Are you getting Strava kudos or follow requests from bots?

For several years now, Strava users have been receiving kudos, follow requests and requests to join clubs from spam profiles. For the most part, it’s little more than an irritant, but it’s still one that many would like to see resolved.

Posting on the road.cc forum last week, Yorkshire Wallet asked whether others had ever been given kudos by complete strangers with odd profiles. The user who had given Yorkshire Wallet kudos had uploaded a run in which they had apparently covered 19 miles in 19 minutes.

Yrcm was one of the first to confirm that random kudos is far from unheard of on the social site. “I had kudos on two successive days for my commutes on a 16kg hybrid from busty young women capable of running at 60mph. They also happened to be short of sportswear judging from their profile pics and said they were looking for love. So you're not alone.”

“I've had the same,” added mrml. “Briefly got me to HR zone 3.”

A Strava spokesperson said only: "Strava is aware of the issue and investigating."

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A March 19 post on the Strava Support pages says: “We are aware that a new group of spam accounts has been created, and is giving kudos. These profiles are in the process of being deleted, and the kudos they left will also be deleted.”

A statement elsewhere asks that users get in touch whenever they encounter an account they suspect of being spam.

It reads:

We take any fraudulent activity seriously at Strava and we work constantly to prevent such activity that violates our terms and affects the user experience. As is the same for any open social network, it is not possible to block spam, bots, unwanted solicitations and fraudulent activity entirely. However, we are at your service to help whenever possible. Please reach out to us directly with any further questions and to report fraudulent or spam activity.

To report content, we offer the following tools:

• Flag an Activity to report data quality or accuracy concerns.
• Flag a Segment to mark it as hazardous and remove the leaderboard.
• Report a Post on Android or report a Post on iOS for spam or sensitive, abusive or harmful content.
• You can also Block an athlete on Strava, preventing them from seeing or interacting with your data.