Behind the spam

Entry Filed under: Mumblings, Rants

February 20th, 2009

Recently I had the privilege to visit a “friend of a friend of a friend” in order to sort out  his local home network. His name will remain undisclosed, and I can shamefully admit that I don’t even remember it, so I will refer to him as “HE” or “Big Kahuna”

Moving on… As with every networking problem, small talk is compulsory, but this guy talked BIG, and I mean really big. If I may quote - “Sure will be glad to get this fixed. Every time my network acts up, I lose about 400$ daily.” It really was strange for someone to be revealing his daily earnings in a country with an average monthly salary of 200-400$, but I just kept on moving my head in an up-down acknowledging motion, confirming his claims and letting him have his daily shot of satisfaction, since he obviously liked the idea of being a rich yuppie.

Soon after, boredom kicked in and he quickly tried to sell me 5$ VoIP prepaid cards while I was meddling with his cabling. As a pathetic pleasant person I am, I mumbled quietly that I don’t have a need for VoIP services although I proceeded to give praise to his prepaid card distribution business, calling it “innovative” and “it’s what people want, compared to the current high long distance prices” just to get him off my back, and completely ignoring the fact that a “400$ per day big kahuna” just tried to sell me a 5$ product.

As I was finishing up with all the cables, I sat down with his 300$ laptop to configure everything (trust me, I know it’s value). As if I wasn’t surprised already, the keyboard did not work. Noticing that, mr. Big Shot quickly pulled up an already connected USB keyboard for me to type on, while claiming boldly that he accidentally spilled coffee on his laptop keyboard and was unable to fix it. (ugh) By the way, here is the keyboard I was using, the keys had to be literally stomped on to work properly.

Finally, everything was done. His home network started working properly, and he was online again. Before uttering anything related to “thanks” or “how much?”, he quickly sat down and said “There’s something I quickly have to do, I’ll be with you in a moment.” From the other end of the room, my fairly decent vision came into play… I saw him opening several Wordpress and Blogger blogs, scrolling down to the comments section and pasting 3-5 links with a message below - “Hi! I saw your website, and I thought you would be interested in some of my links too!”… He carefully entered some required captcha information, and pushed “Submit”.

Now that I knew he was a die-hard spammer, I asked innocently - “What do you do for a living?”… “Advertising and promotion” – he replied fairly quickly. “Here, here’s my card!”, he said with a retarded grin, and invited me to a promotion of a new DVD in a local town hall (that is usually rented for low-grade book promotions and cult gatherings).

Needless to say, he never saw me again.

So, what do I know about one spammer that may have even visited my own blog? Not much, except that he has a family, that he “earns 400$ per day” and still lives in his mother’s apartment with his wife and kid, and that he is an annoying, cheating, lying, conning bastard with no values whatsoever. That should cover it. Good riddance.

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