Thursday, July 18, 2013

On the Hunt for the Jakarta Spammer II - Death Threats

As outlined in my previous posts, I am still engaged in my own private war with an Indonesia-based spammer vandalizing wikis at Wikidot.com. My previous attempt to email the businesses that presumably pay this guy has ended in failure - there have been no answers to my emails, and the spammer has not even slowed down.

I am glad to report that the Wikidot.com team has been supportive of my spam hunt and based on my suggestions automatically reverts all edits of banned spammers. And for a few days, the spam hunt was glorious indeed - though I did notice an uptick in anonymous edits by this guy.

Unfortunately, this morning the spammer has figured out that he can circumvent this by simply making two edits to each page he spams with different user profiles, which means that the anti-spam tools Wikidot.com uses will need further updates. I suspect that this cycle will continue for a while - the spammer doesn't seem likely to give up any time soon.

Especially since this seems to have become as personal for him as it has become for me. He has now outright vandalized one of my wikis - this, this, and this page to be precise (you can still see it in the page history).

And there is more. You may remember my examples of his profile pages, such as this one:




While it is noteworthy for both the theft of my own user picture and the insult, I would like to direct your attention to the "Real Name" he used there. While it is an obvious derivation of my own user name at Wikidot.com, he also used that same name repeatedly for new user profiles. And today I decided to search for it on Google, and this is what I found:
 



Yes, that's right - he created a fake Facebook profile with my user picture!

His sole post is a link to this article, which as far as I can gather from Google Translate is about some local Indonesian terror groups. His comment for this article is:
"rela mati demi dapet 7 bidadari? Mesum amat tuh otak.."
When I asked for a translation, one of my sources said:
"Are you willing to martyr/die to receive your reward ( 7 angels)? Mesum ( Is weird can mean a few things: stupid, moron, adulterer depending on context; which isn't too clear here though from the mention of brain/mind its probably an insult to your intelligence."
In other words, I might have received a death threat here.

A more intemperate person might have reported this profile immediately, but I took this as an opportunity to learn more about the spammer. For example, this "Friend" of the profile:

 
 
looked familiar. Contrast this Facebook profile with this Wikidot.com profile - they are using the same "real name"! What's more, if you scroll down the Timeline of the Facebook profile you will find spam for pretty much the same sites as on the wikis themselves. A third Facebook profile I could identify is located here - compare it with the user name of this Wikidot.com profile.

I think I have learned all that I could from these profiles, although it might be of interest if the second Facebook profile holds any further information (since it seems to be the oldest). Do you have any other suggestions before I report the lot of them?