Non-computer spam & Craigslist Personal PPC fraud... it's getting worse!

[JuniperPark]

I've noticed a couple of annoying trends lately:

1) Cheap little signs illegally placed EVERYWHERE (freeway onramps, landscaped areas, grocery store parking lot entrances, lawns) that say "Single? Visit SanDiegoSingles.org". Of course out of curiosity I check out the site and it seems to be a scam address collection site, just 2 pages that claim to be a matchmaking site but nothing is there but a form to collect personal data.

2) I posted a personals ad on Craigslist a few days ago, and got this response:
========
From: Jenny De Graff [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 4:07 PM
Subject: Re: your posting on craigslist

Thanks for writing back. I'm running short on time to write, but email gets boring quick anyways. I've recieved a couple replies on here and I'm narrowing down my pray. I mean my selection.. teehee. Just Kidding!
You might think that I'm a man eater, but really I'm not at all. I decided to get naughty from the start and give you some steamy pictures of me and see what happens...
Here I am http://www.myfavphotos.com/jenny05/
The guy I am kind of seeing is out of town for the whole summer and I'm going crazy w/o sex. If you like what you see lets get things moving otherwise good luck to you!
XOXO ~ Jenny
====

Note that:
1) I never wrote her, she's responding to an ad, so it's a generalized spam message
2) The domain name was registered the same day she wrote the message
3) It's a PPC page, linking to Google syndication

So there you have it 2 new scamming methods!

 

[Duckinla]

It's a sad industry at times. The sadder part is that I actually clicked on that link thinking there would be some steamy photos!

I have to admit that one thing I find intriguing about the industry is all the clever, deceptive little schemes people will come up with when they can hide behind anonymity. I had always heard the world was this devious, but never got to see it first hand like this. Some new scheme is being hatched every day on the internet.

 

[Poker]

You'll never steal as much as you can earn...if they would just put the same time and energy into helping people instead of tricking them, they would make more.

 

[MrDude]

I always get generalised message spam on myspace that goes along the lines of

"Hey hun, i checked out your profile and thought it was great, i would love to chat more but i gotta run, i'll be on webcam later if you wanna chat, just go to my website"

 

[hunnam]

I used to run a dating site and found it very difficult to make a success out of it at first because of the amount of fake sites that were going on. I used to get to the top of a dating topsite but then out of nowhere a group of similar sites start taking over the top of the topsite and it was so obvious they were using proxy software to get there as the numbers for "In" were exactly the same for each site. I had to sell the site after paypal banned my account because the name dating3000 was deemed adult content.

 

[italiandragon]

Soon or later Internet will have better rules, maybe an International Police but like in the real life, thiefs and scammers will always exist.