Can you shame those who have no shame?

You know, the Internet is a wonderful thing. It puts a truly mindboggling amount of information at your fingertips, and it's all accessible at lightning speed. Some use that power for good. Others, for evil, or at least money-grubbing unethicalness.

A few days ago, I received this comment spam, probably the first since turning on Bloggers CAPTCHA. It advertised www.abrams-california-health-insurance.com. I'm pissed off by the fact that they're spamming my blog to advertise what I figure is crappy health insurance, but I'm really pissed off by the fact that they're doing it in sub-eighth-grade English.

It wasn't just me, this spammer hit over 250 other blogs with this crap. In my case, the spam was left by someone who came to the blog after Googling for "general health care." His IP address was 68.123.236.84 (adsl-68-123-236-84.dsl.irvnca.pacbell.net). The spam payload domain is registered to:

Abrams & Associates
23232 Peralta Dr #119
Laguna Hills, California 92653
949-472-9892
949-472-9815

Interestingly enough, if you go to the website, there isn't a single email address to be found anywhere. Not one. Not even at their "Contact Us" page. For an Internet-based business? I guess they don't want to get spam, but don't mind foisting it off on the rest of us. There is one in the domain registration entry, however. So it would just be terribly tragic if dan@insuresaver.com got picked up by some other spammer's spider and poor dan@insuresaver.com started getting a bunch of spam on his own. (See what I meant about a staggering amount of information?)

I am not the only one to take umbrage at this sort of behavior. One of the other spam victims was this guy on whose blog the spammer actually left his email address. (So it would be terrible if vpatel@acsseo.com got spidered as well.) So he called Advantage Consulting Services, the spammer, and left a message, and they actually called him back and confessed to being the blog comment spammer. God, if you're going to run your business in a horribly unethical manner, shouldn't you at least lie about it?

The implementation of the various CAPCHAs means that this wasn't an automated process. So I guess the good news is that some poor spammer was kept up until 2:30 in the morning cutting and pasting his spam into little blog comment forms.

Just to be abrasive, I sent this little missive to vpatel@acsseo.com:

To: vpatel@acsseo.com
Subject: Please stop spamming blogs with your advertisements

My blog is not a medium for you to advertise on. If that's what you're looking for, go spraypaint it on someone's building.

"We use industry best practices and ethical standards" my foot.

It was considerably more polite than the first draft.