So, the new community is now spam spam spam?

[johnvoliva]

What’s going on with these new posts trying to sell controlled substances?

[christiema]

I saw those too, including one promoting counterfeit money.  I noticed they were all from the same person posting though so I just reported each of them as Spam.  How they were able to make it all the way the Square Community is puzzling to me though. 

[kristen]

@christiema, that is definitely the right action to take. Thank you for reporting it! Marking as spam helps our filters grow stronger and notifies the admins of the community. As far as how they make it to the Square Community... scammers are crafty! This isn't an uncommon thing where someone can sign up to use software for free, and then create a community account based off the software login. I guess the only way it works is because they send sooooo many spammy posts out, even one clicking through and purchasing adds up really fast? I really don't know because I am not a scammer or spammer 😆 I'm just a lady.

Thanks again for reporting what you noticed, and as I mentioned to @johnvoliva, don't hesitate to tag myself, @tranguyen, or @nika if you need eyes on something ASAP. 

[Bwise77]

I’ve literally been getting emails from square about buying counterfeit money for the last week or more !! What in the world is going on ?!? This is so wild !!

[kristen]

@Bwise77 would you mind sharing a screenshot of one of the emails? Was it a notification from the community to one of the spam posts, or was it an actual spam email sent from Square? Clarifying that will help me get the issue to the right folks. Thanks!

[kristen]

Hi @johnvoliva - I can confirm that the community is not spam spam spam now! Promise. I think our recent relaunch (basically a gigantic migration of alllll the historical community posts etc.) might have triggered some bots 'n things to come and try to spam us more than usual. We have a bunch of new pages to crawl and for spammers to try out so I'm not surprised to see this, although it is annoying.

So I did confirm our filters are set up correctly, and I just reset the notification settings for community admins to get a message when something is marked spam. I feel like I've seen a lot of random spam in my days, but the drugs and counterfeit money were definitely a new low. 😬😬😬 I'm sorry it seemed we were stuffed to the gills with bots, I know that wasn't a great experience when expecting something shiny and new. Please continue to mark spam as you see it, our spam filters get stronger each time someone does that. And if there is anything super egregious, you can tag myself @tranguyen, or @nika and we will check it out ASAP.

Thanks for the note so we could have a chance to explain, and please let us know if there is anything else we can help with! 

[vanityesthetics]

Right this is rather ridiculous. I don’t wanna pay $100 a month for all the services I get through square to just get all these spam emails

[kristen]

@vanityesthetics would you mind sharing a screenshot of one of the emails you received? I'm trying to determine if it was a notification from the community to one of the spam posts, or if it was an actual spam email sent from Square. Understanding what you are seeing will help me get the issue to the right folks. Thank you!

[kristen]

📌 Also just wanted to remind folks that they can report suspicious emails posing as Square to [email protected]. Here is a help article about this topic: Recognize and report phishing scams

[Subport]

Recently there has been a lot of parasitic SEO attempts where people will use high domain authority websites to get backlinks for their website. I did notice a lot of these spam posts did not have a website but this is a real issue going on.