My blog has been awash with Comment spam over the last few weeks, and now a new and very annoying trend has emerged with a kind of spam that hijacks the Trackback and Ping functionality of WordPress to make hooks into the spammers’ cruddy sites. It is possible that I will need to completely disable Trackbacks to get rid of this problem and to those of you who like to use this feature I apologize.

Another kind of Comment spam is becoming more prevalent as well: that of the individually hand-entered ‘comment’ that is in fact a link to a spam site or a riff on the ‘Nigerian Unclaimed Fortune’ scam. This means that poor saps are sitting somewhere trawling through blogs entering this data personally. Grim. And now they’ve started with just plain ‘begging’ letters.

At the end of one of my previous Peter Popoff posts, NIMLY had this to say:

Kindly present my prayers to the Lord, as follows, please. (a) I am a deacon (officer) and would like to win souls for God, through performing of miracles, signs and wonders in Jesus Name. (b) My wife would be pleased to have children though doctors said is impossible. (c) our financial situation is very bad and we have much loans to refund every month. (d) we are unable to complete a house project since some years now.(e)I want fultime job at my place of work and good salary, also, work for my wife, who is presently jobless.(f) I have eye and heart problems. My postal adress is – 62 rue A. CAMUS, 68200 MULHOUSE, FRANCE

When I received this comment I was preparing to give NIMLY a good ol’ Cow-style roasting and then it occurred to me that I could check and see if the address he gave was real.

It is. NIMLY lives here:

Nimly's House

It is the work of moments to establish that Mulhouse, with its acres of condominiums, is a high immigration/low income city in France, and somehow, suddenly NIMLY became a very real person and I felt overwhelmingly saddened.

Not because I think for a moment that NIMLY is feeble with eye and heart problems, or indeed that he is a Deacon, but because I think that it is very likely that NIMLY is in fact very poor and in need of a fulltime job.

Additionally, NIMLY is plainly not very bright (and certainly not internet-savvy) because he has given out his address for the world to see.

I hate spammers, as you know, but I feel quite sorry for NIMLY. He’s trying on a scam for which he’s hardly equipped in a medium which he really doesn’t understand. NIMLY, if you’re tuning in again, take some advice – forget this caper. You’re not cut out for it and it is likely to turn out badly for you.