Oddities

[pecunium]

For reasons various, I don't allow anon comments to post without my approving them. Mostly it keeps the comment spammers from getting any fruit from their labors.

I also track the IPs of anon posters. So I got two of the same reply, to two different posts. Both anon, both telling me they were good, and imformative; as always. Both with a title, "Testing this one."

The IP address was the same for both, and one of them claimed it was from Switzerland. When I did a WHOIS lookup, it's from a range allocated to an Italian company, and that block is from Rome. My statcounter doesn't tell me of any activity from Switzerland either. Then again, it doesn't tell me I have any visits from Italy either. I do have a couple of people reading from a PDA.

So I wonder, are they looking to see if they can get something to post, and then planning to go back and spam older posts? If that's what they are doing, the slugline seems counter-productive. But, absent them following the rules, (anon is allowed, but some form of introduction/continuity of persona; at least to me, is required), it just stays behind the screen.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

My partner, whose information I trust on this issue, says that those are almost certainly Nigerian scammers. They've been branching out of late; many are working thru connections in Europe, and they're running more kinds of scams than the standard 419 now.