Spammers, scammers, and marketers are abusing every possible system to get eyeballs and it's moved beyond frustrating.
I've had to dump phone numbers due to SMS, voicemail, and phone call spam. My spam box on my e-mail address (not hosted at Google, but still) is littered with bogus calendar invites, fake invoices, file sharing attempts, and so on.
I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.
> I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.
It's been a long time since I last had reason to look at an Apache access.log file, but Referer spam used to be very common (IIRC, the default Apache access.log format logs the content of the Referer header, and analytics reports based on these logs often showed these as live links; it was not rare for these analytics reports to be publicly visible, so these Referer links could be used to spam the Google index).
I've had to dump phone numbers due to SMS, voicemail, and phone call spam. My spam box on my e-mail address (not hosted at Google, but still) is littered with bogus calendar invites, fake invoices, file sharing attempts, and so on.
I'm a little surprised spammers aren't putting ad messages in fields that get logged in HTTP access logs just so admins will trip over them somehow.