Have You Checked You Email Signups?

3 replies
Over the last few months, I have noticed a big increase in the number of people signing up to my email list. At first, I was all excited to see my list grow so fast. Then it hit me that something is wrong here. I was getting 100 -200 signups a day to a site that only average around 800 - 1200 visitors a day.



So I went into my Aweber account and really looked at the reports and I noticed that the vast majority of the signups were unverified. I took a look at the email addresses of the unverified and I noticed that most of them were coming out of China.



Then I noticed that the email addresses were john letter, letter, and number at aol.com. Or the name would be Pharmf*** at aol.com. So then I decided to take a look at my other list to see if I noticed the same pattern and low and behold I did. It took me several hours to go through all my lists and delete all the unverified that had bogus email addresses. I noticed that they were using the same prefix at the beginning and just change the end of the email address.



For example crookedjoc+ a name @gmail.com.


Here is a list of the most common email I found on my entire list:


Dentistas Barcelona - **@aol.co.uk
crookedjcoc+name@gmail.com
superiorkxjp+ name@gmail.com
reservoirlkvd+ name@gmail.com
nightmareebcf+ name@gmail.com
advancehvnq+ name@gmail.com
john***@aol.com


What I have not figured out is why these spammers/hackers are signing up for all of my email subscriptions. I also don't know if this is causing other problems on my sites/blogs. No malware has been detected on my sites and as far as I can tell my sites have not been hacked. I have several security plugins installed on every site, but that really don't mean my sites have not been hacked.


I wonder if anyone else is experiencing the same issue. And if so, what are you doing to rectify the problem and what preventive measure have you put in place to avoid this from happening in the future. I have deleted/blocked all the bogus emails from my list and I will continue to monitor my list over the next few weeks to see what happens.


Any ideas or suggestions you have will be greatly appreciated.
#checked #email #signups
  • Profile picture of the author competent123
    thats a spamming script i think its name was 99backlink or something like that,

    someone seems to have messed up with negative or positive list in the site

    try to find out from server logs where is the bot coming from, there you will find the site /ip address of the site that is hosting that script. put that link in your firewall, and relax. thats the only thing you can do for now
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  • Profile picture of the author PerformanceMan
    They're likely trying to fill out a form to get a link.
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  • Profile picture of the author OldLodgeSkins
    They're not people, they're bots, trying to sing up to everything they can.
    Spam bot sees form, spam bot fills form... It's as simple as that, there's no logic there.
    Captchas don't necessarily help anymore these days as they can be easily solved, but I've found using a maths challenge is quite an effective solution to stop them.

    Seb.
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    Do you use Facebook ? Then you can make money just by inviting people to a Facebook group ! It's called the Instant Income System. How cool is that?
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