More about the onlineshop.us.com comment spamming debacle...

Posted October 1, 2004 12:28 PM.

Another response has come through to me via Cory from the people at Amazon Associates about the comment spam problem I was having a while back. It's actually fairly interesting how little response I've personally had from Amazon (ie. none), and how much response Cory's e-mail to Jeff Bezos has engendered (ie. lots). Anyway - I can't fault how helpful they're trying to be. An excerpt from today's e-mail reads as follows:

We have contacted the Associate with the Website mentioned in your email. After further investigation, it appears the spam you received may not have come from the owner of this site. Unfortunately, there is no way to confirm the origin of this spam based on the information provided in your email.

In order to identify the culprit and attempt to put an end to this type of activity, we are asking for your assistance in identifying the origin of this spam. If you have any further information you can provide, such as the IP address listed in your log files etc., we ask that you please forward this information to us.

So anyway, I sent them a list from my MT-Blacklist logs of about a third of the 370-ish comment spams that I've received from onlineshop.us.com, but I've unfortunately deleted the original comments. So here's an appeal to you guys out there - if any of you have been comment-spammed by the onlineshop.us.com people could you send an e-mail about it (and a copy of any logs or comment-alert e-mails or whatever other evidence you might have that might help pin down the culprits) to associates [at] amazon [dot] com. There's still a good chance we could nail these bastards and stop them making money at our expense...