Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Nationwide Domain Name/Yard Sign Conspiracy

Posted by timothy on from the tragically-yes-I'm-single dept.

robertjmoore writes "Everywhere I go lately, I see these lawn signs that say "Single?" and then give a URL with my town's name in it. Being a huge business intelligence geek with too much time on my hands, I decided to track down who was behind them and wound up uncovering ten thousand domain names, a massively coordinated and well-funded guerilla marketing machine, and the $45 Million revenue business hiding behind it all. Hot off the presses, these are my findings."

3 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. My garbage can is full of these signs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These signs appear in my neighborhood about once a week in the wee hours of Monday morning. I usually remove about 10 of these signs from my neighborhood by 8:30 am. To date I have disposed of about 250 yard signs. It is illegal to post the yard signs on my property and my fellow home owners property without our permission. Thanks to your research our lawyers will be able to send letters to the proper people now.

  2. BTW, those signs are illegal by sootman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you hate them as much as I do, visit this site for tips and contact your local code enforcement office.

    Legally, they are no different from litter. If you don't have a permit to leave something in a public place, it's nothing but trash. That said, the neanderthal assholes who post them might not be aware of that* and almost certainly won't be happy if they catch you taking them down, legally right or not, so be careful when picking up trash.

    * and I'm sure the assholes who SELL the signs never mention it, either.

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
  3. Re:Well done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was going to bitch about the submitter advertising his company in the summary but after reading the article, I say that he has earned it. I didn't much care about this company but the whole detective process was quite fascinating.

    Agreed.

    What I'd like to see next is this guy taking out the "Crazy Fox" scam. Late-night TV commercials with the same video, namely a poorly-rendered CGI fox, talking about what an awesome home-based-business... yadda yadda yadda. The commercials are identical, except for a random number prefixed or suffixed to the domain name containing the string "crazyfox".

    It's obviously a pyramid scheme of some sort, but the mechanism of spamvertizing it is ultimately the same as that employed by the "randomaffiliatename"{singles|dating}.com scam. The only difference is that it uses TV commercials (which are probably the "thing" being "sold" by the people at the top of the pyramid) instead of lawn signs.