Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Little of column A, little of column B.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
and discovered other people were upset, at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member,
Well, specifically, he found a blog entry from someone else, saying:
I went back, caught his name and cyberstalked him. I found out he was an investor. I found out that he was a runner. And soon enough, I found him on a singles page called "Jlove.com," a website for Jewish singles.
So she believes everything she reads online, she assumes that just because the name matches it's the right person and she makes no effort to speak to him face to face. Yeah. Just the kind of woman I'm interested in getting to know.
I think the guy she was cyberstalking had a lucky escape.
That's interesting. The site has been around for a while, and it's based on electoral roll data from the year 2000. These genealogy people seem to think that it's legit, if a little inaccurate, giving numbers in the same vicinity as other sources. It's certainly given consistent results over the years. This is a similar service for USA data, and it gives similar results (rare names give low numbers, common names give high numbers).
You didn't put an asterisk in the first name field did you? You don't have to use a wildcard, you just leave the field blank. If you use an asterisk, it assumes it's part of the name, and gives you zero results.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
hehe, rest assured: the site is also reachable at: http://www.yourenotme.com/, but I guess the gpp chose to use the more common URL for the site!
No, it's fraud, asshole: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fraud Just because it's not legal fraud doesn't mean it's not fraud. Deceit for profit -- seems pretty cut and dry to me.
Quit trying to defend unethical actions by simply claiming what you do isn't illegal. It can still be disgusting and wrong.