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?"
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?
"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.
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.
In other words, assholes like you commit fraud, so everybody else should just live with it.
Besides, if you are the real Ehrich Weiss, even if your victim got you thrown in jail you would just break out.
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!
Mine too!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
But you're defrauding the people who think that your dating site actually has real members.
It's nice to see how warped a crook's mind is.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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