Would you wanna get to know each other and hang out sometime?

September 29, 2005 1:39 PM

What do the friendster spammers want from me?

As much as I'd like to believe that beautiful women just happened upon my profile and really want to get to know me better, I'm awfully sure that's not the case. In the last few weeks I've received messages on friendster from "girls" with flattering pictures, prurient hobbies and interests and, of course, a rabid interest in "hangin' out sometime!" It's obvious that this is a scam of some sort, but I'm curious to know to what end? It's seems like a rather labor intensive way to go about spamming for some porn site or something, and there just aren't any clues in the emails as to what these people are up to. Anyone know? Any ideas?

posted by muddylemon to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

This happens on MySpace too. My guess is that they are escorts.
posted by mds35 at 1:42 PM on September 29, 2005

Someone may have written a script to do this.

On the other hand, dating a robot... KINKY!
posted by delmoi at 1:53 PM on September 29, 2005

My guess is that they are escorts.

Huh! I would never have thought of that myself but it makes perfect sense. Do the research, Muddy! Perverted minds want to know!
posted by phearlez at 2:22 PM on September 29, 2005

I've heard that sometimes girls will contact guys and chat with them and after a while tell the guy that she has a website with some naughty pictures of herself and the site is just a porn site that she is trying to generate traffic to.
posted by Justin Case at 2:31 PM on September 29, 2005

Response by poster: I hadn't thought of the escort angle. It makes more sense to me than the website part, just because the payoff is larger, it wouldn't be cost effective to spend an hour developing a local alter ego for every metro area and then spidering thru the results, checking email from those who respond, entice them to your site... it's just not a very efficient marketing program. But with the escort thing it makes more sense to invest in a targeted local market of men who respond to pretty girls coy invitations for companionship and are naive/lonely enough to not see thru the ruse.
posted by muddylemon at 2:35 PM on September 29, 2005

That seems like a very labor intensive way to advertise porn... Escorts seem more likely since a single "hit" will get them more money.
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:35 PM on September 29, 2005

Its very very easy to create a script that 'trolls' myspace and friendster, dropping friendly messages and adding friend requests. As for motivation, last time I got one of these on myspace, the 'hot chick' had a link to a porn site. *shrug*
posted by onalark at 3:00 PM on September 29, 2005

doh, *It's*
posted by onalark at 3:01 PM on September 29, 2005

I get these on frienster, yahoo and a couple of other places.

It's a bot/script...the ones I've gotten from foreign women fall in the same category.

A fake profile (or 50)...then getting you to chat...with generic emails...finally a website where she (tee-hee) has more revealing pictures.

Report if you have the chance. It's just automated trolling.
posted by filmgeek at 4:17 PM on September 29, 2005

I have gotten a couple of these on myspace. All the ones I got were of girls (I did a little investigation to find out who they are) who were trying to create demand for their pay-to-view webcams. Set up the profile, some copy & pasted messages, and you can sucker a decent amount of guys into it eventually.
posted by frankie_stubbs at 6:51 PM on September 29, 2005

The spammy messages I've received on MySpace have always asked for me to email them (as in, not using MySpace's messaging). I assume they're email harvesting.
posted by patgas at 5:55 AM on September 30, 2005