Quote:
Originally Posted by cdn2wheeler  The same person who sent a PM from E R I N P A V L I N A (not "our" Erin, certainly, but somone purporting to be her) about some sort of e-book or something that this person wanted us to review? |
Yup. He's still actively spamming and has hit at least 100 forums and counting. He hit several more today. He's been spamming using Erin's email address as well as mine, so we get the email verification messages and can see which forums he's targeting. He often uses Erin's name as the account handle, but it looks like he's targeting other people as well. While we never click the verification links to register those accounts (obviously), many VBulletin forums allow PMing for unverified accounts. And you can usually PM about 5 members at a time with the default VBulletin settings. He's been angering quite a number of forum admins.
After the first several days of this, I setup an auto-reply template to notify the forum admins they're being hit by this spammer whenever a new forum sign-up message comes to my email inbox. It includes info on how to fix their VBulletin settings to prevent this from happening again. So at least the same forums shouldn't be hit multiple times. A lot of forum owners thanked me for these messages, since it helped them catch and ban the spammer before he did too much damage. On some forums apparently hundreds of PMs were sent though.
I don't know why he's involving us in this by using our email addresses. The only real clue is that several months ago, he joined the forums here but was soon banned for trolling and personal attacks. So maybe he still has a chip on his shoulder about that. On his web site he boasts about trying to get people to sue him and rants about me being the real spammer (like I'm the one promoting his ebook by registering forums accounts with Erin's name and email), so he doesn't seem to be the most mentally stable person.
I even tried emailing him to ask why he's doing this, but so far he hasn't replied.