Back to Home11/17/2025, 7:08:26 PM

Ask HN: Why All the Indonesian Spam?

1 points
0 comments

Mood

skeptical

Sentiment

negative

Category

meta

Key topics

spam

Hacker News

online security

The "new" page with dead articles shown has about 5 submissions per page with Indonesian titles and spam contents usually containing a phone number.

Sometimes they're posted by brand-new accounts, sometimes it's "aged" accounts that have never posted before. For instance, this one created in 2021 has posted 12 times in the last 2 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheDarkLegend

(you'll need to have showdead turned on)

Is this the world's most misguided phishing attempt? AFAIK dead posts don't get picked up by any search engines etc...

The author is puzzled by a recent influx of spam posts with Indonesian titles on Hacker News' 'new' page, wondering if it's a misguided phishing attempt.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

5m

Peak period

3

Hour 1

Avg / period

3

Comment distribution9 data points

Based on 9 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    11/17/2025, 7:08:26 PM

    1d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    11/17/2025, 7:12:57 PM

    5m after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    3 comments in Hour 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    11/18/2025, 9:25:23 AM

    12h ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

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ID: 45956847Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 7:09:03 PM

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