Talk:Steve Fossett

Article is being used to support spam
Should also be monitored for vandalism by the same spammers trying to hype their scams more aggressively. Perhaps that's what all the link modifications are about? I still think the obvious solution, assuming Wikipedia actually wanted to prevent scamming spammers from abusing Wikipedia's reputation as part of the scams, would be to annotate any article to that effect as soon as the spammers start linking to it. Put a clear warning at the beginning of the article, perhaps with a link to the specific category of spam. Today's is pretty clearly a 419 fee payment scam so the corrective link should tell suckers not to believe 419 scams. Shanen (talk) 11:04, 31 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Hi Shanen, Could you be more specific about which edits are supporting spam? Thanks! Cxbrx (talk) 20:34, 3 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I would if I could, but it would be extremely difficult. It's easy to see that the scamming spammers are using Wikipedia's credibility as part of their scams, but hard to guess how. The basic problem is that they can wrap their scams around the articles as they exist, or they could reverse course and vandalize the articles to fit around the scam. Basically it would depend on the balance between their adaptability and their experience in scamming suckers. I strongly suspect that there are certain features of their scams that work better than others, and they know which ones because that's where they got money from previous suckers. Therefore they could search Wikipedia for matching articles, or they could make the articles match. I think it makes more sense to go after the part that's easy to see. If they send out a bunch of spam referencing Wikipedia, then any person who receives the spam can notify someone on the Wikipedia side, and then that link to Wikipedia could be turned against the spamming scammer, per my suggestion. The warning doesn't have to be permanent, but just knowing that their email spam will quickly become a warning to the potential suckers should be enough to deter the rational spammers. Unfortunately, I think they are pretty rationale in seeking money. Shanen (talk) 18:58, 4 September 2019 (UTC)