Gozshop (Gozshop.com), Bonodo (Bonodo.com) Gozshop...spammers, scammers, attackers Intenet

This is a warning about Gozshop.com, known as Bonodo.com in a previous incarnation. A quick Google search on "Gozshop" pulls up 100+ results, the vast majority of which are obvious spam on message boards and within comments on blog articles. Google searches reveal that the same person apparently spammed a similar site, Bonodo.com, earlier this summer, but that site is now defunct.

A member in the forums at MacRumors.com somehow found out about Gozshop claiming to offer unlocked iPhones and posted a thread asking if it was a scam site or if it was legit. A number of members pointed out that it contained many hallmarks of scam sites, including having been created only a few days earlier, offering a small and bizarre list of products, accepting only payment methods known to be exploited by scam sites, plagiarizing extensive amounts of text from other sites, etc.

Based on what I saw before moderators were able to step in in the MacRumors forums, the owner of Gozshop.com discovered that the thread was ranking very highly in Google searches, and he began launching spam attacks against the MacRumors forums, vowing to stop only when the thread pointing out the obvious scam that was his site was removed.

The moderators at MacRumors do an excellent job of dealing with spam, but even so, I saw dozens of accounts and hundreds of spam posts appearing from this guy. The accounts were quickly banned and the posts deleted, and I assume the IPs were banned as well, meaning that the spammer likely used proxy IPs to launch his attacks. This went on for days, and while the staff at MacRumors commendably allowed the Gozshop thread to remain on the site for quite some time, they apparently ultimately decided to remove it for the good of their forums.

Spammers and scammers are the scourge of the internet and can mostly just be ignored. But I couldn't allow this guy to go so far as to hold a site hostage in retaliation for simply allowing members to point out that this guy's site is an obvious scam.

Jason
Abilene, Texas
U.S.A.