Grifters, Shills and Spammers

Oh my!

Grifter  -- A grifter is someone who swindles you through deception or fraud.
Synonyms include fraudster, con artist, cheater, confidence man, scammer, hustler, swindler, etc.
e.g.: ‘That grifter swindled me out of £250,000!’

Shill -- A person engaged in covert advertising. The shill attempts to spread buzz by personally endorsing the product in public forums with the pretense of sincerity, when in fact he is being paid for his services.
e.g.: ‘Who are you shilling for?’
e.g.: ‘ Ignore the n00b, he's just here to shill.’

Spammer -- Someone who makes the most of their advanced technological knowledge to place advertisements online without having to pay any costs.

1. Someone who post needless amounts of crap on a forum.
2. Someone who sends too many e-mails to the same person.
3. Someone who will up a chat window with the same thing repeatedly, or something that means nothing at all.
e.g.: ‘Quit spammin my forum, spammer.’

These three titles are not interchangeable. You can, however, be a spammer AND a shill. You can, possibly, be a grifter and a shill. I imagine you can be a spammer, shill AND a grifter but that seems unlikely.

Grifters are working for a higher, bigger potential pay off. They're the dangerous ones.

Shills they're the annoying as hell, transparently cheesy, inferior examples of humanity. Not dangerous -- more irritating than anything.

Spammers? Also bothersome but, primarily, just plain sad. They’re at the low end -- they're McDonald's Filet-O-Fish® to Legal's Signature Crab Cakes. Twinkies to Saint Fratelli's Chocolate Gateau.

Why does this come up? I’ve been getting mega tons of spam commentary here on Tell Me A Story lately -- much more than usual. I don’t mind the odd blog whoring comment. Hell, I do it myself on occasion. Nope, it’s the strange ones left by the spammers from delightful organizations such as Legitimate Job Online, Currency Trading Scam, Online Roulette, Online Casino and more.

‘I used to be suggested this website by my cousin.’ 

‘Hello everyone, it's my first pay a quick visit at this site, and piece of writing is actually fruitful in favor of me, keep up posting such articles or reviews.’

‘Pretty section of content. I just stumbled upon your web site and in accession capital to assert that I acquire in fact loved account your weblog posts.’

Not only is the syntax thoroughly mangled, which I can understand TOTALLY if English is not your first language, but the comment rarely has anything to do with the post. They most often reek of canned remark -- the kind that fits an imperceptibly small percentage of blog posts MAX. As though the spam worker bee has been give X+1,000 blogs to hit within a certain, very short, period. There’s no time to read the actual posts!

Caribou Barbie, the Abominable Snow Grifter. the Thrilla from Wasilla, incredibly, makes more sense.

Nah. She doesn’t. Never mind. That was a stretch. Excuse the hyperbole.