Spam alive and well on Social Networks

Its been a while since Ive been spammed on a social network; infact since I last got junk from MySpace, but it appears spamming is alive and well. Today I received an invite from “Erica”. I meet alot of people around the world so I wasn’t sure if I knew her or not. A quick look at her profile gave the game away – some people I know are very popular, but 28,000+ friends? I think not.

[For those who cant see it on this graphic, it says Erica has 28,623 friends ... yea right. She's cute, but she's not 28,623 friends cute!]

It is, without doubt, difficult for sites (including our own at Rummble) to manage and avoid unscrupulous users using the site to spam unsuspecting users about their products or to drive traffic to porn sites, but there are obvious things one can do. Safeguards we employ includes:

• Simple “Abuse” reports for people sending fake invites
• Automatic highlighting of unusual activity in the system (excessive friend invites for example)
• Captcha technology which is randomized to prevent scripts hijacking invite functionality on the website

With Hi5’s size and funding, I’m surprised that these are either not in place or not being actioned. There really is no excuse.

Suffice to say I will not be purchasing from “Die Dada” mobile portal. I had hoped that this sort of spam selling was something of the past in the mobile industry; clearly that hope was premature. It does nothing to induce confidence in users and if they are willing to use spamming techniques to gain traffic and potential sales, then they are likely to unscrupulously charge your credit card for subscription downloads on mobile too! So avoid! …you have been warned.