International Law

What is the Con Here?

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I will walk you through how these online scams work on Facebook and other social networks - the mechanics of how the money is made, some of the people involved, and who is actually clicking on ads. If you're reading this article, there is a good chance that you are not the type of person actually clicking on these spam ads, but are you curious as to who actually is?

This is from Techcrunch, Dennis Yu confessing to using deceptive marketing tactics to make money from advanced phishing techniques.

I found the article moderately interesting.  Social engineering techniques mixed with brute force and opt out deceptive programs will make you a bunch of money.  So will counterfeiting.  Yu's article was moderately interesting, partly for the fact that he did not seem to want to identify the genesis of the Facebook phishing tricks. Perhaps he doesn't know.

Where the story got interesting was with Jeremy Sdhoemaker's uncharacteristically long and articulate complaint against Dennis Yu as a confidence man.  Mr. Schoemaker is a marketeer who made money as the result of the early and lax regulations regarding ringtone offers - he was a very successful affiliate, or third party reseller, of ringtone offers.  Many of these ringtone offers had deceptive marketing terms associated with them - but, Mr. Schoemaker was not responsible for these terms.  There is no suggestion that Mr. Schoemaker was anything other than a clever online affiliate marketeer.

Now oddly, for a man who likes to speak his mind, Mr. Schoemaker's complaint against Dennis Yu was simply that Yu had conned him - not that any of Yu's phishing techniques were false.  Indeed, Mr. Schoemaker outs himself as the target of Yu's complaint:

"One of the largest Facebook advertisers (I'm not going to out you, but you know who you are) employs this technique to this day, using a white-listed account.

Our supposition is that it makes too much money for Facebook to stop him. Believe me, we have brought this to Facebook's attention on several occasions.

Here's what this fellow does--he submits tame ads for approval, and once approved, redirects the url to the spammy page. To be fair, players like Google AdWords have had years more experience in this game to close such loopholes."

Nobody would have known that Mr. Schoemaker was Yu's target but for Mr. Schoemaker's post.

Now, here is what I don't understand.  Why is Mr. Schoemaker, and others, making such a big deal out Yu being a confidence man, how they were scammed, instead of focusing on how to prevent the phishing techniques?  Is there some reason Mr. Schoemaker wishes us to focus on the messenger and not the message?  

(See also the comments on Mr. Schoemaker on Paul Schlegel's blog on Work at Home Truth.)

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on November 17, 2009 (boomark / email).