How to Fight Name Scraping Scammers?

CurtMonash writes "I was ego-surfing the other day, and was surprised to discover that I was listed as a member of an on-line dating service. It turns out these scamsters generate web pages for lots of (FirstName, LastName) combos, each claiming that the named individual is a member of their service. I posted about this, and discovered other people were upset, at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member, and so on. I've since followed up with lessons learned, a big one being that everybody should have a visible web presence. But frankly, the ideas I've come up with for fighting this kind of reputation scam seem fairly weak. Do Slashdotters have any better ideas?"

Comments

Re:You caught a wave!

[Zero__Kelvin]

How the hell is this off topic? The guy erroneosly concluded that "his" name was being used, as if there couldn't possibly be anyone else with "his" name. His answer, in case it was too hard to figure out (clearly it was for someone) is: don't be surprised to discover that someone else also has your name"

If only my .sig wasn't so appropriate (it seems they change dynamically now rather than being a permanent part of the post like the old days, so I'm including it in the actual post for archival purposes. Please, let us not see some moron come along and mark this post redundant the way the other moron marked my parent post "off topic".)
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The answer is obvious; understanding and addressing the question is going to take a while, though ...

Re:Was it really you, or just "your" name?

[ehrichweiss]

So why haven't you grabbed your followers and taken them to heaven, Jesus?