Travelresearch Ltd. Competition Spam Autoentry Scum
I took a look at the competition entries thus far for the Wish You Were Competition NPF is currently running this morning and there were nearly 4,000 entries which is about 2,500 more than usual. After some further investigation, I discovered that some clever German has written some computer software that automatically enters competitions using a bot with thousands of email addresses at its disposal and, more annoyingly, hundreds of IP addresses too so it is difficult to spot them as being a spammer. There business is to enter so many entries into a competition that they are very likely to win the competition they are entering. However, at NPF, the winning competition entry is checked very carefully to make sure it is not a bot or a duplicate entry from someone. Indeed, there are several things in our competition software that looks for duplicate email addresses, IPs and a...