Who is pulling spammers' strings?

  1. pulling the/sb’s strings
  2. pulling strings

I imagine that ‘pulling strings’ puts more emphasis on the result of the action, whereas ‘pulling the strings’ puts more emphasis on the relationship between the person who pulls the strings and the people whose strings are pulled. Am I right?

I wonder who will benefit from those spam posts. The following is a list of possible candidates:

  1. all astrologers (This is not probable. The image of astrologers has became extremely negative. )
  2. some astrologers who are not ‘supposed’ to have sent spam messages
  3. spammers ( Do they send spam messages for its own sake, or do they do so to get some money?)
  4. telephone companies
  5. anti-spam specialists
  6. anti-astrology campaigners
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@SanneT
Thank you for showing example sentences.

I read some of the spam messages. If they were written well, they would be able to persuade some prospective clients to call the numbers in the messages, but this is not the case. They are not convincing in any sense. Why do spammers send us such meaningless messages? What kind of people are pulling spammers’ strings?

I doubt whether we are dealing with advertisement-spam here. It seems to me that this is a quite deliberate attempt to attack the forum and cause annoyance, etc.

As to the motives for this, who knows? Maybe it’s a business rival of LingQ, or something? Or maybe just a nutcase? It’s hard to understand what is going on inside the heads of these folks, IMO.

If you google for the numbers you can find other forums spammed as well. So I guess it is not an attact against LingQ especially. Usually these spammers are paid by entry that they made, not by result. This is part of the problem. The most important thing is not to dial these numbers. If nobody dials the numbers they’ll stop.

A solution is announced for today. We have to wait for it. In the meantime I do my best to delete the spam as soon as possible.

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Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the telephone numbers in the spam messages are really owned by ‘astrologers’ in India. If you wish to contact an astrologer, you must pay the expensive cost of the telephone call, or you must visit India to get the service face to face. I doubt whether the messages are persuasive enough for prospective clients to call or visit the astrologers in India.

@alex
I noticed that some spammers has begun to spell words by alternating a small letter and a capital letter like ‘ReCeNtLy AcTiVe ThReAdS.’ Speaking of spammers, can you delete the thread title of that kind in ReCeNtLy AcTiVe ThReAdS?

It’s gone.

Why do they spell the words by alternating a small letter and a capital letter? I suppose that they are wondering whether some spam filters are used to avoid accepting messages that include some listed words related to the content of the spam. They might suppose that the filters are case-sensitive.