Spam Users?

[DaisyDesignShop]

Hey everyone! Lately I've noticed that I've received a TON more favorites from people, and often it is one user who favorites something like 10 vastly different items. So I started clicking on the User and three times now, Etsy's taken me to a page saying that that user no longer exists. Do you think these users are spamming or doing something to get themselves banned? And has this happened to anyone else?

[DaisyDesignShop]

Okay, I did some searching in the forums and here's what I found:

"It's suspicious because the number of faves is not humanly possible - so it is a bot. And if you go to the profile, it is not a shop, but it does include links to an off-site service for social media promoting, which is against the TOUs, and basically the whole thing is a spammy aggravation."

So Etsy has been trying to shut down the profiles of anyone who does this. You can read more about it and what to do if it happens to you here: http://www.etsy.com/teams/7718/site-help/discuss/10370480/page/1 and here: http://www.etsy.com/teams/7718/site-help/discuss/10365161/page/1

[Former_Member]

Thank you, Samantha, I didn't see this until just now and it JUST started happening to me....so I will follow your link!!

[Former_Member]

How super weird. That just happened to me this morning, and in the past half hour from when I noticed the "person" their profile has now disappeared. thanks for sharing what you figured out.

[Former_Member]

By the way I did report that person to ETSY and they replied back and said "thanks, they'd look into it".....