Reddit spammers beware: It doesn’t matter how intricate your scheme is — you will likely be caught.
Last year a group of redditors exposed a complex spamming operation from the Village Voice, which was then forced to publicly ask for forgiveness.
And just yesterday, a single redditor, Joel A., discovered a similarly massive spamming operation run by tech support firm iYogi. The company is based in India but offers tech support by phone to American customers.
Joel A. discovered that the company was held at least 28 phony accounts on the site, which it used to submit posts that linked back to its own domain. The phony accounts upvoted one another’s posts, helping them rise artificially on Reddit. (Joel A. asked to not use his last name out of concerns for his privacy).
That’s a clear violation of Reddit’s rules. And for Joel A., who spends 10 hours a day scouring new content on the site, the pattern was unmistakable.
“I had seen two or three of iYogi’s handymen’s posts before,” Joel A. wrote in an email to the Daily Dot. “And I might have forgotten about them if it wasn’t for the amount of up-votes the (very ordinary) post’s were receiving.”
In just two hours he had assembled a dossier on all the accounts the company was using to spam the site and posted it to the WTF subreddit. He titled the post: “Large multinational Indian based IT support company has complex web of accounts and techniques they are using to spam reddit”
The post got popular, fast, gathering nearly 4,000 upvotes and briefly reaching Reddit’s front page.
“I have found similar things in the past but never on such scale,” Joel A., who works as an IT consultant on Australia’s Gold Coast said.
Redditors were not pleased.
“My torch and pitchfork are ready,” wrote one.
“I think this might require a drive-by egging. Good thing I’m in Delhi,” wrote another.
The Daily Dot reached out to iYogi for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.
The lesson?
Spammers should know at this point that any temporary payoff is not worth the long-term cost. Redditors take spam seriously.
Or, as one redditor succinctly observed, referencing Reddit’s voting system, which it calls karma:
“It’s kind of ironic that this Indian firm’s motto is ‘Great Tech Support. Good Karma’”
