Comments to my yesterday’s blog prompted me to clarify why the Web site that described a death of a spammer is, in fact, a hoax. The Web site pretends to be a blog and even have a list of previous’ months entries. None of them work though because they do not exist (all point to “sorry.html” and the whole Web site consists of only a single page about the spammer’s murder):
No wonder that all the historical links do not exist - the Web site itself was registered on 11 October 2007 only few hours before the “breaking news” appeared on it.
Plus, neither Russian search sites nor Google have ever heard of this particular spammer (which would be impossible as he is depicted as one of the most prolific). And there is no trace of this murder case in the news, on TV or on the Web. In a word - it is definitely a hoax.
I tend to agree with our colleagues at Sunbelt (http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/alexey-tolstokozhev-spammer-dead.html) that it could be an attempt to create a highly referenced URL and later it might get populated with exploits and malware.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Igor, good show in calling out this hoax and explaining the simple steps you took to identify that the facts just do not add up. Also, I think your idea on one possibility as to why they would do this is right on. Another one might be to generate link power for SEM (search engine marketing) and then re-direct it to a gray-hat or black-hat monetized marketing site.
Michael Rowles
CopiaTECH