Some of it is quite sophisticated: full blown "instant" profiles with fake comments ... the smarter spammers actually make the profile look real (often lifting material from legit user profiles), and then just ...
At the MIT Spam Conference, I was talking to MySpace's anti spam researcher. He said that they see many profiles that look totally legit and which have been carefully nurtured for more than six months -- and then the formally legit profile suddenly becomes the drop site for a Phishing campaign or other spam repository. Captchas apparently help quite a bit to stem this kind of problem because they install a technical barrier that, while not impossible to break through programatically, at least delays things a bit and reduces the ROI for the spammer. Regards, Ken -- Ken Simpson, CEO MailChannels Corporation Reliable Email Delivery (tm) http://www.mailchannels.com