Well, well, well...it looks like spammers are now exploiting YouTube's features to spam the heck out of us. "Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in." Not really. I just felt like throwing that Michael Corleone line out there. Alright, getting back to the issue at hand, YouTube allows us to view and post various videos on the Internet through a common portal (if you did not already know that, please shoot me an e-mail and I would be more than happy to recommend a few good middle schools to you). Users are allowed to leave comments under each video. From my experience with these comments, they are usually flame wars between adrenaline powered teenagers which I find to be quite entertaining. I just realized that these comments have nothing to do with this article. Note to self: stop taking off on tangents.
When you come across a video that you would like to share with your
pals, YouTube offers a service called 'invite-a-friend' which sends out
an e-mail (along with your own comment) to your buddies asking them to
view the video. Spammers are now using (read: exploiting) this service
to send out spam in the comment section to various random e-mail
addresses. According to Information Week, "The
body message tries to lure users to visit
dating Web sites or they come out and offer prizes like the recently
released Halo 3 game for the Xbox 360 console." My question is, why are
people still falling for these scams when the chances of them winning a
free Xbox 360 online are way lower than winning the $150 million
lottery?
These e-mails are getting past various spam filters because the sender's address appears as service@youtube.com (which is a completely valid e-mail address). I highly doubt that this method will last long but hey, it's still annoying right?
