This spammer hit MANY wikis recently with a message which looks like it was more crafted as a fake blog comment:
"Crystal wrote a great article on business cards last week. I suspect that there is more to come from her, but I can not resist giving my two cents on this subject. So, here are two things that I want to encourage. First, always, Always, ALWAYS, include a phone number on a business card. A business card is a point of contact whereby you are giving your contact information to the other person. Why make it difficult for them! Don't waste their time or your money if you don't want to give a phone number. I know that this sounds harsh, but this is an issue that needs to be driven home. By the way, I also encourage people to put an email address on the card. This is fast becoming as important as a phone number. Second, if at all possible, put your picture on the card. People remember these cards above others. Over and over again, I get comments about my card and how much they enjoy having the picture. It allows the recipient to remember who the card came from."
Followed by the spam links with the following keywords
in the database but we need to add those keywords.
I think this spammer has figured out a sneaky way of hiding their spam. They seem to be targeting MediaWiki installations, and always altering the wiki 'about' pages or 'Community Portal' pages. These are pages which are linked to in the menu bar (in the default mediawiki installation) but often the pages are never used for legitimate content (on small wikis where there's only actually one or two pages of content anyway), hence the spam has a good chance of going unnoticed despite being prominently linked to.
Other pages which often get spammed on mediawikis include 'Help:Contents' , 'Talk:Main Page', 'Current events', 'Wiki:General disclaimer'.
They're not the only spammer to use this trick. e.g. p2l.info seem to do the same thing. But then it's never clear if a spammers thinking of these things themselves or just hijacking some other spammer's spammed page.
According to WikiMinion's database, this particular spammer is also spamming the following domain names: corporategifts-guide.com, cruise-guide.org, ebackground-checks.com, ecar-rentals.com, globalflights.org, secure-network.info, and wedding-knot.com in addition to the aforementioned ebusiness-cards.org. A quick check with whois shows them all having their registration hidden by the same proxy registration service. However, they all use either plesk82.com or plesk83.com for their name service. Neither has a valid web site, but they both show the following registration information:
Incyber Rajiv Chugh (domainbooking@gmail.com) +91.1125282817 Fax: +91.1125258877 R-134, Greater Kailash-I New Delhi New Delhi, 110048 IN
– RichardP - 2005-07-16 18:05 UTC
I just did a quick check, and naturally Ann has already collected information about this spammer. See the entry for Anil Maheshwari on her wiki. – RichardP - 2005-07-16 18:12 UTC