Advertising

I have just received an email from OSM saying: “glossop removals has added you as a friend on OpenStreetMap.”

Their profile is simply an advert. I have have no relationship with this company, which is not local to me.

This is obviously a misuse of OSM, but I do not know what to do about it. I do not know how they got my email address. Has OSM been hacked?

They’ve used OSM’s “add as friend” function to make you aware of their profile. OSM has not been “hacked”; they’ve just signed up to OSM like any other user might do and used the normal functionality of OSM.

I recently updated https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Spam with the most effective way of dealing with this sort of spam, which is to report it in #osm-dev on IRC (where the admins will see it), which I’ve done. See also https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2017-November/079774.html - there is work in progress to create a more effective way of dealing with this sort of stuff.

  • Andy (from the Data Working Group, who deal with a couple of other sorts of spam in OSM, among other things).

I also have received that type of message “Master services has added you as a friend on OpenStreetMap.”

I have not anything common with this company.

What’s wrong with OSM?

Nothing is wrong with OSM. However, https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Master%20services shows that this user account does not exist, so perhaps someone reported them to the admins and the account was deleted, or they renamed it.