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I googled "wordofmouth.com + scam" and found the
following on a bulletin board from the UK somewhere in cyberspace.
Yvonne Cunnington
______________________________________________________________________________
www.word-of-mouth.scam spam bastards! - posted Monday 21st April 2003
Today I received an email from a website claiming that "a report has just
been submitted about the person or persons associated with this email address",
with the general implication being that someone had something bad to tell the
world about me.
I can't believe a normally spam-savvy user like myself
was suckered into even checking this one out, but I was intrigued, partly
because they were using a very very old email address for me from 1996 - I've
had four major ones since then (buy a more recent spamming database, guys!) -
but also because I actually fell for their psychological trick of playing on
everyone's natural fear and suspicion that someone, somewhere, hates them and
wants to make their life difficult.
I think the biggest clue that gives
them away is that they don't include your name on the page. SURELY if someone
wanted to file a report to catch up with you and cause problems for you further
down the line, they would at least put your name on it!!
As much as it
is possible for me to be (hand on heart) I try to be one of the nicest, most
up-front and honest people you could hope to meet. Sure I make mistakes (like
anyone else does) but I would guess that there really aren't many people around
who seriously don't like me.
The few that I do know of (two
ex-girlfriends, and somebody who lent me something quite important that I lost -
but have now found and am waiting to return to them!!) all have much more recent
email addresses for me, and would have used them. (They don't even *know* my old
email address!)
The idea that someone I've had any dealings with "in the
last year" would be using a seven year old, long forgotten email address seems a
little strange, no?
The fact that I've hardly done anything much in the
last year (thanks to being up to my eyeballs in my final year of university)
also makes me suspicious - if I've really pissed someone off so much, why didn't
they file a report sooner?
The bullshit detector was in full swing, so I
Googled, and found that other people had received similar emails, and were
naturally quite worried about them. After reading a few pages on this, it seems
that this is obviously a scam in an attempt to get you to pay for information
about you, which of course, they don't have. They obviously want to scare you,
take your money (you have to pay to contact the person who "filed the report"),
and run with it.
This is 100% illegal - certainly in the UK, the 1979
data protection act means that you are entitled to have full access to any data
that is stored about you, and that any such stored data must be correct, and
only used for the declared purpose it was collected for. People cannot store
information about you without your consent - it is ILLEGAL. If they have
information about you, you are entitled to know exactly what they have, and YOU
DO NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT, not a single penny.
I am certain that data
protection acts exist in almost every country these days - no doubt the data
protection laws in force in the USA are even heftier in legislation than the
laws that exist in the UK. So, in conclusion, all I have to say is that this is
undoubtedly an illegal, immoral scam, and that whoever is responsible for it
thoroughly deserves to have their fingernails pulled out with pliers and their
genitals skewered and slowly roasted over an open fire. Wishful thinking aside,
it shouldn't be long before someone files a class action or other lawsuit
against this website. How about for "psychological trauma" for
starters?
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