Creative Comment Spamming By “Rashid Mahmood” and Domain-Clearinghouse

We’ve all seen the bots and the comment spammers visit our sites.  They seem to be getting more and more creative and are getting tougher to stop.  One of the latest spammer goes by the comment name “Rashid Mahmood” and all his links lead to Domain-Clearinghouse.  I’m actually quite impressed with the way it works and here it is.

He realizes that in a wordpress blog than once a comment is approved that all subsequent comments are automatically approved.  He also realizes that certain keywords and styles are picked up by Akismet and will be caught if it’s too off topic or contains a link.  To take advantage of this,  his first comment is always hand written and is a legit comment in relation to the post.  This gets him in as a “good” commenter.  At this point he scrapes comments from other sites that have domaining type wording and lets a computer automatically comment on all your stories.  At first some of them sound legit but many of them are completely off topic, about domaining, but off topic.   Another commenter noticed that one of the comments on my site was the EXACT wording of a comment that he (the commenter) had left on another blog.  I Googled the comment and he was right.  It was copied from another site and posted on mine under the Rashid name.

One might ask why someone would spam no follow comment sections of a blog but it’s simple.  People click on comments all the time.  Curiosity leads people to want to know more about the person that left a particular comment.  I don’t comment on other blogs to get hits but it is a nice kickback for being an active commenter.

I’ll give the spammer credit, it’s a nice automated system and if he didn’t comment on each and every post I may not have noticed.  Anyone else had similar things happen?