It turns out my last run of my scam alert bot coincided with a day called Eid al-Fitr, a public holiday in Islamic countries. To make sure the measured decrease in scam activity wasn’t purely the result of the scammers leaving for holiday, I re-ran the bot on March 28th and 29th.
The bot scraped a total of 170,783 comments on the 28th, and 193,250 on the 29th.
Please ignore the spike at 1am on the 29th of March. This is due to a bug in my code involving Daylight Saving Time. I fixed the bug, but the data is irreparable.
We can observe that the scam activity patterns on March 20th closely match the day of March 29th. As the 29th was a Sunday, it is a good indication that the 20th was some sort of holiday for the scammers too.
By observing March 28th, we can see that although the decrease was not as dramatic as I originally thought, there is still a 56% decrease compared to 3 months ago. I think this is a much more realistic result of the various rate-limiting measures put in place. However, the 28th is still a Saturday. Another run needs to be done on a weekday to get a full picture of the current scam activity.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the OTW System Committee for allowing this bot to operate.
