I was contemplating writing a complaint to the University of Pheonix Online to inform them that they are funding these viscious spammers. When I first looked at the 'cb.adprofile.dot.net' link from there, I submitted a bogus address into their systems, and got through to a place which had the logo promoting 'university of pheonix online', indeed a few of the many spam link keywords refered to university of pheonix.
…but interestingly the original domain names which they spam linked to, are now all inactive, only 3 days after the original spam. Unless they've blocked my IP address after I posted garbage in their forms.
I'm interested in the idea of figuring out where the money comes from.
'university of pheonix online' sounds like a reasonably respectable organisation. Maybe they're not aware of these spam promotions which are being carried out by a contractor of a contractor of the marketing team. An email to let them know what's happening might result in the contract being withdrawn, and less money for the spammer!
Maybe I'm being naive. Maybe they are aware, but not really interested as long as they make some sales, in which case 'university of pheonix online' are bunch of inconsiderate tossers along with the rest of them. I think mentioning their name on the the spammer description page would be a good idea, because this looks like bad press for them. Then they are damaging their reputation by hiring spammers to do their marketing. – Halz
I agree. Whether it's email or wiki spam, it always helps if you try to follow the money. And I think that often the owners of the spamvertzied sites don't know that someone they hired is spamming wikis to promote their page rank. In this case, I don't think that it really was the University of Phoenix that did anything. This is someone who is trying to use their name.
We do have University of Phoenix in our database, though.
Seems the spammer was just to stupid to setup his domains correctly before he went on his spam run.
--Manni