Let's help Amazon shut-down comment-spammers…

From an e-mail I sent to Amazon today:

I don’t know if this is the right e-mail address to contact you on, but I just thought I should mention that onlineshop.us.com – a site that is using the Amazon affiliates scheme – has started comment-spamming thousands of weblogs.

Today I received no fewer than fifty automated comments on my site from them – each containing dozens of URLs they want to get higher in Google – each one a site that uses Amazon affiliate links to get money. I imagine I’m one of thousands of webloggers in a similar situation. As I’m sure you can imagine, comment spammers piss off a hell of a lot of people, and bring Amazon’s good name into disrepute by association. From looking through your terms and conditions I notice that you demand that associates obey laws regarding marketing spam, and as a result I imagine that you would consider the unsolicited and automated posting of marketing materials without any way to ‘unsubscribe’ whatsoever as (at least) highly inappropriate. The people these individuals are targeting are also highly web-savvy individuals who are more likely than most to be regular Amazon customers as well. I imagine this gives you even more reason to be concerned.

If you could ban the person concerned from your programme for violation of terms I would be extremely grateful – as I’m sure would hundreds of other people who have sites suffering abuse from this individual/organisation. I’m assuming that there’s probably a way that you could refuse to pay accumulated revenues as well, and I would ask you to seriously consider this as a way of directly hurting people who try to abuse their relationship with Amazon and with the general public. Perhaps if they realise that there’s no financial incentive any more for behaving like the bottom-feeding scum that they are, they might change their ways and consider getting proper jobs.

Yours,
Tom Coates

Have you had comment spam from an Amazon affiliate? Help get rid of it by sending Amazon an e-mail today. If they refuse to do anything about it, then there’s always the possibility of a boycott of affiliate links or a refusal to buy or promote anything from them. Hopefully it won’t come to that though – I’m sure Amazon will see this as a problem…