For some reason I was not able to sleep and found myself bored. In so I decided to check out what was going on in the "internet underground" So I fired up MIRC and started to poke around. I pop into a SEO channel and after awhile a topic caught my eye of someone selling one way links in blocks of 25, 50 and 100. What they where actually doing is selling accounts. In short they would go on "I think related" forums / Blogs and post threads. Once they have gotten X amount of threads they would put a keyworded link in a sig file then sell that account and start all over again. I found this fascinating that someone would actually do this. But it also got me asking myself

Is this the new wave of link buying? or just a scam.

Now I know IRC is not the place that most companies go to get SEO help and most of the people in that channel I would bet where running some what questionable sites but the fact is there where people there and if it gets out could this become the new wave?