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Ask HN: Why All the Indonesian Spam?
The "new" page with dead articles shown has about 5 submissions per page with Indonesian titles and spam contents usually containing a phone number.
Sometimes they're posted by brand-new accounts, sometimes it's "aged" accounts that have never posted before. For instance, this one created in 2021 has posted 12 times in the last 2 hours:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheDarkLegend
(you'll need to have showdead turned on)
Is this the world's most misguided phishing attempt? AFAIK dead posts don't get picked up by any search engines etc...
- mtmail 11mo agoGoal is to get indexed by search engines or LLMs and then show up as first phone number for "$airline customer support" or such. It's been going on for a while, I keep flagging them when I see them in my timezone. I thought it was Turkish. The old accounts is amazing though. Either somebody really playing the long game or easy guessable passwords?
- slater 11mo agoI was wondering the same
- jjgreen 11mo agoAs an aside, I'd always assumed that you only got so many "flags" per minute or whatever, but I've had a half-dozen where my flag killed it dead (which makes it all rather fun), so maybe I was mistaken?
- defrost 11mo agoNot all HN users are "flag equal", if you consistently flag spam then sooner or later a mod will notice this (as many flags get reviewed) and you'll get upsized to "super flagger" - unlimited flagging power with one flag == death. You then get more scrutiny, start "petty flagging" (flagging a fellow legit HN user out of spite because <insert no good reason>) and you'll be demoted to the rank and file. If you email HN and ask they'll often happily tell you if you've been tweaked in some manner or another.
- jjgreen 11mo agoInteresting, thanks.
- customer1 11mo ago[flagged]
- customer1 11mo ago[flagged]
- defrost 11mo agocute, but foolish.
- treetalker 11mo agoI also flag these on sight. And when I do, I mutter "mekka-lekka-high, mekka-heinie-ho" to myself.