Say that three times fast! But hopefully, don’t catch any. I haven’t had any so far, but my dad just reported getting IM’ed by a spammer. Googling it, I found people who said they’d been IM-spammed on Skype frequently, to the point they were getting new spams every few minutes.

This was so inevitable, I am surprised I didn’t see it coming. Given the open directory of Skype, and the fact that many people will leave their settings open to it, and the fact that spammers gleefully crap all over and ruin any resource they think they can squeeze a fast buck out of, I am in hindsight frankly amazed that this hasn’t already become epidemic. Maybe it’s because so many people aren’t using Skype yet. We just recently used Skype to hold a conference between our Japan campus and our home campus in Wisconsin, and almost nobody there had even heard of Skype before.

Fortunately, there are steps you can take. Blocking spammers is useless, as they generate hordes of accounts and you’d be blocking them all day and night. Instead, go to your settings, and under “Privacy,” set it so that only people you have authorized can send IM’s or anything else. Spammers then can still pester you with unlimited requests to show your details or add them to your contact lists; under “Notifications” in your preferences, you can stop the sound from playing when that happens. On the Mac, that’s the extent you can stop them, but on the Windows version, you can also block pop-up windows or system tray notifications when they do that. Hopefully, they’ll add that to the Mac version soon.

You might wonder if spammers would bother to attempt to be added to your contacts list, as few people would fall for such a transparent scam, especially more than once. But remember, few ever buy stuff from spammers–but since spammers automate their spew and can send millions out per day, they don’t care if only one person out of a thousand is stupid enough to fall for it–that’s all they need, and they are likely to get it. Witness Nigerian bank account scammers, where you get emails from someone wishing to use your bank account to transfer X million dollars, and you get to keep 10~30%. This has become so famous it’s literally a joke–but they keep sending them, in large numbers, especially to email addresses found on web sites. Someone must still be falling for it. Hard to believe that someone so stupid could survive even daily life, but there you are.

I am trying to think of a non-Internet analogy to describe spammers, but am coming up blank. Where else in the history of the world has there been a small group of people who invade, defile, and nearly incapacitate large public forums, and yet get away with it so regularly that everyone simply accepts them as a force of nature or something? I mean, advertising in general is kind of like that, but not to nearly the degree that spammers have become a destructive force on the Internet.