On June 19, I discovered a new online scam (perpetrated by a dating service called JLove) and posted about it on Text Technologies. On July 7 I also posted about it here on A World of Bytes. It was Slashdotted the same day. On July 9 JLove took down the offending pages -- which numbered in the 10s of 1000s at least.
Admittedly, this was an easy case. The JLove dating service business was probably floundering. The pages themselves were autogenerated in a simple way and had a variety of rough edges. So the overall investment JLove walked away from probably isn't much.
Indeed, that's a standard practice of "black hat" SEOs -- build a huge number of scummy websites via simple automation, milk them for as long as possible (which often is only a few days), then walk away. There isn't much that can be done about that until online advertising networks and affiliate marketers get good at violating the privacy of their less scrupulous advertisers. But more enduring businesses -- as JLove hoped and perhaps still hopes to be -- can be made to regret sleazy behavior.
That's nice to know.
Well done, everybody!!
Curt Monash is a leading analyst of and strategic advisor to the software industry. Praised by Lawrence J. Ellison for his "unmatched insight into technology and marketplace trends," Curt was the software/services industry's #1 ranked stock analyst while at PaineWebber, Inc., where he served as a First Vice President until 1987. He subsequently co-founded Evernet, Inc., a $40 million networking systems integrator. Since 1990, he has owned and operated Monash Research, an analysis and advisory firm covering software-intensive sectors of the technology industry. In that period he also has been co-founder, president, or chairman of several other technology startups.
Curt has served as a strategic advisor to many well-known firms, including Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, AOL, CA, and Netezza. Curt earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (Game Theory) from Harvard University. He has held faculty positions in mathematics, economics and public policy at Harvard, Yale, and Suffolk universities.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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