4 ms·

"TrustedPayday has gobbled up Mary’s information and is alerting other sites, with names like clicks.cashadvance.com. Somewhere in the machinery that processes

"TrustedPayday has gobbled up Mary’s information and is alerting other sites, with names like clicks.cashadvance.com. Somewhere in the machinery that processes payday loan applications, decisions are being made. In just a few minutes, loan offers begin falling into Mary’s inbox. We’ve just watched Mary’s identity get turned into profit before she’s even taken out a loan." Is there a way to fight fishing with spam? Perhaps if the loan request market was saturated with enough fake requests, the price for leads would fall as leads would become increasingly unreliable and time-wasting for the fishers. Margins would decrease for the sites who sell the loan request information, as their info becomes less and less reliable (valuable). Margins would decrease for the scammers as they invest more time and money in due diligence and verification of the loan requests. The irony of the situation would be priceless. Could spam be the way to fight scams?

srazzaque 13y ago
In theory I think this would work. However, the risk is that Lead Flash cannot be linked to any of the illegal activity that happens a few points after initial sale of the leads. So they'd probably have grounds for legal recourse against such activity.
- roymurdock 13y ago
  Perhaps you are right. It seems like the environment is murky enough that a sufficiently motivated individual (or organization) with Mike's drive and skill set could set up a fake identity dumping program while avoiding detection, just as scammers can mask their activities. There would be the inevitable question of incentives: Who benefits from this service and who pays for the service? Mike tracks these guys down (unsuccessfully) in his free time, as a hobby. His only reward is the feeling of justice he gets from cornering a scammer and making him squirm. There is no data to support this in the article, but it seems as if the majority of the scamming targets lower-income, misinformed, and vulnerable people. So it would make sense that the taxpayers would pay to rectify this situation and rid the general public of this predatory nuisance. The failure here is with the government - they have the resources and the incentive to fix this situation. Seems kind of ass-backwards that our legal system would protect a company such as Lead Flash. But hey, capitalism isn't perfect is it?

srazzaque 13y ago

In theory I think this would work. However, the risk is that Lead Flash cannot be linked to any of the illegal activity that happens a few points after initial sale of the leads. So they'd probably have grounds for legal recourse against such activity.

roymurdock 13y ago
Perhaps you are right. It seems like the environment is murky enough that a sufficiently motivated individual (or organization) with Mike's drive and skill set could set up a fake identity dumping program while avoiding detection, just as scammers can mask their activities. There would be the inevitable question of incentives: Who benefits from this service and who pays for the service? Mike tracks these guys down (unsuccessfully) in his free time, as a hobby. His only reward is the feeling of justice he gets from cornering a scammer and making him squirm. There is no data to support this in the article, but it seems as if the majority of the scamming targets lower-income, misinformed, and vulnerable people. So it would make sense that the taxpayers would pay to rectify this situation and rid the general public of this predatory nuisance. The failure here is with the government - they have the resources and the incentive to fix this situation. Seems kind of ass-backwards that our legal system would protect a company such as Lead Flash. But hey, capitalism isn't perfect is it?