Bizarre No-link Comment Spam Discovered

Posted on May 31, 2006

Boing Boing has a post by Mark Frauenfelder who says he has been getting some unusual comment spam submitted to his Mad Professor blog. The spam reads like normal spam except there is no hyperlink.

I've managed to save up roughly $16804 in my bank account, but I'm not sure if I should buy a house or not. Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?

So what's the point of spamming if you don't include a link? Are spammers testing different strategies? Mark ran a Google search and found thousands of similar spam messages.

I googled "Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?" and it returned 13,300 results. Most of them were from sites that allowed these weird comments to go through (example). I also found that Peter Kaminski has been getting the same type of comments and is just as mystified as I am. What's going on?

Boing Boing has an update (post no longer available) on the strange blog comment spam today with some theories submitted by Boing Boing readers. Could this be something sinister like in Stephen King's short story from Hearts in Atlantis where the villains communicated via missing pet posters? Or, is this just a dumb group of spammers that forgot the URL as one Boing Boing reader suggested? We may never know...