First MySpace Spam, Now Skype Spam
October 9th, 2006A few months back Joe and I started getting friend requests from strange women on MySpace. Now this in itself is not interesting or really all that unusual except for the fact that these messages would usually hit just after logging in to MySpace. Essentially if one of us logged in to check new messages or something, we would be hit with up to a dozen friend requests in the space of the 5 minutes we were online. It was as if the spammers had an inside track on who was online when. Not only that, on at least one occasion Joe clicked on a user’s name to view her profile and was quickly wisked away to a (non-Myspace) adult content site. Had the spammers taken over MySpace?
At the same time we also noticed spam coming through our Skype phone. We set up a Skype account for our business to make free long distance calls using the screen name messengerapparel (our company name). Now, several times a day, we get messages from India, China, the Phillipines, and Turkey offering us information on garment production overseas. The Skype spam is especially annoying because we somehow get pulled into random apparel chatrooms, requests for our contact info, and messages written in broken English all on our business phone. There must be some way to turn all this off but one would think the default configuration would keep the spam out a little better. How do you even search for random users on Skype, these guys must be pros!
It seems even the newest mediums of communication and expression quickly are hijacked by spammers for their own use. I would say mobile phones are next but in fact, that’s already been done (anyone else get the snakes on a plane text message?) If you think email spam is a big problem think again: spam will find you where ever you are!
