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?"
But when a website was launched to check how unique your name is [yournotme.com]
Is anybody else horrified by that domain name?
[/grammarnazi]
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
You see, in order to get people to join a dating site, you have to fradulantly claim to have people who already joined the dating site to attract them; it's a catch-22 that we cannot avoid.
There, fixed that.
And I'll bet those profiles sound really good and new members wonder why they can't ever get hooked up with the fake profiles.
Smells like scam to me.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
If your girlfriend has an account at a dating service, you don't have a girlfriend, you have a fuckbuddy. Nothing wrong with that, just be sure to use a condom.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest