Thursday, February 14, 2008

The Many Anna Kravcovas

Its been a long time since I posted here. I still do some antispam stuff, but not nearly like I used to. I still report spammers when I see them of course, but as you can guess from this post, my current hobby is photography. Much more fun than endlessly fighting spammers.

I am sure it will be gone soon since Flickr is pretty responsive to spam reports, but I ran across a spammer hitting photo pages. "She" left two identical comments today on a friend's photo from two different Flickr accounts. If not for that stupid mistake, I might not have noticed. The comment does not link to her webpage, you must retype the URL so it can sneak past spam filters.

Anna.Kravcova.447.
Anna.Kravcova.549.

Those two accounts will probably be removed soon since I reported the spam, but you can see a seemingly already removed but cached copy of the same spam on the mobile version of Flickr from 4 weeks ago from Ann.Kravcova.1988. Or on a republished Flickr page by Ann.Kravcova.2008 here. The spam is gone from the actual Flickr page there too.

Her comments:
Good photo! ;) I want meet you! See my photos here gumble.110mb.com
Of course, a Google search shows a few more.

Searching for gumble.110mb.com lead me to this photo where, Anna 475 and 476 posted three comments at the same time. Here is another where AnnaKravcova posted. Google currently shows 39 other hits on Flickr, but Google's estimate for the search is 1,500 results. I wonder if that many have been removed already, Google's estimate usually isn't that far off.

And another Google of Ann.Kravcova shows a bunch more. In January, Ann 1986 (who is no longer on Flickr) posted:
Cool photo! I want to meet you :) See my photos here: annkravc.h17.ru
Both sites were Anna says she has her photos just show her one photo and a link to a dating service to "meet beautiful Russian Ladies interested in getting in touch with overseas Men."

Update Feb 15: Thanks to Travis, I found a whole lot more Annas. He found 101 a few hours ago, now there are 88. So Flickr is getting a few of them.

And here is Anna's Facebook page.

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