A spammer is periodically posting messages in Chinese to the User Diaries. These diaries follow a distinct pattern:
1. Reading machine translations, the messages advertise a variety of products and services that are against the law. This may be to attract people who would be reluctant to contact the authorities and admit what they are looking for. 2. Diaries are posted in batches of considerable size (up to 20+), typically differing only in having different names of cities and provinces in the text. This would appear to be targeted at searches through search engines. 3. Diaries rarely contain links (occasional exceptions) so cannot be targeted at search engine rankings for pages hosted away from OSM. 4. Numbers preceded with the letters QQ appear regularly; these may be accounts with the Tencent QQ messaging service. 5. The spammer has come back repeatedly creating new accounts so it is likely that that the operation is successful. I have not followed any message account, keyword or link in any of the spams. Among other issues I am wary about possible malware in scam pages. -- Andrew _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
