from Hacker News

Who is running the Pandemic Survival fear-mongering spam campaign

by ophelia on 4/12/20, 11:19 PM with 14 comments

  • by pmachinery on 4/13/20, 8:01 AM

    A one post fake blog about absolutely nothing[0], knocked-up five minutes ago, on a garbage domain extension registered a few weeks ago, exploiting the clickiest topic of the day and posted to HN. Who's the coronavirus spammer here, exactly?

    [0] The only issue after wasting my time reading most of the post is that it was, according to the author, spam (UCE). Otherwise it's no more remarkable than any other affiliate marketed ebook trash that aren't worthy of blog posts.

    To fill the article the author complains that the book simply gives "trivial" tips; but if the tips are good advice ("proper handwashing techniques") or at least not harmful, so what? Maybe there are people who don't trust the Federal Government or UN or WHO or CNN but take advice from the kind of thing you might find advertised on alexjones.com.

    The rest of the article is just about the ways companies hide who they are and use fake office addresses. Again, so what? It's not something I particularly support or agree with but it's commonplace, not a secret and seemingly not illegal.

    I was struggling to see why this was written, other than it's related to the topic of the century, until I noticed it was a fake site with only one post and that is the only reason it was written.

  • by ddmma on 4/13/20, 4:20 AM

    Quackery is often described as "health fraud" with the salient characteristic of aggressive promotion.”

    In the medieval times this was done by shouting in the public markets, today using affiliate marketing networks targeting millions of emails. Surely they don’t target people that can reason and ignore/ delete their messages but the ones that click and follow the dodgy trail.

    Here is an interesting podcast about Scams - You Are Not So Smart Podcast 097 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbW18RcO8Y

    Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery

  • by zipwitch on 4/13/20, 5:03 AM

    I misread the title. I was really hoping this was a link to house-rules on playing the Pandemic cooperative boardgame with the COVID-19 coronavirus as the disease.

  • by dhosek on 4/13/20, 2:47 AM

    Kind of ironic that halfway through reading an article about spam, they have a popup on screen begging me to sign up for their mailing list.

  • by vorpalhex on 4/13/20, 1:17 AM

    Title doesn't match source.

    "Coronavirus spam selling the 'Pandemic Survival' ebook"

  • by smoyer on 4/13/20, 2:04 AM

    I read the article to the end and was half expecting the answer to be "Alex Jones". Hopefully he doesn't reappear so easily after being banned from so many platforms!

  • by droithomme on 4/13/20, 12:31 AM

    The article mentions yomali out of Malta. Yomali's just an ecommerce, billing and hosting site doing payment processing for the people selling these guides. Much as Google and AWS host services for numerous questionable companies.

    Malta has some weird tax advantage apparently because a lot of ecommerce goes out of there. Also Cyprus.

    Yomali's owned by an Israel guy who says his name is Mike Peters. ( https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326673 )

    It's likely he and his company have little to do with these ebooks other than handling payment processing for them along with many other small companies.