HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why All the Indonesian Spam?

25 points by al2o3cr ↗ HN
The "new" page with dead articles shown has about 5 submissions per page with Indonesian titles and spam contents usually containing a phone number.

Sometimes they're posted by brand-new accounts, sometimes it's "aged" accounts that have never posted before. For instance, this one created in 2021 has posted 12 times in the last 2 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheDarkLegend

(you'll need to have showdead turned on)

Is this the world's most misguided phishing attempt? AFAIK dead posts don't get picked up by any search engines etc...

7 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 24.4 ms ] thread
mtmail
Goal is to get indexed by search engines or LLMs and then show up as first phone number for "$airline customer support" or such. It's been going on for a while, I keep flagging them when I see them in my timezone. I thought it was Turkish.

The old accounts is amazing though. Either somebody really playing the long game or easy guessable passwords?

slater
I was wondering the same
jjgreen
As an aside, I'd always assumed that you only got so many "flags" per minute or whatever, but I've had a half-dozen where my flag killed it dead (which makes it all rather fun), so maybe I was mistaken?
defrost
Not all HN users are "flag equal", if you consistently flag spam then sooner or later a mod will notice this (as many flags get reviewed) and you'll get upsized to "super flagger" - unlimited flagging power with one flag == death.

You then get more scrutiny, start "petty flagging" (flagging a fellow legit HN user out of spite because <insert no good reason>) and you'll be demoted to the rank and file.

If you email HN and ask they'll often happily tell you if you've been tweaked in some manner or another.

treetalker
I also flag these on sight.

And when I do, I mutter "mekka-lekka-high, mekka-heinie-ho" to myself.