One of the first video reviews I posted when I started my channel Moondog2A (nee Moonog Industries) has been getting a lot of attention lately. This was a review of a cheap CVLife reflex sight that I posted over 3 years ago. About two weeks ago I got a strange comment posted that simply read “Triston Mountains” from @RolandaPierzchala-h3l.

I try and respond to every comment posted to my videos, at least with a thumbs up. I even respond to the negative comments when appropriate. But this one was somewhat nonsensical. I Googled “Triston Mountains” which turned out to be on an island in the middle of the South Atlantic and administered by the British Commonwealth. I asked the poster if Triston Mountains was where they lived? They didn’t answer.

But I would get one or two posts a day from other different accounts posting a comments that were simply a random place name, like Garrison Falls, Connelly Valley, or a list of random first and last names. I thought these names may be attempts to tag people but they lacked an @ symbol. These appeared to be random bot accounts simply posting random names. Why?

I asked some fellow YouTubers if they recently had similar posts on their videos and some replied, yes they were bots. We suspect they may an attempt to validate bot accounts by generating a patina of legitimacy by accumulating posts on those fake accounts (building up post counts on YouTube analytics?). Or they could be trojan posts, that are innocuous words now but will later be edited to add in phishing or spam links later. Whatever the case, they do not appear legitimate and we agreed that it would be wise to delete or hide the posts.

Unfortunately I have about a hundred such posts to now go through and manually report to YouTube and delete. The only positive news to report is that so far this spamming has only happened to one of my videos. Be careful out there. The internet is only getting less trustworthy and it’ll only get worse as automated bots and A.I. get better.