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The latest waves of pills/drugs referrer spam, as reported by Gary and Ann Elisabeth clearly demonstrate one thing: The spammers just don't care how efficient their spamruns are.
Not sure if the two are actually related, but the timeline suggests it: First there was a wave of referrer spam for subdomains at various free subdomain services. They all contained the usual pill names and redirected to the spammer's actual site. Many (though not all) of those subdomain services were quick in shutting down those redirects - but the spammer kept on spamming for them up to 48 hours after they had been shut down.
The second wave now uses "proper", though sometimes misspelled domain names (e.g. businesresources.com). Ann laments the enormous bandwidth used by that wave. Again, that is something the spammers don't care about - either because they're not spamming from their own machines anyway or simply because they have some bulletproof deal in the usual places.
And on top of that all, the names of those pills and drugs make nice filter criterions, so they're easily blocked.
Of course, that last bit only applies to those site owners that care or have the technical knowledge to do something about it. So I guess "we" are just not the target audience and the spammers make enough money from the few poor souls that actually fall for those spams ... On a side note: When looking at the email spam I'm getting these days, I have to wonder how anyone can still fall for that. Most of it is only gibberish and it's often not even possible to tell what they're actually advertising. Which makes me wonder if a large portion of email spam is only an end in itself and if comment and referrer spam will soon be the same (there are already some tendencies ...).
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