Predatorswatch.com UPDATE!

#Scams #predatorswatch.com  

So remember earlier this year? I didn’t either until I saw my calendar this morning. God damn time files by!  

Anyway I was going through some old files, doing some organization to get the blog up and running again and I noticed my blogs from earlier this year about predatorswatch.com.

For those who don’t know, predatorswatch.com was a scam site that would create fake personal ads on websites like craigslist.com and would take responding male’s information and post it online. The victim who was unfortunate enough to reply to these fake sex ads would receive an email explaining to them that they are on a website that lists known sexual predators and exhibits the information publicly.

In order to get the information taken off this bogus site, you had to pay the guy $99.95. The reason the owners felt this payment was necessary was listed in the FAQ section of the website. It explained that it was needed to pay the developers for their time and service to remove the information.

They were tricky bastards, because also in their FAQ they mention US law which protected them. You see, in no way can you link the people who post the fake ads to the owners of the bogus website. And the owners of the website don’t post this information themselves, they allow any Joe Shmo to post information about anyone they please, just as long as they don’t use any copyrighted photos. The US law which protects them basically says that the owner of a website cannot be held responsible for the content their users post. And since the owners posted this on their site, and everyone else but them is posting this bogus information, they cannot be held liable.

Example: I use Blogger.com to host this blog. Blogger.com is not held responsible if you are offended at the stuff I say on my blog. If I am breaking the TOS then Blogger.com can delete my profile. But other than that they can not be held liable for the crazy shit I talk about in this blog.

For extra protections, the owners even used a service called “domain privacy”. That’s where you pay a third party to pretend to be the owner of the site, when in fact they really have no affiliation with the site other than providing you with privacy. So yeah, these guys had their asses covered.

Well I checked out the website and it is gone! In fact Wiki-Warnings.com is also down! This was done because of several entities from what I hear, but I’m still not clear on who or what was behind the closing of these two sites. But who cares right?

But hey folks, watch your back out there. I’m sure this set back isn’t going to stop the owners of these sites, or any other scum bag who wants to do the same thing from doing it again.