Blog-spamming Investigation

Hunting Blog-Spamming Scumbags

In my capacity as a moderator on a few different online forums/blogs, I recently came across a 'network' of related blog/forum comment-spammers who offer software for ripping and converting various video and audio formats to be compatible with a variety of devices like iPods, Zunes, AppleTVs and others.

What got my attention, is that I was constantly having to delete blog and forum comments that reference this crap software; which really makes me mad.

As I dug into it a bit, I discovered that they seem to have people who do nothing but make fake blog postings to spread the URLs for their crap software. They also set up many, many interconnected web sites that purport to offer reviews of such software. All the reviews are fake, and all point to each other. It's obvious the strategy is to increase their pagerank, and sadly it seems to be working.

Besides this, they post almost daily additions to the big download tracking sites like download.com, macupdate, and versiontracker. The guys from VersionTracker.com have investigated and found that they had hundreds and hundreds of listings from these companies, going back about three years. New entries are posted almost as fast as they can delete them.

But the software is all absolute junk, and I'd certainly be wary of giving credit card info to any of them.

Scumbags Hall of Shame

I've started to collect a list of all the aliases/domains that this group uses. (I didn't list the complete URLs, as I don't want Google to think this is a page of links, thereby making the problem worse.) Do yourself a big favor and avoid them.

These appear to be all the same people/company:

- adusoft
- aglaresoft
- aimersoft
- aiseesoft
- alivemedia
- allformp3 (note devious spelling)
- alloksoft
- alldj
- applemacsoft
- aone-soft
- avex-dvd
- avonesoft
- brothersoft
- buydownload
- cucusoft
- daniusoft
- download-software-free
 - dvd-ipod-psp-converter
- dvd-ripper-copy
- dvdtompegx
- easiestutils
- efreedvd
- fantasysoft-studio
- foxeasy
- giftdownload
- iEffectsoft
- imtoo
- iphonevideoconverters
- iOrgsoft
- iskysoft
- isofter
- lenogo
- moyea
- mp3towav
- mp4converter
 - mysupersoft
- my-video-converter
- nidesoft
- plato
- pqdvd
- simplestutils
- soft29
- sothink
- tipard
- tompegx
- tansee
- topvideopro
- uSeesoft
- winxmedia
- wondershare
- xilisoft
- yasasoft
- 1clickdvdcopy
- 4Media
and I'm sure there are many more I've missed. I'll add them as they come to my attention.
Update - June 2008

Thanks to GT for alerting me to the fact that this page had been hacked, adding a malicious script to the html. I guess I pissed someone off with this little list.