Innocent Bystander

An Innocent Bystander (IB) is a URL or URI that is present in spam but is not authorized for such use by its owner.

Spammers will put 'innocent' URLs in their spam to make it look legitimate, for instance references to news articles or government web pages. Other examples include the mandatory advertising placed at the bottom of email messages in footers by free webmail companies and by antivirus software*. In the case of phishing email, nearly all links will be stolen from the Innocent Bystander.

An attempted Report of a URL or URI that is marked as an Innocent Bystander will be met with ISP does not wish to receive report regarding [the Innocent Bystander] and possibly ISP does not wish to receive reports regarding [the Innocent Bystander] - no date available.

Please see Once I close a spammer's account, how can I prevent others reporting it?∞ for how an ISP can mark a URL as an Innocent Bystander.

*Opinion: It is understood that free webmail companies need to recoup their investments via footer advertising. However, paid antivirus software companies' and paid ISPs are attempting to double-dip (unless they make it very clear in advance to their customers that their prices are significantly lower due to their footer advertising schemes, and give their customers options to pay higher prices for advertising-free products).

---

CategorySpamCopGlossaryWikiI

---