In an interview with The Daily Dot, Steve, a self-described 24 year old man elaborates his dubious bot-powered spam business that clutters Pinterest with recommendations for random things from dressed to boats from bogus accounts, and makes thousands of dollars a day in Amazon affiliate payments.
A week ago, Total Pinterest revealed Steve’s spam network, which is powerful enough to raise pins to the site’s “popular” tab with a large number of recommendations and many repins from Pinterest users, most of which were discovered by their lack of a profile picture and links to blank Twitter accounts. Steve, however, makes no attempt to cover his behavior, telling The Daily Dot that “it’s spam, no other way of putting it” and “if you’ve ever heard of one of those spumy looking Facebook apps, i was one of the ones doing that.”
Steve claims he has no real “nine to five job” and that his only source of income is his online earnings, despite claiming to be a holder of three associate degrees in aviation and an FCC license. However, it isn’t really surprising that he’s turning a blind eye to connectional employment. He claims for the past two weeks, he’s made over $1,000 a day, and by next week, hopes to double that figure to anything between $2,000 and $2,500. With this new fountain of wealth open to the world to see, Pinterest may increase efforts to crack down on spam. Steve claims that it’s “by far the easiest social network to spam right now” and “quite possibly the easiest ever to spam.”
However, Steve gas also said that this scheme does not assure a fortune. He says that “there are no guarantees in this business” and that it’s “not a matter of it, but when” it will come crashing down. He is also quite pragmatic in terms of ethical implications of his behavior, saying simply that “I have no guilt” and that “I’m not trying to scam anyone, or upload viruses to their computer or anything like that.” He does admit to “spamming the crap out of the site” but emphasizes that “it’s nothing personal, just business.” Steve believes that he is providing a valuable service by helping people discover products they would otherwise not have heard of.
