Search Engine Optimization for Really Dumb Dummies
I forgot to post this at the time.
The message contains a link to an obviously fake LinkedIn profile at the sender’s name.
The message was sent to an address that only exists in a HTML comment on a website. The only parties that will ever find it are spammers spidering for addresses.
The domain is registered at Moniker to “Kery Nieminen”, which sounds fictitious (“Kery” not being a Finnish name at all, or a name in any language I know…), apparently of Snellmaninkatu 83, 02760 ESPOO, tel. +358-40-6345731 (unlisted number). The unfortunate part is that there is no Snellmaninkatu in all of Espoo… Googling for the person’s name brings up the LinkedIn page and any number of spams that contain the same text as below, sent to blogs and public mailing lists.
Spamming IP: 66.7.222.182
Spam headers:
From kery.nieminen@seofinland.net Tue Jun 19 02:mm:ss 2012 Return-Path: <kery.nieminen@seofinland.net> Received: from seofinland.net (unknown [66.7.222.182]) by x (Postfix) with ESMTP id x for <x>; Tue, 19 Jun 2012 02:mm:ss +0300 (EEST) Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:mm:ss +0000 To: x From: Kery Nieminen <kery.nieminen@seofinland.net> Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?ty=C3=B6skennell=C3=A4=C3=A4n_yhdess=C3=A4?= X-Priority: 3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="b1_x" Message-Id: <Generated by the receiving server as the message did not have one> Content-Length: 1695 Lines: 113
Human-readable spam contents:
Hei,
Nimeni on Kery Nieminen ja haluaisin kertoa miten DOMAIN NAME
voi sijoittua vielä paremmin Googlessa.
Olen hakukoneoptimoinnin asiantuntija ja työskentelen SEO Finland –yrityksessä.
Tehdessäni tutkimusta eräille kollegoilleni, löysin sähköpostiosoitteesi
ja päätin ottaa yhteyttä välittömästi.
Jos olet kiinnostunut, lähettäisin mielelläni lisätietoa ja yksityiskohtia
yhteistyön toteuttamisesta.
Kiittäen,
Keryseofinland.net
Wow, I got exactly the same mail in German, pointing to a different LinkedIn profile:
http://de.linkedin.com/pub/saskia-schimpf/51/a42/989
The “company” domain is also different (datenverkehr.org).
So it looks like these Spammers create a lot of LinkedIn accounts to avoid direct URL detection in mails.
What I also find interesting is that in the last week or two, all of these three self-professed SEO experts involved in spamming (whose SEO hawking web pages look surprisingly alike, at least to me…) have changed the privacy settings on their LinkedIn profiles so that the full profile can no longer be viewed without a premium account. Now I know that Mr Inget and the other dude who doesn’t want his name mentioned cannot be the same person because they both have legit business registrations to their names, but somehow I get the impression that “Kery” is a fake identity created by one of the two, or the both of them in cooperation. 😉 Could it be that any publicity is not good publicity?
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