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Spammers using URL shortening services


klappa

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Many spammers use these services to avoid their domain which they advertises in their spam to be avoided by e-mail reporting services like Spamcop. Is there a way around that other than to manually report the target domains? Recently this spammer i have got has used the bitly services to avoid being caught. Unfortunately bitly never seem to take any action against him no matter how many Spamcop reports i send so he can happily continue using them without being suspended.

If i report the target domains to the webhosts running them they often don't take any responsibility. Cloudflare often don't do anything other than to blame they often act as a reverse proxy. It's very frustrating!

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I suspect that spammers' use of link shorteners is more to do with avoiding URL-based filtering, with avoiding reporting being a bonus for them.  (Bitly etc. are too widely used for filters to treat those links as anything other than neutral, whereas the actual URL might look positively dodgy.)

In my experience, bitly do tend to deactivate short links on their system that are spammers' ones (or rather, they make the short URL go to a page that says "Stop - there might be a problem with the requested link", with an explanation and then a small "Or, continue at your own risk to..." and the original destination URL.)  The problem is that bitly don't require you to have an account to create short links, so they're unlikely to be able to identify who created the link beyond an IP address (which is probably going to be part of a botnet or similar) or have a way of preventing spammers from creating more bitly links.

As for Cloudflare, they appear to be fine with hosting full-on criminal DDoS services (see http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-July/087257.html), so it's I don't see that they'll care about spammers either.

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