HT Media wholly owned subsidiary Firefly e-Ventures joins the list of mainsleaze spamvertizers using orkut profile visitor spam for promoting their job portal shine.com.
And clicking on the link in image above lands on the page whose screenshot is shown below.
Sure I gave them some benefit of doubt until I did a full text search on orkut for stickiwicket
Now there is something really wrong at so many levels with so many single, female(s) having a spamvertizement as their homepage url and then visiting a lot of orkut profiles expecting a pingback.
I also noticed that many of the profiles in orkut full text search have changed their homepage url to none after it had been the shine.com spamvertizement link suggesting that perhaps there was some form of profile hijacking which set the homepage url to spamvertizement link and then probably changed back by the owners of the profiles. Needless to say that orkut search index is a few hours behind the actual profile information.
A lot of young people share their email identity authentication information with shady sites which probably provide them with some extra functionality for scrapping on orkut but are not aware of the pitfalls awaiting them.
An explanation of orkut profile visitor spamming technique
Orkut allows a profile owner to view last 5 visitors. This is exploited by many shady businesses run by spammers who create fake profiles of 'hot, single, female's and mention the spamvertizement link in about me, location etc. fields of this fake profile. Worst part is such profiles have their scrapbook filled with zillions of frustrated 'single,male's who somehow hope against hope that there is some real person who loves to add spamvertizement urls to their profiles. This behavior is described better here.
Once a fake profile is added as a connection(friend) it opens it up for more spamvertizement urls in your scrapbook.
http://digg.com/tech_news/HT_Media_spamming_Orkut_for_job_portal_Shine_com
Update: They have been spamming full-blown ever since, received a whole ton of spam from them till now even though I never registered with them.
