emails that link to bots . a new rip?

[tangor]

Last 12 days I have had emails (and found the results of bot activity in my logs) either thanking me for joining, first reports, or complaining when their bot can't scan.

I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR ANYTHING. PERIOD.

Tonight I got these in email:

1. Your Uptrends Business account has now been created
2. To activate your account on report-uri.com
3. Thanks for trying out LinkAlarm
4. because you signed up to receive your custom speed report from Test My Site on Think with Google.
5. You successfully signed up for a Page Modified account.

Of course that made me scramble to update deny in .htaccess, though I couldn't find two of the critters as they have not yet hit the site (or they are waiting in vain for me to "activate" their so-called service... meanwhile, I now have a growing list of things to watch for.

Admit to being very perplexed on who is signing me up (I don't conceal my email address or my name on one site) and why it is such a sudden thing, and getting larger by the instant. More curious is why whoever is behind all this considers this a viable way forward as a business. If you pi$$ the client off before you get ink on paper that does not bode well for future profits.

Are any of you at WW experiencing this behavior? It is completely new, appears to be VERY recent, and all appears to be SEO "helper" stuff. Broken links, speed check, validator, etc etc etc.

Worse, these critters are aggressive as heck ... hitting site two+ times PER DAY and not a nickle coming in on the back side. All claim to make your site better, if only you pay for the full boat of what they offer, monthly...

Can Ki$$ my A$$ets away since their services are neither desired or valid. I can find my own broken links, thank you very much, and as far as speed is concerned, I was THERE before anyone else thought about it. As for "validation" if you can't code it right it won't display in the first place.

My concern is where did this sudden blizzard come from. Was it bots on the web scarping/linking email and site? Or something closer to home: SEO cats scraping WW profiles?

I don't know... but I consider this SPIDER behavior and will report it as life goes on. It is abusive, undesired, and makework that takes me away from my job to deal with.

</thanks for listening, just hope none of you get "bit!">

[tangor]

Addendum ... Bots I get. Rude and all that stuff and we deal with them in time honored fashion.

This, however, claims we (the webmaster) signed up for the aggressive activity, turning the scraping on its head.

I wonder how many sites out there are getting hit, even if the email does not match?

Is this a new method of validating bot behavior? ("but you signed up for it!") even if you never did?

Is this anti-competitive behavior by competitors? Is this a stupid business plan for a business niche that does not currently exist?

Or am I reading too much into bot behavior that comes with an email?

Color me perplexed.

[iamlost]

eMail bots (in current ‘offer’, ‘follow up’, ‘re-engage’ format) is a couple years old. They are supposed to be an automated (can you gag out AI?) followup system.

What seems to be happening (going on discussions with others as not hitting me as yet) is that virus (induced or excused) desperate times have caused some users to reformulate a faux concern followup system into a scummy cold call initiate system.

Whether they work from bought or bot retrieved target lists the result is a similar pita on the receiving end.

An increasing amount of nauseating web scum and scams these days. That said, the broader SEO/SMM services niche has always been shifty incompetent fly by night, its just their tools/approaches/hooks that change.

Or it could just be that no one loves tangor like bots love tangor...

[engine]

I am certain some people will scramble to contact the business to accept or deny, thereby validating a fresh emaill address.
Block the unwanted bots and beware of hidden imagrs in the email acknowledging when the mail is opened.

[tangor]

Obviously I don't ENGAGE the emails ... and virus protections are strong.

What I have found :"different" is the actual appearance of these "tools" appearing in my logs ad nauseum ... they might be one bite, but not a second.

[lucy24]

It all sounds like another version of the tried-and-true scam of sending in an invoice for a product you never ordered, from a company you’ve never done business with. The idea is that your bogus invoice lands in the Inbox of a business large enough that they just mechanically pay up without investigating further. Or, in this case, “Yeah, I sign up for so many things, I guess this was just one more” --gambling that you don’t stop to ask yourself why you don’t remember signing up, since legitimate confirmation emails are sent out instantly, and even I can remember what I’ve done within the last half hour.


:: irritably wondering why cat can’t eat his Ten Lined June Beetles outside instead of bringing them into the house for me to deal with ::

[not2easy]

I get spam notifications (I could set it to "delete only" from contact form spammers. I opt for the notification so I know who to block. A redacted version (with only the name and nature of their service protected so as not to assist them further) :

Spam Service offers a FREE 14 days trial – you could be
verbing up to 100x more nouns immediately!
It even includes International adjective verbing.
Paying customers are out there waiting.
Starting verbing today by CLICKING HERE
http://www.spammerservice.com to try Spam Service now.

If you'd like to unsubscribe click here
http://spammerservice.com/unsubscribe.aspx?d=example.com

Akismet Spam Check: probably spam
Sent from (ip address): 138.128.14.216 (Web Hosting Solutions 138.128.0.0/17)
Date/Time: July 11, 2020, 3:49 pm CDT
Coming from (referer): https://www.example.com/contact.html <---- The contact form their script targets
Using (user agent): Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.87
Safari/537.36

I have years of these notifications, none of this is new. All kinds of different services and offers. I have never "unsubscribed" as I never subscribed to begin with. Never visited them.

The service may be different, but the game is the same. I would use the data they give you to keep them away from your server.

_{BTW - @lucy24 - Cat has learned that digestion is aided by dining in a relaxed and comfortable place. Clearly, you have never competed with the cat for its beetles.}

[lucy24]

Spam Service offers a FREE 14 days trial – you could be
verbing up to 100x more nouns immediately!
It even includes International adjective verbing.
Paying customers are out there waiting.
Starting verbing today by CLICKING HERE

As far as I’m concerned, this post wins the internet :)

[iamlost]

As far as I’m concerned, this post wins the internet

Seconded and so moved.

Thanks to a brain spasm not2easy’s fabulous paraphrase post somehow became a brain worm:

Here we come verbing for nouns today,
Nouns today, nouns today,
Here we come verbing for nouns today,
On a cold and frosty morning.

Who will go verbing for nouns today?
We'll have SpamSEO for nouns today.
Who will you send verbing for nouns today?

We'll have SpamSEO verbing them today,
Verbing them today, verbing them today,
We'll have SpamSEO verbing them today,
On a cold and frosty morning.
—-nuts2easy

Apologies to all.
Brain worms are pernicious critters.

[tangor]

The fun continues ... as i said, the other difference with this spam/fishing is they actually follow up with hammer and tongs on the website eating up all kinds of bandwidth and distorting metrics.

more fun: Some of the hits are under the "moniker" the rest are fabricated human UA's and that just makes log cleanups that more intensive.

Phishing is one thing. Phishing AND hammering the site is something else. And then to have the effrontery of COMPLAINING if their bot activity is unable to complete...