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Why are there no sites to shame and punish companies that spammers promote?

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mouser:
I understand how terribly hard it is to track down and deter/punish the individuals that post spam comments to forums and send spam emails.

That seems like an impossible task.

But what continues to bewilder me is why there don't seem to be any mechanisms for shaming/punishing/reporting/deterring the COMPANIES that spammers promote?

We get dozens of spam posts and profiles changes every day that are deleted from the DonationCoder.com forum before anyone seems them.  All of these spam posts are promoting a given store or product.. Why on earth is there not someplace for forum/blog admins to report these companies that could impose some penalty that would stop them from hiring or incentivizing these spammers.

The commercial spam ecosystem is very clear -- the companies are paying the spammers to do this stuff -- or paying middle men that they know hire spammers.  We can't stop the individual spammers but de-incentivizing the companies seems trivial -- google could put them out of business in 10 seconds if they wanted to..

Every time i see some story about some stupid new google pr stunt i wonder.. hey wouldn't it be cool if every once in a while they devoted some energy to shoveling off a layer or two of the advertising spam that the internet is drowning in?

Ath:
So a wall of shame, with a specific downvote on Google searches if found there? That surely would need cooperation from Google then :huh:

mouser:
A public wall of shame yes, created from submissions by trusted forums+blogs, of companies who are being actively promoted by spammers.  With the understanding that these companies that are being promoted will be severely penalized by a wide variety of entities (search engine placement, amazon marketplace support, end-user boycotting).

Rover:
I like the concept.  Sort of a reverse Angie's List.

Of course I see a huge potential for about.  Want to get Walmart in trouble?  Start SPAMMING ads for them.   :P

mouser:
While that's a theoretically concern, i don't it's likely to be a real issue in practice.

Writing a negative review about a competitor must be extremely tempting, with a high rate of return, no downsides other than getting caught, easy deniability, and very difficult to catch for a variety of reasons.  But paying for huge volumes of fake spam from a company has none of those upsides and a huge downside that i think would make it very unlikely.

For one, the volume of spamming you'd have to fake to show up on a list like this would be extremely risky for a competitor to engage in.  Because of that and because a company would have to be paying someone to create all this fake spam, the risk and potential of getting caught is high.

Writing a couple of fake negative reviews slagging off a competitor requires only a family member with an amazon.com account and a willingness to pretend to hate a product.  Sending off a few thousand spam advertisements for a competitor every month requires money and leaves a trail that would be hard to erase.

And unlike writing a fake negative review -- this is a case where you would actually be PROMOTING your competitor with tons of paid spam advertising, and HOPING they get penalized for it.

I just don't see it happening.

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