New follower with apparent scam site — can anything be done to check it out?
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I clicked on one of my new followers to check out their blog and my antivirus package flagged it up with these words. “This is a scam site, do you want to follow the link or exit?” As I decided to exit, I’ve no idea if it’s a wordpress site or not, so can’t report it through the usual route. Obviously I would like to alert others to it being problematic if, indeed, it isn’t my antivirus programme being alarmist. What should I do?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there. Without the URL of the site in question there’s not much we can offer in terms of advice. I do think it unlikely that it’s a WordPress.com site as it’s not really possible to modify a WP.com site to automatically install malware or viruses.
I’d just ignore that follower, as it’s highly unlikely he/she will ever comment on your blog either – these kinds of “followers” usually just follow blogs in an attempt to drive traffic to their own sites and don’t actually read our blogs.
I hear what you’re saying about alerting others to this follower, but there are literally millions of sites like these out there, making it a futile effort to start with, and it might actually have the unintended effect of more people trying to visit that site to verify what you’re saying. Better to just ignore them completely.
And just in case you were wondering: there is no way to remove that follower from a public blog.
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If this person has a gravatar profile, you can report them for abuse directly from the link in their gravatar.com profile page.
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Thanks, kokkieh and justjennifer, for your feedback about this.
I decided just to ignore them completely and have had no further trouble as a consequence.
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