As affiliate marketers and spammers wrestle it out in the Myspace for your hits, clicks and email addresses, the escalation of “fake profiles” used to exploit the system seems to be on the rise – do you ever wonder how many of the purported 90 million plus users are in fact real?

If you have a Myspace account, then you might have received a message like this:
“My friend Joe told me about this site that gives out complimentary ring tones for anybody on Thursday... So I had to let all my friends know.... “

A more common scenario is a ‘hot tip’ from a new friend which details a new way of make money by completing surveys at home. Comment SPAM like this is becoming increasingly frequent, and Internet marketers (armed with fake profiles and readily available software) can reach thousands of Myspace users with barely a CAPTCHA key to stop them.

Reporting SPAM like this usually results in a perfunctory cut and paste reply, presumably from one of the moderators posing as Tom (AKA Myspace Man): I know a lot of you are seeing SPAM comments on your page. sorry about that!

Tom goes onto say “…we are in the process of taking legal action against the losers behind this comment spam. bad news is that's going to take awhile because courts are slow, good news is we won some recent cases which is going to make it easy to punish the beejesus out of them.”

Interestingly enough, Myspace was the first site to prosecute a teenager who sent millions of messages (or SPIM – SPAM via instant message) to Myspace accounts. He attempted to blackmail Tom Anderson into an exclusive marketing deal and was later arrested in Los Angeles after being lured to a fake business encounter.

While Myspace might have nailed a few of the big phish, the ease of creating sham accounts remains - the only requirement is a free email account. Another quandary for Myspace is that it’s not only a haven for spammers; it’s also the cyber-lair of choice for those who prey on the young. In a matter of minutes a registered sex offender can be up and running with a bogus profile pretending to be whoever fits in with their target market.

Predictably, it’s not hard to make friends.

We decided to find out how News Corp deals with comment spammers, perverts, white supremacists and, of course, TOS-breakers - What exactly are the consequences for deliberately posting “photographs containing nudity, or obscene, lewd, excessively violent, harassing, sexually explicit or otherwise objectionable subject matter”.

As it turns out (at least in this experiment), there are none. Using fake profiles based on fictional characters, we tried as hard as we could to get ourselves banned. We even reported ourselves to see what sort of responses we could muster.

We tried sending out affiliate offers to our entire friends list. One young chap told us “YOU ARE REPORTED” adding “You came in a flood of requests, 17 in 2 minutes”.  We dressed another profile up in white robes and went to work adding friends. Strangely enough many African Americans who accepted our invitation didn’t seem to care less that we had White Power and KKK propaganda all over our page.

As well as the abuse reports submitted by others, we tried our hardest to submit our own abuse reports to no avail. The accounts used to send out blatant SPAM (and invitations to join the KKK are still up and running).

With our third account, we decided to hide the default Myspace advertising code at the top of the page (apparently accounts have been closed for such incursions). Up went the “Myspace is Lame” banner. We even sent instructions to our friends list detailing how to do the same thing with a snippet of code. We reported ourselves again. Nothing.

In the end we decided to upload porn videos and images. Surely that would have to get our account banned? We also asked 10 different women for naked photos of themselves, specifically erotic photos of videos that we would give them money for.  Interestingly enough, no complaints were made and most women were polite in their responses: “i'm flattered, but i dont play like that”…

The moderator’s approach was to remove the video (some of  the more suggestive pictures were also deleted). The account is still active and we have received no messages or warnings about a pending account closure. If anything can be learnt from this experiment, it’s that  “MySpace.com assumes no responsibility for monitoring the MySpace Services for inappropriate Content or conduct.”

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