Comment Stuffing by Sockpuppets

The Feedly RSS Reader for Chrome should not be trusted. Since they are cheating to get signups, it’s impossible to say what other bad things they are doing behind the scenes with your data.

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The face of spam keeps changing. It used to be email, then blog comments, now it’s comment stuffing (as in “ballot stuffing”). Look at this screenshot and tell me what you think looks fishy:

Let me give you a hint, the exact same comment was repeated word-for-word by over 40 different people in the review section of this Chrome Extension.

I know it’s a near impossible task, but you should always be on the lookout for fake people (AKA Sockpuppets) recommending products. I reported this incident to Google but it’s happened a lot before and it will happen a lot in the future.

4 Comments

  1. Adam says:

    That’s pretty shocking.
    I mean, if you were to create a bunch of sock puppet accounts, you’d use a Scrapper and Spinner to make the content unique.
    You’d also test it before rolling it out to a real website.

    Just saying :)

    Because the best automated stuff doesn’t look automated.

  2. lee says:

    Adam, I totally agree. I guess my post didn’t properly address the 2 issues I really wanted to mention in the right order…

    1 – Comment stuffing is rampant. Don’t trust feedback
    2 – Here is an obvious, ridiculous example of comment stuffing (this obviousness isn’t the norm)

  3. not lee says:

    Adam, I totally agree. I guess my post didn’t properly address the 2 issues I really wanted to mention in the right order…

    1 — Comment stuffing is rampant. Don’t trust feedback
    2 — Here is an obvious, ridiculous example of comment stuffing (this obviousness isn’t the norm)

    Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

  4. lee says:

    Nice one, Chubb!

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