Anti-Spam Vendor Caught Spamming

Filed in archive Spam News on July 5, 2008

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 5721884

Popular anti-spam vendor AVG has come under fire for it's Link Scanner feature, which offers real time scanning of search engine results for suspect pages before the user clicks on them. The problem is AVG does this by faking it's user agent to fool sites into thinking it's a real human clicking. This has resulted in a flood of fake traffic, wasted bandwidth, and many irate webmasters. The backlash was so severe that AVG modified the feature so it no longer scans search engine results and released the modification as an update. Can you say busted??