Spammers

Spam is the Internet equivalent of junk mail - email you didn't ask for, and probably don't want. It's sent by spammers, usually using automated tools (aka: spam bots). Freegle members will often have their own spam filters to detect and remove spam. The following just covers what you can do as a moderator to reduce the chance of your Freegle group being used for spam.

Spammers attack Freegle either by sending spam to the group, or by collecting members email addresses from the posts they have made to the groups and using them to send spam.

Sending spam to the group

There are three ways this can be done:

1. Spammer joins the group and sends spam

You can combat this by moderating new members until they have posted a valid OFFER. Many spammers join a group and immediately send a message - if you moderate new members then the spam will show up in your Pending queue. Don't reply to it, just delete it - replying to spam just tells the spammer that they've reached a human, which is what they're trying to do. Most spammers either aren't clued-up enough to send a valid OFFER to get off moderation before sending their spam.

2. Spammer impersonates ("spoofs") an existing member, and sends spam which appears to come from that member

There's basically nothing you can do about this - it's quite easy to forge email and make it appear to come from a valid user . So if you see an existing user send spam, don't assume that they've done this personally -it may be that someone is impersonating them. Look at the members posting history to verify this, often very active members and even moderators are targeted by this kind of spammer. Place the user on moderation for a while, to allow you to catch any other such messages, and contact them gently to check.

3. Spammer hacks into a members email account and sends spam to the group

In this instance you will see when the email arrives in your inbox that their whole address book has been cc-ed. Again, put the member on moderation. You could contact them and let them know gently that their email account may have been hacked, so they may wish to consider changing their password and running a full security scan on their computer.

Harvesting member addresses and using them to send spam

A spammer joins the group, and then extracts email addresses from the message archive, or from emails that get sent to the group. They can then send spam directly to those addresses, without passing through your group. There are even some spammers who tailor their spam just for Freegle groups so that it looks like replies to member's posts. Most often these emails try to trick your members into clicking on a link that is related to the item the member requested in a Wanted post.

Check out also the pages on FreebieJeebies

Informing Members

There is an email you can send out to members here.

Mod Tools listing

Suspect email addresses can be reported in mod tools, using the Spammer button

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