Spam 3.0 - the new level of AI spam?
bikegremlin
ModeratorOGContent Writer
I will start by quoting an email I got to my public email (listed on my websites' contact section):
Title: Someone actually reads your server migration posts
Hi Relja,
This is going to sound weird coming from a stranger, but I've spent more time on bikegremlin than I'd like to admit. The piece where you documented the actual CPU steal time across shared hosts, the one where you showed the graphs nobody asked you to make. That one stuck with me for months.
I kept thinking about it. Not the data specifically, but the fact that you bothered. You ran the tests, wrote it all up, posted it on your forum where maybe a few hundred people would see it. No affiliate link at the bottom. No sponsor disclaimer at the top. Just a guy who wanted the truth documented somewhere.
That's rare. You know it's rare. The entire first page of Google for "best web hosting" is affiliate content wearing a lab coat.
I'm Todor Markov, a solo developer. I built a thing called The-Scraper-Site. It scrapes real pricing from 39 hosting providers every day, around 960 plans total. The idea was simple. Show what hosts
actually charge, including the renewal price they hide behind the asterisk. I built a calculator that shows true cost over 1, 2, 3 years so people can see the bait and switch in plain numbers. No rankings you can buy. No "editor's choice" that mysteriously goes to whoever pays the most. Free tool at The-Scraper-Site .com.
I want to be honest about something. Your writing was part of why I built it. Not the only reason, but a real one. I kept finding your posts while researching hosts and thinking, this guy is doing the hard version of what I want to do. If one person with a blog and a forum can be this thorough, there's no excuse for not building a tool that at least gets the pricing part right at scale.
I'm not emailing to ask you for anything specific. I don't have a pitch. I just wanted you to know that your work reached someone, and it turned into something.
If you ever want to poke around the site and tell me what's wrong with it, I'd genuinely want to hear it. You'd find problems nobody else would. And if you think it's useful enough to mention to your forum people, that's their call and yours.
Either way, keep doing what you're doing. The internet is worse without people like you on it.Todor Markov
What makes this spam campaign stand out?
Using a Gmail account to avoid spam filters is nothing new, many spammers use that nowadays. True, this one is doing it with a non-generic address ( The-Scraper-Site @gmail .com ) - probably the initial go until it gets flagged enough times.
What is new is that it did a decent scrape of my website to write the pitch email. And probably automated that to a thousand other sites in a similar "customized" way. I get quite a few of these so can confirm that this one is pretty well done compared to your average. Looks like a competent use of LLM tools.
When I went to the site, I saw over 20 articles published within a month max, so if it is a one-man project that in itself is a good giveaway of AI use.
I also noticed Bluehost gets listed and recommended in some categories, while no MDDhosting is mentioned, so I am pretty sure that the creator of that site made zero visits to my website.
No affiliate links on the site, but it could be just an experiment to perfect the AI tool use - who knows.
A possible line of thinking (and perhaps prompting too) could be: "Find hosting-themed sites. Analyze each site's technical niche and write a fan email highlighting a specific technical detail that shows I value 'truth over profit' or some other value found on the site."
Googling the signed name is interesting - not sure if it is legit, but it could be as the name comes up from a "Researcher at Anthropic."
The Net is getting more and more scary in terms of being able to (and having to first) figure out if something is machine-made.
Relja HumanMade Novovic
Edit/P.S.
This got me thinking further about the case where Gox's and mine 100% hand made text was judged as AI by what I suppose was a human (can't be 100% sure):
https://www.bikegremlin.net/threads/when-human-replies-look-like-ai-real-youtube-exchange.506/
Comments
Good luck have fun don't die
The internet as we know it, from the perspective of a 45 year old who has been online for 30 years, is about to change at a rate I don't think anyone is ready for or will like.
I am literally making plans to prepare for this.
TierHive - Hourly VPS - NAT Native - /24 per customer - Lab in the cloud - Free to try. | I am Anthony Smith
FREE tokens when you sign up, try before you buy. | Join us on Reddit
Ahh yea, the Jerry can scenario!
VirtFusion Affordable, Reliable virtualization management software for the hosting industry · Connect with us on Discord
Collecting old hardware and software from before AI
(Long before in most cases) and moving all my shit local.... evil cloud!
TierHive - Hourly VPS - NAT Native - /24 per customer - Lab in the cloud - Free to try. | I am Anthony Smith
FREE tokens when you sign up, try before you buy. | Join us on Reddit
This got me thinking further about the case where Gox]s> @AnthonySmith said:
I am considering to somehow register/protect my sites as "a work of art from before the AI" since all the info will come from the AI from now on.
Wasn't wise enough to save all the pages to the web.archive.org before the LLM/AI boomed - hard to prove stuff was human-made nowadays.
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
That is quite something! Thank you for posting. I haven't encountered that yet, but I'll be on the lookout for it.
AI is bringing us closer and closer to the point of being suspicious about everything, and to trust nothing. It used to just be Nigerian Prince scammers. Now it's on a whole other level.
On the SporeStack side of things, a few months ago I noticed 60+ servers that had legitimate-seeming business websites (machining, cleaning, crane services, etc) that were all made by AI. They websites would look legitimate to search engines. They'd then send out targeted phishing emails using a special URL that would be an actual phishing page. Here's the blog post if you want to see archive links of those sites.
I had sort of felt like I had seen it all, but I clearly hadn't. It took me a bit to figure out exactly what I was looking at.
Slow Servers IPv6-native VPSs hosted on OpenBSD's VMM in Spokane, WA, USA. (I racked these.)
SporeStack Resold Vultr VPS/baremetal, DigitalOcean, and a whitelabeled brand in Europe. KYC-free, simple to launch. (I didn't rack these.)
Neither are dirt cheap!
Oh yeah, I've been seeing a lot of it. A client of mine gets a lot like this:
The customized content is scrapped from my client's site. I think that, plus the "casual" language makes it difficult for Gmail to catch them. In my case they don't come from Gmail addresses, but the domains are always recently registered and redirect to what I'm assuming is the spammer's client.
I agree with Anthony Smith: things are changing fast, and I'm afraid not for the better.
It's pronounced hacker.