Anything But Coffee

There are many spamers (mostly pornography sites in nature) on MySpace who will fill out their profile to look as legitimate as possible but include links embedded in their text to take you to their site. Some will just use you to post spam in your comment section and worse some will try to hijack your page so they can spam all your friends with bulletins.

Here are a few simple yet effective ways to avoid this;

1. Check the text in their “About Me” section of their profile. Look for the hypertext by different color text or just run your cursor over it to find a link. Read the navigation bar of the link if its spam you will be able to tell.

2. Be cautious about people who offer you friend requests who do not have any pictures of them self’s but have hundreds or thousands of friends. Most people who are on myspace will have a few picture’s at least of them self.

3. Be cautious of obvious professional photography pictures being used as their default pic. Now this might be difficult at first because there are many legitimate people with professional modeling style pictures but compounded with the other clues you can easily spot them out. Plus models and celebrities will not be adding you as friends just out of the blue, use common sense.

4. If you receive a friend request and an email saying something to the effect of “Hey my friend saw you online but they don’t have their own computer, click here to speak with them” That is obvious spam and you might as well just report them to MySpace Support.

5. Look at their comments that others leave on their page, spammers post with other spammers, look for them.

6. If the person gives their private aol, msn, hotmal or yahoo Instant message name or email but its written with
spaces like “myname @ a o l.com” or write me here at “m y name @ya hoo. Com” this is an obvious attempt to avoid any detection by MySpace support looking for known spam address.

7. And finally if your just on the fence about accepting someone but you want to add them do it and watch it. If they are spammers then they will quickly start posting comments or bulletins and you can see who they are and delete them.

8. On a side note, periodically check your “edit friends” list to see who has been removed for spam. MySpace will delete them and their picture will show a huge red X in its place but their name will still be on your friends list, so just remove them.