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A Pinterest spammer tells all

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Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#21

Post by MichaelApproved »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
debacle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that that third party is complicit in allowing this ecosystem to exist. If they would just pony up a dollar or two a month, they could exist in a world without spammers. That's all it would take.

The spammer in the article makes two thousand dollars a day from his army of spambots. Even if he started running two thousand bots on monday, he'd be pulling a profit by tuesday.

Payment would be the unique identifier. Creating a ton of email addresses to uniquely identify each account is easy. It's a lot hard to find multiple unique payment methods so you won't show up as the same person.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#22

Post by dangrossman »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile ph…

It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#24

Post by pavel_lishin »

dangrossman wrote: post #22
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile ph…

It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.

How do you scale that? Sure, you found him - but how do you find the others?

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#25

Post by coderdude »

codexon wrote: post #18
coderdude wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also an easy way to generate a lot of false positives. To be a spammer does not mean to take advantage of affiliate revenue. I would say this method would be too sloppy to use by itself. It would need to be a small part of a larger set of signals. Edit: DanielBMarkham's comment does a better job of conveying why this would be a bad approach.

I don't think it generates a lot of false positives. Obviously not every amazon link with an affiliate tag is spam. Take a look at how many of the accounts there solely spam affiliate links from Amazon, are from a Twitter account, and repeatedly post the same items.

Right -- you just used three separate signals together to identify a possible spammer. I'm fairly sure we're on the same page.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#26

Post by jcdavis »

Aside from the (good) conversation here, I'm actually shocked the guy agreed to an interview. How many HN people just spent some time thinking about how you would do one of these? Not that nobody could have possibly thought about pinterest spamming before, but this interview has certainly increased knowledge of it

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#27

Post by pavel_lishin »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #21
pavel_lishin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spammer in the article makes two thousand dollars a day from his army of spambots. Even if he started running two thousand bots on monday, he'd be pulling a profit by tuesday.

Payment would be the unique identifier. Creating a ton of email addresses to uniquely identify each account is easy. It's a lot hard to find multiple unique payment methods so you won't show up as the same person.

Does Paypal not allow multiple accounts tied to the same bank account?

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#28

Post by pavel_lishin »

krschultz wrote: post #23

Frankly this sounds like what Pinterest should be doing for revenue. Isn't basically what promoted tweets are for Twitter?

Promoted tweets are a fucking scourge, at least so far. I've seen two - both times for something totally irrelevant to me. (What the hell is the Shell Houston 2012 Open? I have zero idea, and less than zero interest.)

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#29

Post by Father »

dangrossman wrote: post #22
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile ph…

It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.

Most of the experienced spammers fake the referrer. They'll have a scrub site setup which will appear as any blog. The spammer will spam links to the blog page (often using a url shortener); however the link will contain a id. If you visit the page with the id it will selectively redirect traffic to their amazon affiliate link, without the id link it will appear as a normal blogpost.

Amazon will think the traffic comes from the blogpost. The person getting spammed won't get any protection if they filter amazon links.

Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all

#30

Post by girlvinyl »

dangrossman wrote: post #22
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

I'm not suggesting that this is trivial to implement, but in principle, wouldn't it be fairly simple for Pinterest to identify these guys based on their 'social networks'? If a group of accounts only 'pins' posts of other accounts in that same group, that suggests either a spambot farm, or a very inclusive group of friends. False-positive detection could be decreased by looking at account sign-up dates, or profile ph…

It sounds like he only has one Amazon Associates account. Identifying all his accounts would be trivial, then -- find all accounts that have posted an Amazon link with the same associate ID in the URL.

Amazon Associates allows you to create unlimited, unique affiliate IDs, tied to one AA account.
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