Scammers and spammers

Since the beginning of time mankind has been trying to find new and interesting ways of ripping off one another, and since the beginning of the internet spammers and scammers have found themselves with the world at their feet.

Now I have been trying in vain to get some organic traction for my site illustratecreate.com with the likes of Google and Bing etc, Sixteen years ago when I set up my first website I had a relatively easy time getting good ranking for local targeted key word searches, Basically I had very little local competition in the web arena for my industry which for obvious reasons made it a lot easier to get great search results.

I have to say my new venture Dmac Studio, Illustrate Create is taking a lot longer to get anywhere near the same exposure with twice the effort, now I don’t want to be a winging winger, but I have to ask the question.

How the hell do all the spammers manage to find my site in the inter-web abyss, when real potential customers cant?

I know right? I can log in and look at my stats, see where my traffic is coming from, referrers , key word searches, what countries my visitors are from plus a ton of other information. So I can see the dismal amount of genuine traffic after all the search bots and such, that actually reaches the site.

But here is my issue, every few days or at least once a week I will log into my blog, which I don’t really add too enough if you reading all the latest SEO stuff, anyway I log in and see a bunch of comments on my blog posts! Cool! I think to myself, but alas, It’s just more blog spammers who post all sorts of rubbish on other blogs with back links to their own site or blog.  I have my blog set up in such a way that I have to approve any comments made before the are view-able to anyone who may happen across it.

With all my handy-dandy stats in hand I can see that some weeks I get more traffic from spammers than real traffic just by the amount of spam comments on the blog, not to mention the dozens of malicious log in attempts. If these people put in half as much effort into a legitimate enterprise as they do being dodgy bastards, I’m sure they would enjoy much more success.

The Scam artists

Spammers are really just an annoying part of life, from junk mail in your snail mail letterbox to spam on your blog, everyone is trying to peddle their wares, but Scammers are another story. The scam artist will try to take your hard-earned money by any nefarious means that they can.

As an example, I received this email a couple of days ago:

Jackie Wilson <jackiewill0831@gmail.com>

I read the email and felt something was off from the get go, a quick google search later and my suspicions were confirmed, this email floats around with various name changes etc, but other than that its word for word. This is another variation of a standard scam involving over payment for goods and services and weird money transfers, for which the victim ends up out of pocket.

Just after receiving this email I jumped into my stats for my site, and low and behold I only had one visitor that day from Nigeria.

What really annoys me the most is that a scum bag from Nigeria can find my site (buggered if I know how) and send me an email, not from the site contact form, just a normal email,   But… I can get good local google search results!!!

Rant over

PS:  If you’re a spammer or scammers, get a real job!!!