New Contact Page – Now with more spam

So I realized recently that my old contact page wasn’t working. And by working, I mean the form didn’t show up anymore. So I quickly did a search for an update but the original author is no more. Not deterred, I turned to the ever-present Google to find a new contact form plugin. I found one. Nothing special, it does the job and touts back-end features I could benefit from but ultimately, it’s there “just in case”.

My first new contact form user sent me a message this past weekend and boy was I excited. David Kruse wrote me about an advertising opportunity I’m sure to follow up on.

Hi,

I am interested in purchasing textlink advertising at some specific pages of http://archshrk.com . let me know if interested so that we can discuss it further. I can make a good offer to make it worth your time.

Let me know!

Thanks
David

Aside from the poor grammar, which I’m sure come from typing too fast, this offer looks legit. Only David has made this offer to lots of people. I feel so used.

Now I follow the first rule of spam detection – if it sounds too good to be true…

My first clue is that I doubt anyone wants to advertise on my site. So far, I only have had two site specific advertisers and you can see why they wanted my site. One contacted me directly with specific details, the other is through textlinkads.com and this is how David should have contacted me. So either he’s trying to cheat the system (which would make him dishonest) or he’s spamming sites looking for easy targets to abuse (which makes him pure evil)

But I don’t stop there. Included in my new contact form is a referrer IP address and a WHOIS lookup link. The IP address takes me to a page that requires that I – Enter the username and password for ?Multi-Homing Gateway Administration Tools? at http://203.81.225.147

IP Address: 203.81.225.147
Time Stamp: Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Referrer: http://archshrk.com/contact/
Host: 203.81.225.147
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)
Resolve IP Whois: http://www.arin.net/whois/

To find out more about my Contact Page or other plugins, visit the About Page.