This year, several companies launched advertising programs targeted at the millions of users of Limewire and other Gnutella or eD2k based filesharing applications. The boundary between advertisement and plain old spam is completely disappearing, especially with the recently launched service ‘PeerMatrix’.
A new trend is surfacing, as spammers have sent out millions of emails targeting BitTorrent users. The emails, that claim to come from MediaDefender, warn the receiver that he or she has been logged using BitTorrent and points them to an attachment supposedly containing evidence, but which is in fact infected with a virus.
The popularity of BitTorrent also has its downsides. Over the past months we reported about fake torrents, torrents that force you to download malware, and torrents that spy on your download behavior. TorrentSpam is a new service that allows you to report such scams, and clean up BitTorrent sites, bit by bit.
Spam comes in many shapes and forms and today we have news that anti-piracy company Media Defender has hooked up with telecoms company Sprint and Atlantic Records to give away 16 million free tracks on P2P networks. However, don’t get too excited, its 16 million tracks from one artist.
Today Mininova announced that they banned 3652 spam/scammers. Fake files, “free stuff”, and poker deals; Torrent sites are a great tool to spam and scam “innocent Pirates”.
Some time after we started mininova there were a few people that thought that uploading spam torrents would be a good idea to advertise their “GET A FREE [...]
