As part of the update, we have revamped our list layout. The Scams menu item lists all the Emails we have received as a series of HTML cards containing the Email headers. The field “Scammer” indicates the scammer’s actual Email – usually the Reply-to address.
When Brendinghat started up, our RSS feed consisted of the full Email we were receiving. Speaking personally, I am a big fan of RSS feeds, but I could not see a real need to have scam Emails appearing in a news feed. But as it was a feature of the framework we are using, and as we discovered, not that easy to turn off. But we eventually had to turn it off after finding a rogue site was using our feed to create their content.
The rogue site had set itself up as a scam Email site. But rather than using their own honeypots, they were copying our samples directly from our feed.
Their pages were full of adverts and had an automated page refresh every 15 seconds to increase their view rate. They even pretended to offer free advice to anyone with a potential scam. Strangely, they never replied to anonymous Emails.
We would welcome similar websites with their sources, filling in the gaps of the ones we missed. All this site was doing was stealing some of our traffic and earning money. We turned off the RSS feed.
After discovering someone earning money from our time investment, we decided to sell our soul and host some adverts. I will be honest; we only make enough to keep Brendinghat ticking over.