Well the situation does seem quite bad when you see people who leave fake reviews become brazen enough to actually advertise their services on Amazon itself [1]. I reported this review about 10 days ago and it's still up. The email address provided appears on hundreds of product listings [2]. When they can't even filter out nonsense like this I can only assume they put zero effort into tackling fake reviews.
419 eater is a site dedicated to exactly that. The general idea is to act totally clueless about everything. They want a scan of your passport? Request instructions on how to use a scanner and do everything wrong. Some people take this a lot further and get scammers on "safari" - a long and expensive trip where the scammer believes they'll be meeting their victim but instead just waste their time and money.
I managed to register a Yahoo account when I was a child with the password of 'poo'. Login still works although unsurprisingly I do get a notification of suspicious activity on the account.
Firstly there's been quite a few articles posted to HN that aren't even technology related, let alone being of proper substance, yet are still of interest to HN readers. For example I have fond memories reading through a bee keeping article posted here and the discussion that followed. Due to the popularity of that article and others like it, I think it's fair to say the readership isn't fixed on the idea that all articles must even be strictly technology related. Secondly you'll notice that BBC articles get posted here quite often and that's absolutely a mainstream news source.
> Very weird, not sure if a bot puts these together or if there's human involvement.
It'd be easy enough to source a list of company names and owners of the companies then generate possible domains and possible email addresses for the owners but you ultimately need to know who should receive the email. This probably involves a human digging around on LinkedIn. I have no idea what's it like to scrape LinkedIn but presumably they make it difficult. The difference between using the correct email address for the CFO but incorrect one for the owner suggests it's a bit of both.