MySpace’s Offensive Against Spam - Awesomeness Or Huge Screw-Up?

In case you haven’t heard…

There’s a zillion billion news stories going around about MySpace filing suit against Scott Richter who is fairly well known as the “Spam King”. He picked up that name after owning a clothing line that used it (in violation of someones trademark, naturally) and for… Well, being one of the biggest shit-bags to ever grace the net with massive loads of spam.

The suit filed by MySpace alleges that Richter and his company; OptInRealBig which is the parent company of the CPAEmpire.com CPA network, has been spamming MySpace users via bulletins from phished accounts. This isn’t shocking news to me since I busted someone sending traffic to CPAEmpire affiliate links in that exact fashion over a month ago.

If the rumor mill is correct, Scott Richter is simply the beginning of this. Apparently, MySpace plans to file similar suits against over 20 ad networks. Since that suit against Richter has been filed, this is no surprise either.

The below are some excepts from a email convo I had with a MySpace employee back in June of 2006. He initiated the correspondence after reading something I wrote about the adult webcam spam (NSFW) that’s extremely popular on MySpace.

“I’m curious what advice you have for us? We have a good team on it, but don’t have the inside perspective you do ”

“My idea is extremely simple: Sue them. And, have them reprimanded any way you can from a criminal standpoint… You guys have a ton of claims that could be made… negative effect on your brand, hurts your CPM rates, ruins user experience, etc.”

Well, it looks like they’re finally going to be smart about this. Or, are they? There’s some major issues that come along with the “sue the bastards” approach…

1. Throwing the name “spammer” around in the world of online marketing is the equivalent of calling someone a pedophile. You better be damn sure you have evidence to support your allegations or you’ll end up being the one who gets successfully sued.

2. Proving that it’s the ad network themselves and not rogue affiliates is nothing short of a monstrous task. Whenever an ad network does the spamming themselves they create bogus affiliate accounts within their own network to send the spam from. This is generally just done for tracking purposes though - not part of the Cover Our Asses SOP. You would think that getting records of all their affiliate payouts would prove that they have bogus accounts on their network. It can, but in a high stakes game like this: it won’t. They can’t cook their payout records, but they sure as hell will claim that those affiliates were busted for spamming and removed from their network before receiving a single payment.

In other words: if you don’t hookup a criminal investigation sneak attack before the civil suits, you’re likely to lose any good evidence that could be gleaned from their records. I smell a big ass fire and books are on the menu.

3. In cases where it’s not the ad networks themselves but they’re encouraging affiliates to spam MySpace or at the very least turning a blind eye on such practices: it’s another hard sell. You better have a bunch of pages saved from forums of Affiliate Reps from these companies actively recruiting shameless spammers. That, or you better have an expert in this industry on standby to explain why leads being generated from traffic that’s bounced though a couple META, JavaScript, or other redirects should be throwing up big ass red flags as to the type of traffic being pumped by affiliates. There’s a bunch of other ways to semi-prove that they knew what was going on. You just better be damn sure you can prove that they were knowingly accepting such traffic.

There’s a ton of other stuff MySpace needs to have their ducks in a row on to pull these lawsuits off. You get the point though. Based on their track record of unrelenting incompetence and boneheaded moves, I find it unlikely that they’re really ready for this war. They just better hope that these shit-bags are even less ready.

Either way, this is the best move I’ve ever seen MySpace make. Even if they lose every one of these suits, they’ll have made their point. If you spam on MySpace, they’ll come after your ass.

In my last blog entry I said:
“MySpace is on its last leg. Spammers and adware idiots will likely have driven away most of their traffic within 6-ish months.”

I take that back. If they pull off this huge anti-spam initiative; which I think they will, they’ll be the first major site that was spinning down a spam infected toilet to climb out and flush that shit.