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?"
"I was ego-surfing the other day, and was surprised to discover that I was listed as a member of the an on-line dating service.
So, did you get any hits?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It would be nice if the author explained why he thinks that everybody should have a web presence. I don't buy it. I don't have a web presence at all (none of that Myspace/Facebook crap-ola), and I've been pretty successful in staying off the radar that way.
I don't respond to AC's.
I've been caught by my girlfriend... she received a message on an online dating service (WTF!!!) from a guy searching for a Fu** friend. This guy was *ME*. Someone stole my picture off Facebook, and sent it to my girlfriend pretending *HE* was *ME*. Maybe I should just deactivate my Facebook account if I want to keep my girlfriend. Or maybe I should prevent her from having an account on an online dating service!
> Do Slashdotters have any better ideas?
File libel lawsuits.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
the ideas I've come up with for fighting this kind of reputation scam seem fairly weak.
How about people not believing everything they hear from a source they know nothing about? There's no general solution to the problem of people spreading unfounded rumors other than people being more skeptical of new untested information sources. This will take time as people come to realize that "the internet" isn't a single source of information.
AccountKiller
What makes you think this is some type of scam, and not merely somebody with the same name as you?
No, just because you have an unusual name, it doesn't mean you are the only one with it. I have a very unusual name too. I've never even met anybody with the same surname that wasn't a member of my immediate family. I've googled my own name; I'm the only person with my name that has a web presence. But when a website was launched to check how unique your name is, I discovered that there are at least two other people with my name in my country alone. If I registered on a dating site, those two people would probably feel the same about me.
Unless there's something actually linking you personally to this site, like a photo or bio, I don't see any basis for calling this a scam. Your name is not unique enough to be your property.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I strongly disagree with that conclusion. There are already too many people with cringe-worthy web presences. Besides, most reasonable people know better than to believe everything they read.
Caveat Utilitor
My name is fairly common (last name is Miller) - there's roughly 4 of us in the company I work for (out of 95k employees), and there's about forty of me w/ the same first/last name combo (with various differences in middle names and etc.) in the metro area phone book.
It's not just online, either - I remember awhile when some idiot collection agency kept bugging me over some other guy's debt, because we happened to share the same first/last name combo. I tried to tell them this repeatedly, then finally out of frustration told 'em: "see you in court, idiot!" It never came to fruition, and my credit record never reflected it *shrug*
I guess that's why I never really worried if I see my name online - chances are it's not me anyway.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Hmmm. Hot Jewish single guy on one hand or accepting the Jesus as my Lord and Savior? Sigh.
I have to say, I don't understand how this situation is a dilemma, never mind the whole idea that actually talking to people about who they are -- rather than attempting to search them out on the internet* -- is fundamental to building relationships
So, while JLove probably is being pretty underhanded in making up members, I don't think it can really be blamed for this potential couple's failure to actualize.
--sabre86
*The Internet, TM. Where everything is true!
I got an friend invite on Myspace from my wife... who has an pretty unique first name. She has never had an myspace, but I have encouraged her to create one only for the purpose of reuniting with old real life friends. So I click on it thinking she finally created one... Only to find some really nice looking nekkid blond (not my wife).
I showed it too her, she was not amused, but I found it hysterical.
"I was ego-surfing the other day ..."
My wife's mother, who died back in 2002, looked up her own name soon after she discovered search sites. She found, to her delight, that her rather rare name was the stage name of a porn star, and there was a .com site based on that name. For the rest of her life, she was constantly telling people to check out her web site.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I know this might be a long shot, but if people really believe all they see when they google your name on google, how about taking advantage of that? After I had googled my own name, I realised how lucky I am because what you find is basically tech reviews done by me and some old karate scoreboards with me even winning some medals. Putting some effort in it, I could probably make it look like I am also doing third wold humanitarian work, help the poor, fight cancer etc. That would probably fly well with all nosy employers and possible future employers that like to google people. And if someoene asks, you could either stick with the story or dismiss it as a coincidence because someone shares your name. For the record, I do have a name that is most likely unique.
Dvorak on Doomtech
* Bots are scraping names off the web
* Scammers use those names to do bad things
* Therefore, you should put your name on the web
That seems like a bad syllogism. I'm not saying the conclusion (that you need a strong web presence) is wrong. I'm just saying that if you're going to make a counter-intuitive conclusion, you need to connect the dots. You know, for us dumb guys.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I was ego-surfing the other day, and was surprised to discover that I was listed as a member of the an on-line dating service.
I don't see anything on the jLove Curt Monash page that demonstrates that it's the guy who submitted this article. Surely there's more than one "Curt Monash" in the world?
If the site had scraped your Web site URL, e-mail address, or some other personal identifier that made the page look more "authentic", then there's a scam and a real privacy issue for us to be concerned about. If some computer is just putting together combinations of first and last names and building pages with no further personally identifiable information, that's spam for Google to worry about, not a scam or a privacy infringement for us to worry about.
at least one had lost interest in a guy because he appeared to be a member
The world is full of idiots. Just because someone's NAME (which is far from unique) is on a dating site, they lost interest? I'd say the guy had a lucky escape!
If there's any problem here, it's the Western naming convention that allows thousands of people to end up with the same name. Perhaps we should all become known by our e-mail addresses or IM screennames in the future to avoid this.
I got a notice that I had signed up for "WeeWorld" which appears to be a MySpace type site with avatars or something. Honestly, I wasn't really interested in the site beyond the fact that, somehow, "I" was now a member. Not only that, but "I" apparently had already communicated with some of "my" friends on there. I quickly assessed the situation and determined that nothing in my e-mail account indicated any hacking there. In fact, the site didn't have any sort of e-mail confirmation. It just took an e-mail address, assumed that the person was giving their real address, and then sent e-mails to that user notifying them whenever someone sent them a message.
So it looked like someone just decided to use my e-mail address in the "e-mail address" line when they signed up. Since the service nicely sent me "my" password when "I" signed up, I used it to log in. Then, I decided to lock "other me" out, so I changed the password. Then I changed the name on the account to "DON'T USE E-MAIL ADDYS THAT AREN'T YOURS" (so all of "other me's" friends would see what he did). Next, I contacted WeeWorld to report the abuse. They offered to close the account. I waited for a few days in the hopes that "other me" would realize that he was now locked out of his profile and had his name changed. Then I had them close the account.
Part of me was satisfied that, perhaps, he learned his lesson. Of course, another part of me realizes that he probably just signed up again with someone else's e-mail address. A very simple e-mail confirmation would stop abuses like this from happening. Sure, an abuser could use a hacked into e-mail account, but it is a simple action that raises the bar above most of the would-be abusers' heads.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
She found, to her delight, that her rather rare name was the stage name of a porn star
Your mother-in-law was Emily Tubgirl?!
Trolling is a art,
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.
Change your name to something more unique (try to throw in a few numbers).
Leave the country. Try for one of those places without computers. Solitary islands work best.
Have some reconstructive surgery. It is important that your face is altered, but if other parts of your body need work, well, that's your call.
Buy a big fluffy white cat. Not optional.
Design a plan... to take over the world...
Originally I was the only person who showed up in search results with my name. Unfortunately, that has changed. I'm very curious how many would-be dates have not happened because of this Google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=jeffrey+ferland
SIG: HUP
I run a dating site and profile generation is a necessity. You see, in order to get people to join a dating site, you have to have people who already joined the dating site to attract them; it's a catch-22 that we cannot avoid. Usually the fake profiles have an expiration date of 1 year so after that the accounts just die off but regardless, your name isn't protected by any laws and can be used in works of fiction without your approval. Just get over it cause I've got some guy using my real name in a gospel band and as sickening as I find that, I don't care as I have better things to worry about.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Nope, most of them aren't "name scraping" as suggested; they're generating the name pairs from a huge list of first names, a huge list of last names and typically a huge list of cities and states. Also what you suggest could very well count as slander/libel since saying that someone with name X is a member at your dating site is not the same as saying someone with name X is a sex offender.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Hopefully your name isn't listed on http://dontdatehimgirl.com/
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
The US in general seems to have a big problem with mistaking names for identities, hence "no-fly lists" and other such idiocies. The solution here is to spread the meme that a name is not an identity, and you should make no assumptions if you see someone's name in an unfamiliar context.
Mine too!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Sure, a lot of people aren't very good with writing or page layout, and wind up with gaudy, ugly web "presences". But I *also* put a lot of that blame on some of the "social networking" sites that most people turn to these days to create their pages.
I consider MySpace the biggest contributor to the problem. They may be VERY well known, but it seems like it's difficult NOT to create a cluttered mess out of your profile there! Even small businesses and rock bands trying to use them for some free publicity manage to create a collage of slop, 99% of the time.
By contrast, the older (and less "hip") competitor, Friendster, tends to build clean, neat pages, even when you fill out their forms with a considerable amount of info about yourself.
But the concept itself seems sound to me. If you don't want people running across others (real or fake) with your same name, and mistaking them for you - you need to put your OWN info out there for them to find. At least that way, it's clear when they do a search, that there's more than one possibility for which one is you.
I'm sure this is the question everyone wants to ask: What was your mother-in-law's name?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
In Vernor Vinge's near-future novel Rainbows End, an anarchist group gets fed up with trying to sort out what information about people is correct or not.
Their solution is to flood the net with false information about everyone, making the net a useless resource for gossip.
Available free and legal online:
http://vrinimi.org/rainbowsend.html
Here are some tips:
1. For starters, unless you signed up, your photograph is intellectual property owned by the person who took the photo. They can contact the site owner(s) and demand it be taken down. Most of the scan sites register with godaddy.com as it makes the true owner blind so I doubt you'd actually be able to find the real owner and hold them legally accountable.
2. If you have suffered some kind of damages or embarrassment (example - argument with your spouse), you can actually start a legal action in your own jurisdiction and sue the legal owner. In lack of the legal entities real identification, you can sue domain name holder proxy and force them to respond in your legal jurisdiction. It makes it a big advantage for you as they will have to contract out responses to your claims to a legal firm in your area.
3. Immediately let the site owner know (and document) that you are not okay with your name and photo being used. Give them a reasonable amount of time to bring it down before commencing legal action.
Now on to the not just legal stuff:
1. Find out who they are and show up at their doorstep. For example, there was a guy who regularly spammed me in Vancouyer, claiming it was his right. I stalked him and showed up at a user group meeting and basically stood in front of him asking him to chose one of two sentences to say. His choices were "I will never spam you again" or "please stop beating my head in with a chair". He got the message. I am going to China later this year to confront someone else while there on normal business. Scaring the shit out of someone works well when they make the connection that they cannot just do shit online with no consequence.
2. Point you profile at his competition.(if you have access)
3. Find out who hosts his site and make it very uncomfortable for them to continue doing so. Make it clear that you have been in touch with authorities and will be demanding an audit of their sites they serve.
4. Disrupt their business model.
Your best bet is probably to ignore it completely though as all of these will take you much more time than it will be worth. At the end of the day they have probably been sneaky enough to get around the rules in a way that will require you to pay money, spend time chasing a ghost.
Good luck.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
Copycat.
I wonder how they feel about that once they glance at those terms & conditions and the like, dispute resolving, etc.
At least it shows your character - what's that you said to the other AC poster? "Shows real backbone."? Seems like you have none.
To top that off: Really, how many more times are you going to mention that FISA thing? You don't know what I, or any of the others you've used that line on, have done with regards to that matter. Nor does it matter what we have or have not done. You don't tell a blind person to suck it up 'cos at least they're not paraplegic, and tell the paraplegic to quit whining because at least they're not dying of necrotizing fasciitis. So, honestly, stop trying to distract people from your practices and your clear refusal to be open and honest about it - despite vehemently stating that you do not believe you did anything wrong whatsoever - by chanting 'FISA' every time.
While we -do- know, from your own admission, that:
- you have lied and deceived
- that you think there's nothing wrong with that
- that you refuse to be open and honest about it (and no, a disclaimer stating that profile data may not actually be truthful doesn't convey "hundreds of the profiles on this site are fake and created by us to lure in new members")
- that you refuse to be open and honest about it to your members now, as per your parent reply
- that you will grasp at straws to try and either take attention away from you or instill some form of misguided guilt upon others for allegedly not paying attention to bigger issues; completely baseless accusations at best
With your only defense being:
- everybody does it (I'm sure your mother's asked you the "If everybody jumps into [some body of liquid], you will too?")
- it's too hard to get a dating site off the ground without doing so (worst sob story on slashdot I've read in a while)
Although I'll agree with you that you are, at least by legal definition, quite likely not defrauding anybody*, I'll agree with the other AC and say that yes, you are indeed, a .. well, you get the idea.
* although collecting their profile data based on the premise that there will be hundreds of profiles for them to scour through, knowing that a portion of those are (or were) completely made-up, may actually be fraud. IANAL. Neither are you.
I do commend you on making your site completely free, however; and I'm sure we seem rather thankless (not that most of us would have anything to thank for, not living in Kentucky and all). However, I do think most of us applaud your free site - we're just not a great fan of the business practice you used to start it up.. but moreover, we're not a great fan of not being honest about it to your members *now*. You were honest about it to us, the Slashdot crowd, so why not to them? As you said, you're not making any money off of the service - you're probably just spending money on it (hosting, etc.). So what do you have to lose?
Well, how does that help?
Let's say I'm named Joe Random and even register www.joerandom.com, blog under that name on a site or two, I'm on Twitter under that name, on Slashdot, etc. Basically that I make myself very visible on the net. Ok.
Now suppose someone puts my name on a few dating sites, posts other crap in my name, maybe even make a few posts on usenet groups (which by now are fully searchable) in my name. Maybe send some spam in my name too. So someone googling for me, finds those too.
How's my already having a web presence prevent the damage there? How's my blogging, which would probably be along the same lines of "I'm a disillusioned programmer who's seen far too many incompetents" and "look how smart I can sound about <random topic>" as on Slashdot, going to prevent my SO getting horrified by finding my name (faked) on Adult Friend Finder or the like? Do you think she'll go, basically, "nah, he can't possibly be interested in blogging about PHBs _and_ in fucking other women, at the same time. No one has room in his head for both," or what? :P
Or maybe she'll think, "nah, if he were looking for other women, he'd put it on the front of his web page that he told me about, instead of going through those sites." :P
It seems to me that even if my existing web presence spells out exactly what I believe and do, on any given topic (which is already way too much effort, _and_ forfeiting any privacy I might enjoy), how many people do you think it would prevent from jumping to conclusions anyway, when such an account generated by someone else seems "proof" to the contrary? E.g., let's say I put in big bold letters on my web site that I'm strictly monogamous and love my SO. Then someone finds my name (faked) on Adult Friend Finder or whatnot. Want to bet that more than half will bet that the text on my official web site is just a bullshit smokescreen, and the faked one is the real me unveiled?
So it seems to me like having my own web presence, by itself, really wouldn't do that much.
Maybe if I spent time googling for myself, and posting a lengthy disclaimer for every such occurence... well, it might do a little, but at the expense of (A) more effort than I'm arsed to do, and (B) sounding like an insecure sack of complexes, who's probably having the ego-google on auto-refresh just to see what anyone might ever say about him. Plus, once a couple of people get the B impression, then they can DDOS me by just posting enough crap everywhere in my name to fill all my free time and then some.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.