It’s definitely not something that goes out, writes the spam code and is done with it.” We’ve seen entire shifts in what a particular spammer seems to be doing. “It’s a limited number of highly-motivated individuals,” says Kik's Hendry. (McDaid bases his analysis on the screenshots that Kik users post on Twitter or forums.) It’s also hard to tell if these are the same porn spammers that have hit Snapchat, Tinder and Skype. He can’t verify if the porn bots are coming from a single group, as McDaid suspects, because Kik doesn’t analyze message content for privacy reasons, so it’s harder to track what messages belong to what sets of users. General spam makes up a low, single-digit percentage of Kik’s message traffic, Hendry says, and based on the different technical signatures they leave behind, he suspects he’s dealing with a small handful of spam groups in total. The Ontario-based startup has been grappling with porn bots for two years now, according to Dan Hendry, who leads Kik’s server team and wages an ongoing digital war on spam. Last May it boosted its privacy controls and blurred the images that users received on their lock screens to counter the problem. Spammers also make money from simple click-throughs they get from links, or from stealing users’ credit card details outright.

Even with a 0.5% conversion rate, the attack would have drawn in around $16,000 for the spammers.

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