Incompetent Latvian Spammer
Someone (I forget who) once said "people generally don't become spammers because they've lost their job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory" - in other words, spammers tend not to be terribly smart. Case in point: after cleaning up a large batch of spam comments yesterday, I did some digging and noticed that all of the spam came from two IP addresses in two class-C ranges (195.191.54.* and 94.142.131.*), all of which appear to be located in Latvia.
The stupidity of this particular spammer started to become obvious when I checked back through older spam comments on the site & found several thousand from the same IP range, posted over the course of several months. And not a SINGLE one of those comments has ever appeared on the site, thanks to the WordPress Akismet plugin & manual comment approval. So not only is this spammers completely ineffectual, he's also too oblivious to realize it.
But the real fun didn't start until I blocked the IP ranges using the WP-Ban plugin for WordPress (which I highly recommend). The plugin has a nice display of ban stats, showing individual IPs and the number of times they've been blocked - as of this writing, the spammer has made 1,059 attempts (from 18 different IP address, all from the same two class-C ranges), in under 24 hours. And he's still at it, making one attempt at least every 2-3 minutes - sadly for Mr. Spammer, this is not one of those situations where persistence makes up for a lack of intelligence.
UPDATE - JAN 19: Mr. Latvian Spammer has now been blocked a total of 2,398 times, from a total of 18 different IP addresses. And what does he get for his persistence? Since I've always been a fan of the old "SPEWS" approach, the IP ranges 195.191.54.* and 94.142.131.* have now been blacklisted across our entire hosting network (web and mail servers). Congrats!
