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Ask HN: Why do people create incomprehensible spam?

5 points by benev ↗ HN
I run a blog with comments and spam's a bit of a problem. I get that in some cases people try to put links on their for various reasons. However, we also get a lot that doesn't seem to serve any purpose. for example, on from today:

"chanel 化粧品tf szn bttt fy mlfpy urdirp cfyss

pletcherdrw - March 15, 2013 @ 8:08am

ku gcfd hsff pvs tqmu hntu qyo xdij gb fb rxi sjrp jszl hww hwdj kigk zav vkbx sc"

They've had to beat a captcha to post that. I know that's not the most difficult thing in the world, but it does require some effort. What advantage does this create for anyone?

According to Google translate, the Chinese characters mean 'cosmetic.'

4 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 10.9 ms ] thread
mschuster91
Entropy messes up certain kinds of anti-spam solutions. And captcha beating is mostly automated these days.
benev
Are you saying this is decoy spam sent purely to try and confuse my anti-spam system? It's an interesting idea.
what_the_frell
Does your comment system strip out HTML tags and CSS? I used to work for an anti-spam company, and I'd see tons of those messages. It looks like garbage when you view the raw text, but with a bunch of font-tags everywhere alternating colours or floating things around, you end up with a message.
UnoriginalGuy
Maybe they're trying to post in an unsupported language or a partly unsupported language?

Also could just be sending out "test spam" so they can tell potentially clients that they have a n+1 list of sites which can be spammed for $50 (or whatever).

You often have SEO companies in particular buying lists of spammable sites or spam companies buying lists from indexers so they can sell a service to SEO companies or the mob.