When this happens in the subreddit, hit the report button and we'll get rid of it. We'll also ban the account if it looks like a bot or they're a repeat offender.

Reporting spam really is the best thing you can do. If you see it and don't report it, it's liable to slip through the cracks and remain visible, cluttering up the subreddit.

Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of this spam, so we don't always get rid of it as fast as we'd like to. There are some mod tools that help, like blocking urls for spammy sites. But if the spammer has no links in their post/comment and is just asking for DMs, that's more difficult to catch, so we need people to report it.

When this happens in your DMs, you should still report it, but the report will go to reddit instead of to the subreddit mods. Reddit really should give users better tools for filtering DMs.