TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur's JourneyThe journal of a web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Tyler Imposter

Sorry, sorry. It’s been nearly a week since my last update, believe me I know.

I’ve been busy. Well actually, that’s a lie. I’ve been taking a lot of time off from the Internet lately to devote some time to a lot of reading that I’ve been putting off. As a result, I managed to finally finish Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Stephen King’s Cell, and am currently halfway done a poker book.

I’ve also been having extremely poor sleep patterns lately which have affecting my work as well. Anyhow, here’s today’s overview:

• Arbitrage Update
• Tyler Imposter
• Tricky Spam Bots

Arbitrage Update

Unfortunately both Bryan and I have been very busy or preoccupied lately. He’s in college and that alone proves to me that he can be busy. I’ve in turn been preoccupied with doing a lot of reading, cleaning of my apartment, and sleeping lately. However, we will soon find time to get rolling full force with our arbitrage project again, I’m sure.

We’ve already made some decent progress. We’ve worked out how money and funds will be moved around, who will host the sites, and who will own what accounts and manage what, such as AdWords/AdSense/CJ/etc. We’ve also picked out and agreed on 4 certain niches and have already purchased 5 domains to be made into 5 sites.

Bryan will be handling the design and website creation, and has already been working on some mockup designs for them. I will be doing some research on the niches and writing quality content for the sites.

Once the sites are all created and up and running, we shall start on the fun part of the game: spending and (hopefully) making money.

We will have our mutual arbitrage blog up ASAP.

Tyler Imposter

A very important aspect of this industry is reputation. Networking and making contacts depend largely with one’s reputation. That is why I’m a bit pissed that somebody has been trying to ruin mine.

Love me or hate me, that is all fine and dandy, as long as it’s based on things I’ve said or done. There has been an imposter lately posting on web entrepreneur blogs posing as me, writing slanderous filth trying to give me a bad reputation. I’d like to hereby announce that this is not me!

Why would somebody do this? Who knows. They obviously dislike me for whatever reason. What annoys me even more is how obviously fake their impersonation of me is. For example, he or she has been posting on some of my collegue sites such as JohnChow.ca and BryanLe.net saying things such as “Thats nice but i make a lot more money than you. your sites are pretty bad and u wont make it far. you should work harder then u can make as much as me”. It’s not even a good attempt as you can see, but for those that don’t know me, I don’t want them thinking I’m a prick like that.

Even if I did have a beef with somebody, why would I be so stupid as to write something like that publicly? That’s just plain stupid.

Fortunately, and ironically, I was notified of this imposter from the blog owners themselves! They knew it wasn’t me and kindly deleted the comments as well.

What’s more, I’ve recently learned that I’m not the only one who’s name is trying to be tarnished. Apparantly a few other webmasters have been having the same thing happen to them as well.

Whoever is doing this, please stop. You make think it’s funny or whatever but it’s not, and you may think I’m crazy but one day you could be sued for such a thing.

To everyone else, if you see such questionable comments from reputable people in the future, please make sure that the person has a registered account (most of these fake comments didn’t), but even if they are registered, take them with a grain of salt as they could be fake. Remember, why would somebody want to tarnish their reputation by doing something so stupid?

Tricky Spam Bots

I’ll end this blog update by mentioning a new Spam Bot trick I discovered a number of weeks ago.

For those of you that don’t already know, Spam Bots are automated scripts that spammers have manifested that crawl websites and post spam automatically. There seems to be a whole new breed of them created specifically for forum spamming.

Forum spam bots have slowly but surely been evolving. They used to be registered on the forum by the spammer himself by hand, and then left to wreak havoc. The spammed posts were usually pretty raw, with something along the lines of “Viagra – Become young again with a simple blue bill. Click here!”.

However now, spam bots often register all by themselves, even being able to bypass many CAPTCHA systems (those funky letters you see and have to type back to prove you’re a human). Their spammed posts have evolved as well, now having actual artificial intelligence and being able to reply to posts in a half-coherent manner! They seem to a technology hybrid of contextual programs such as AdSense, and basic bot AI, such as the ALICE program. For example, if the spam bot replied to a post written by an actual human which was:

“I have a problem. How come my ink in my printer is not working?”

The spam bot might write something such as:

“That is an interesting problem. Maybe you should check Google or ink websites. Do you need to buy ink? Here’s a good website for ink…”

inserting their site’s address where appropriate.

Anyhow, the latest trick I’ve noticed these spam bots use can be found on this spam post from my site CookingForums.net (I left the spam post up there specifically for this blog entry).

Looks harmless enough, except for the hints of it being a spam bot, right? Well look closer. Still not find anything strange? Here’s a hint, look for hidden links…

Aha! This spam bot made a fake signature by linking the underscore character: _ multiple times, making it resemble the line that often separates forum signatures from posts. It then links to a number of animal beastiality sites. Wonderful…

I’m actually impressed in the creativeness of this particular spammer, but it’s also another sign that spam is constantly evolving…

That’s it for now…

Good luck and good earnings!