One of the things I do for a number of orgs is manage social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok). For the most part it’s pretty fun. However, there’s a group of folk I’m seeing more and more: spammers. This crew is bolder and more annoying. They’ll post their spam comment about being a YouTube expert, then keep replying (“did you read my note?”). Initially, I took them at face value and replied saying “thanks, no thanks”. Then I had the guy ping us how we could increase our YouTube engagement, for a client who has NO YouTube presence. I mean, come on, at least TRY with your time-wasting spam.
I have been taking modest delight in deleting these requests. Micro-empowerment, I guess. It is a Sisyphean process, so I take what wins I can.
To think that spamming has become a career choice for some, bizarre.
All the best
DD
I guess it’s lucrative enough, even if you become a pariah.
Spam will never go away which means someone out there has to be falling for it and paying these people money! Or maybe it’s like the advertising industry where it’s been proven several times that ads have no correlation with increased sales, but companies spend millions on ads anyway.
With AI we’ll see more sophisticated spam because it’ll be harder for less savvy people to tell when a spammer is from a scam mill in Pakistan, but when people say that they neglect to mention that AI will also help control spam.
True, it doesn’t take many bites for it to be profitable.
It’ll be interesting how the AI will play out in the cat-and-mouse game of spamming and fraud.