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Weird type of spam I discovered (vids2025) (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(I'm aware that I'm giving this spam more attention by posting this, but I really wanted to share this weird behaviour.)

There are accounts whose sole purpose seems to be posting links to a certain blogspot blog. The posts of this blog only consist of YouTube videos, with very basic titles such as "Kangaroo Fight", "Growing Strawberries", etc.

Here are some example accounts I found via a web search (unfortunately the URLs of posts isn't taken into account when searching on lemmy):

I also found two other accounts that seem to be part of this, too, but they were already banned:

Another interesting discovery: Compare the two links for each of the accounts marked with (*). You will notice that the posts on moist.catsweat.com link to YouTube, but when viewing the posts from lemmy.world those same posts link to the blogspot. Why is that?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's been a long-running thing for blogspam to appear here. Usually admins will step in at some point and squash the accounts, but any time I see anything.blogspot.com as a post URL, I look at the account history and see if that's all they're posting. 9.9 times out of 10, that's all they're posting, and I ban them with content removal. Same for other sites that pop up out of nowhere that get spread from a brand new account.

I have no idea what the objective is (SEO, ad views, etc), but it's been a thing as long as I've been on Lemmy.

Thanks for the list: some of those I had yet to ban.