Why so many new users from Vietnam?

Question

I was looking at the new users reputation for this Meta site, and I noticed that most of the new users are from Hanoi, Việt Nam, and have exactly 1 reputation. Also, all of these user profiles have a link to the same website.

What can be done about these accounts?

Answer 1

It's likely that these users are created to post spam; maybe not immediately, but at a certain point in the future. Several indicators:

• they are already promoting the website in their profile
• the website uses a so-called 'nameserver' which is used by many other spam websites
• they are posting in Vietnamese, and we see more spam like that
• the moderator system indicates there's some suspicious activity originating from the IP addresses they use

I've instructed SmokeDetector, a bot created by volunteers from all across the network, to watch for posts linking to this website. Combined with other factors, e.g. a post in Vietnamese, this may lead to their posts (when they write them) to be automatically flagged as spam which will help tremendously in getting them deleted as soon as possible.

Answer 2

Thank you for reporting this. It's hard to say why we have many new Vietnamese users. My guess would be that either a particular Vietnamese organisation promoted the StackExchange websites and consequently a group of members decided to enlist, or it is spam-related because each user has a long profile description and, as you mentioned in your question, all profiles link to 1 particular website.

What I find strange is that all users signed up to at least 163 StackExchange sites without performing any other action; no votes, no posts, nothing. Since all profile descriptions follow a somewhat similar pattern they could be created by 1 single user, so at this point I'm inclined to think it's spam. On the other hand some profiles have links to social media accounts which seem to be legit.

Since the users are not violating any rules there is no need to take any action. The links in the profiles are questionable, but profiles hardly get any views especially those of users with 1 reputation point.