Ask HN: Why All the Indonesian Spam?

25•al2o3cr•2mo ago

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...

Comments

mtmail•2mo ago

Goal 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•2mo ago

I was wondering the same

jjgreen•2mo ago

As 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•2mo ago

Not 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•2mo ago

Interesting, thanks.

treetalker•2mo ago

I also flag these on sight.

And when I do, I mutter "mekka-lekka-high, mekka-heinie-ho" to myself.

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