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?"
Since I don't get revenue from the site, tell me how I do advertising. Since it's for local people only, tell me how I do that on the internet. You see, you don't know as much about the business as I do. I'm running it for fun but there are certain evils you have to embrace. Sad fact but it's true. And for the record, the disclaimer that everyone agrees to states that the information provided may not be legit.
What most of you are missing is the fact that people who run dating sites are at more disadvantages than you could ever imagine. Every spammer on the planet is trying to get an account on your site so they can send adultfiendfinder(misspelled on purpose) or other dating affiliate spam to your members, or the ED spammers, or the "did I tell you about this great site" spammers. So we have to keep them out, attract new people, deal with administration, debug the software and add features; most of the time without the first dollar entering your pocket for over a year(I've run mine for over 5 years and it's been completely free). So I really couldn't care less how you people feel about it until you've been in our shoes for a while because it's a lot harder than running any other website; I administrate about 100 and the dating website eats more time that the rest combined.
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No, they are NOT scams(your definition doesn't fit the dictionary..you just don't like the practice..you're allowed to say that instead of using sensationalism to boost your rep here) AND to address your last point, the only time that people ever filed for fraud against a for-pay site was when those sites used employees to send email from fake profiles to string people along as paying customers. Read that bold part over and over and you'll understand that THAT is a scam.
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Yet, 1) I don't charge so I'm not "selling" jack shit, 2) lots of dating sites have profiles that people sign up for and forget about sooo how does one tell the difference? Answer: you can't, and as long as those profiles aren't being used to string along paying customers(of which I have ZERO) then there is no scam, there is no fraud.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Sorry, you fail. The trickery would only apply if those fake profiles were sending email to keep paying members around. That is a fact. You don't know enough about the business to be able to know the ins-and-outs of why that's the case but suffice to say your ignorance is showing.
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It's not a scam because I'm not using it to get people to pay for the service; it's used to make the site look more populated to get people to sign up for free profiles(there are no premium profiles on my site). And, regarding the sites that do charge, they are selling the services attached, not the profiles; you see, forums, various forms of text/audio/video chat, image upload service, blogs, etc. are all legit services and business models the last time I checked so what were you saying again? You're talking about a business that you know nothing about. You know, like most clueless people that use sensationalist terms like "scam" for things they don't feel is right. You're fine to feel that way but calling it a scam is disingenuous and shows your limited view of the deal. OR, you could be forced to watch eharmony match.com commercials for the rest of your life, it's not like THEY have been brought up on REAL charges of fraud or other truly questionable practices..
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which is totally what she said