10 Lessons You Can Learn From a Pinterest Spammer

What do you think of when you think of spamming? No, I’m not talking about the meat product that comes in a can, although I do kind of like that Spam. You may think that a spammer sends a bunch of junk e-mail to your in-box, but what if I tell you there’s another kind? A spammer who bombards social sites with information that leads to him making money. Check out 10 lessons you can learn from a Pinterest Spammer.

1. A Lot of money is being made: Spammers are making anywhere from $500-$2000 a day on Pinterest. As they do more spamming their earnings grow. No wonder they are interested in doing this. If they kept this up for even a year they would make over a half a million dollars.
2. It takes very little money to get started: No big investments are needed to do this. You need to have a computer with a lot of bandwidth. So you do need to have already purchased a decent computer and have excellent Internet service. Other than that it’s all know-how.
3. Spammers use bots: I really had no idea that spammers use bots to do their ‘dirty’ work. Apparently they have the knowledge to create a program that will pin photos onto Pinterest and note a link on that photo.
4. Not invitation only: When you go to www.pinterest.com you can look around at photos, but you can’t start pinning them to different boards until you become a user. It says right up front that becoming a user is by “invitation only”. The spammer tells that this is not true and that if you make a request from a valid e-mail address that you will get your invitation no matter what or you can invite yourself from a different e-mail account.
5. Easy to spot: If you spend enough time on Pinterest the bot postings are pretty easy to spot. There’s a picture, but the words under it have nothing to do with what’s in the picture. You’ll see a cute photo of puppies and the link will be for hand bags. Unless you are making hand bags out of the puppies like Cruella Deville I don’t think the link really relates to the photo.
6. Pinterest not shutting spammer down: Out of the thousands of bots this spammer uses he’s only had one shut down. His very first bot because he was posting too many photos. He modified his approach and has had no more problems. This seems surprising to even the spammer so why isn’t Pinterest shutting down his bots?
7. Money made through Amazon: There’s a long-time existing affiliate referral program through Amazon where they will pay a referral fee to you if you refer someone to their site who buys something. By creating links to Amazon products this spammer gets people to buy stuff on Amazon and he gets the affiliate money from them. You’d think they could track down anyone who is making a great deal of money from them and make sure they are not cheating the system. This spammer is cheating Amazon.
8. Crowding out real posts: While this spammer doesn’t feel any guilt about how he’s making his living because he says he’s not hurting anyone. He makes a point to say that he’s not uploading viruses or scamming anyone. But he is hurting the intention of Pinterest. When I go on to Pinterest I want to see real comments from real people. I don’t want the site to fill up with fake stuff.
9. Artificially raising photos to popular: On Pinterest the more a photo gets pinned the more popular that it is deemed to be. Makes sense right? Wrong, this doesn’t work when bots are posting pictures from fake accounts and then pinning and repinning those same photos to increase their popularity so that they are more visible. Yet another way that Pinterest could stop this spammer. Putting in a simple fix that allows you to only pin a photo to 3 boards or something like that.
10. Always be alert: People will always try to make a buck the easiest way possible. Some will not only cheat, but steal too. If you don’t want to be a victim stay alert when you are on the web. The number of scammers on the web is amazing and they would like to dupe you into giving them all your money. Beware!

Taken From Internet Service Providers