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?"
You had the best mom-in-law ever! You should have told your workmates about her too... "My mom-in-law's so awesome she's even got her own website - go look it up."
As for the porn star naming thing... My wife's name is quite unique (being a made up combination of two other names) but there was already a porn star using that name about 6 years ago. I think it's tough to find a name that hasn't been used at some point for that purpose.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
My beloved dead uncle was named Mortimer Onlyoneontheplanet, you insensitive clod!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sorry, that's not how it works. For one, they don't pay me a dollar; not a dime in 5 years. Most for-pay sites offer a free limited membership where you can determine whether you think that there are people you are interested in before you pay; you should avoid those that don't or be an informed consumer if you do. At what point did it become that the consumer lost responsibility to check into things like this?
I'll state it again. REAL fraud is when sites like match.com and the like got busted for having employees string paying customers along by sending them email from fake profiles. You may not like the practice of generated profiles but there are uses that you aren't going to grasp since you're hellbent outta shape trying to prove it's a scam because you didn't get to fuck that hottie on adultfiendfinder or what-have-you.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0