On the subject of spam, I was scrolling through Google Images at random and found this rather funny algorithmically generated store scam.
It presents itself as a store, except all the products are random images grabbed off the web with titles grabbed off whatever page the original image was on.
Each image has a random price attached, and all of them have 50% "discounts" on them. The page implies that the images are actual shippable products, and the payment button is surrounded by various antivirus logos as a guarantee of safety. Many of the images do not in any way correspond to real products and are are titled in totally incoherent ways, often with the name of the original site they were grabbed off listed as part of their title (some of them are grabbed off Wikipedia and have the "[article name] - Wikipedia" as their name). Each product page has a flashy countdown for until the discount ends (always under 2 hours from what I saw), a warning that the item is almost out of stock, occasionally a high "X people are viewing this right now" number, and a vast collection of generic reviews that do nothing to indicate what you are actually buying.
The "About US" page on the site reads as if it was either AI generated or written by some ESL and has some very dubious capitalization choices. The site footer links to jquery.com for some reason.
The product categories are rather funny too - the "kids sunglasses" category had a subcategory for "kids sunglasses" with a subcategory for "kids sunglasses" and "towel" under that. The "jewelry" category has another "jewelry" subcategory which then has "mens bracelets" and "hand bracelet" under it. Most of them have similarly repetitive category nesting. Some categories do not work at all. Some of the categories take you to a different url entirely, running the same scam store software and looking totally identical but with a different listing of categories.
The site search does not work.
I guess the hope is that one of the images (which they are clearly scraping at random off the web) would correspond to an actual product someone might want and some elderly person would see the antivirus logos, think that makes it safe, and give them their credit card number. The page I saw first was all of "products" that are obviously things you cannot buy, but looking at the front page most of the products there are real things grabbed off Amazon or other stores, and I could definitely see someone dumb or tech illiterate falling for it. Looking on archive.org, the url used to belong to a real business too.
I am almost tempted to try buying something from there to see what exactly gets shipped, if anything. Almost.
This sort of algorithmic spam fills me with great child-like joy and provides me with never-ending humor. I enjoy it deeply.
For the curious,
The site:
shoppb.tireshop-kokubo (dot) com/
First page I landed on:
rocheap.bedandbreakfaststamford (dot) org/category?name=elliptic%20curves%20and%20modular%20forms
(I feel this is insulting to anyone reading, but please remember this is a scam and don't try to buy anything or visit without a content blocker of some kind.)