Massive Wordpress Comment Spam for Online Casinos

Wow!

Today has been a real pain in the @ss.

I woke up this morning to see probably about 15 emails showing "comments" for one of my websites . Usually this is a good thing… but this time it was 100% comment spam for online casinos and poker sites.

Comment spam on Wordpress isn’t a new problem. On a usual day my sites will probably get one or two spam comments that make it to the moderation cue through Askimet.

But…

This morning all of these got through into the moderation cue and of course I got emails notifying me to "moderate the comment".

Okay, that was this morning when I deleted 15-20 emails from Gmail about the comments and marked them as spam in my Wordpress 2.5.1 install.

Fast forward to this afternoon.

Here’s a screen shot I took a few minutes ago of my gmail account (after I’ve probably deleted 30-50 spam comments for online casinos that made it into the moderation cue).

Of course, after I took the screen shot I deleted those and went into WP admin to see what I could find out about the damn comment spammers.

• Every comment is from a different IP
• Every comment is for online gambling of some sort (except one that is for free ringtones)
• Every comment is in the same format (of course done by a spam bot)
• And… every comment is a real pain in my ass right now until I get my Wordpress install to screen spam comments a little tighter

Anyhow, I got to looking at the comments to see why they aren’t getting screened by Askimet and saw a few interesting things… that are spurring on a bit more thinking on my part as far as if they’ve gotten into my WP code or not (I’ll let you know).

Here’s an example of what the comments are looking like:

video poker strategies
http://url | 206.255.14.39

casino gratuites en francais…

Play casino no deposit play free baccarat…

They are all in that same format but with different verbage and in different languages.  The interesting thing is that the comments aren’t leading to a URL other than the "http://url" which does take you to www.url.com which then pops up an ad or two.

What’s Interesting Is…

I know, I’m wasting my time writing a post about this… but it’s really interesting from an SEO standpoint… and whether or not they have gotten into my code and placed hidden links somewhere.

Hey, have you seen this recently?  If so, what’s your take on this format of Wordpress comment spam which is simply banking on bold keyword phrases with no link back to a site… except the http://url site??

I’d love to hear your comments… in the mean time I better check out my Wordpress code to make sure there isn’t any spammy code sneaked into my them.

Damn spammers… I’d love to see what this person is making per day off of this campaign… and how they are making their money.

Oh, by the way… there’s now another 24 spam comments since I started writing this post (about 15 minutes ago).