random chat invatations

Just to add something to this discussion….the reason for the chat invites is not the chat rooms themselves. To the spammer, whether you go in or not makes no difference. The point of the invite is the big link on the invite.

But….why? Wouldn’t it be easier to send an IM with the link?

There are several reasons, the first being visibility. Many people use the accept message dialogue. If that is active, then those people may never even see a spam link because they will reject the message in a normal IM. In a chat invite, the invite comes up as long as they are not blocking invites.

A second reason is AOL’s rules, which were tightened a few months ago to keep out even more spam. Under these rules, if you send a message that gets no response (like porn links), after so many times doing that, the account will be unable to send more messages for a few weeks, unless somebody sends that SN a message first. With chat invites, the number of times one may do so increases.

One limit the spammers should be hitting with these invites is the fact that they are using links. With the limit I outlined above, sending a link in the messages causes the limit to be reached three times faster. I’ll have to do some tests, but I would assume this applies to the chat invites as well. You’ll notice the spammer’s use of %70, etc to mask the address, but are still interpreted by your browser once you click. I would guess by their use of this that they are applying it to the http:// part, and not causing it to keep from being interpreted, thereby making a link. If anybody has seen the raw message before it hits their client, I’d be interested to see how it comes up. Anyway, because the replacement of key parts of links with HTML codes such as the %70 is becoming so common, I’m hoping AOL will recognize those as links, cutting the spam down to just above a third of its current size.