Ineffective Flickr sex spam?

One of the risks with social networking sites is that they can be susceptible to both human and robot generated spam. I was on the receiving end of what I think was a rather odd attempt at sex spam on the Flickr site the other day.

Last week I was added as a contact by someone I didn't know, who already had 109 other contacts. Almost exclusively all of them were Flickr members who specialised in erotic or softcore content on Flickr. In fact a quick glimpse at the kind of favicons used by the contacts will soon show you that currybet was a bit of an odd one out in this list of contacts.

Now, like most husbands, I think my own wife is hot, but the photographs of her on my currybet Flickr account are not in quite in the same erotic league as those posted by users calling themselves 'busty nurse' and 'angel dream for you'.

Thinking it must be a scam, I was interested in working out how you made money from this. My best guess was that it relies on the fact that I, and other like-minded men, would be curious enough to click on these other tempting Flickr photostreams. From there we might move on to sites that were either making money from advertising views or from people who migrate to subscription services. Fairly straightforward so far.

Except that after clicking around a few of the photostreams, I couldn't see where I was supposed to move from just 'looking around Flickr' to actually making a web click that was going to earn anybody any money - I was expecting clumsy URL placement in the comments on the pictures and the profiles at the very least.

So in the end I was left none-the-wiser as to what the point was - unless this particular Flickr user really does just enjoy my pictures of Hania and churches and graffiti as light relief in between the kind of photos posted by 'pink diva' and 'big tease'?

Posted by Martin Belam, May 30, 2006
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