Scamming Reality

Roger Hislop

You’ve all heard of astroturfing, right? A carefully and methodically executed but entirely fake grass-roots campaign. Well, thanks to the power of the Global Interweb, there’s something even more noxious. Let’s call it scamwashing.

It’s a ruthlessly and painstakingly contrived fake Web discourse on a topic to create the impression that a product or company is anything other than a scam. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of trouble – someone has to come up with a scam product, and then create an enormous wealth of material around it, disseminate it extremely widely, then seed innumerable online sites with references and fake discussions, “independent” reviews and spontaneous endorsements from the 'man in the street'. All of this with a beady eye on Google search rankings, so that when someone types the scam product into that all-knowing search box, they get reams of seemingly genuine mentions.

Want an example? Check out Water4Gas. You’ll see floods of search hits – the product’s own website, numerous similar sites, postings on forums, “news” articles on article distribution sites. Many are simple ads, more are bogus “man in the street” posts (“Anyone hear about this thing? What’s this water4gas thing? Does it work? Etc, etc, etc, etc.), mostly from suspiciously recently registered forum users. And this kind of scamwashing takes time. Someone has to create a user login, and start posting – replying to posts, arguing about the merits of the posts, arguing with people that label it a scam, throwing in bogus independent references, generally muddying the waters with bogus information -- and dragging in any number of flame-bait bait (check here, here).

The scamwasher targets popular information portals like ask.com or answers.com, user groups of related products and specialist forums. Experienced, well-informed forum members initially casually dismiss the scam, but are sucked into arguments about the claims, eventually being worn down to impotent teeth-grinding by the relentless barrage of pseudo-science, untested claims and red herrings.

But it doesn’t stop there… the clever scamwasher does a separate campaign targeting searches on the scam… Google “water4gas scam”, and almost all the first few pages of hits are fake scam reports – muddying the water further by positioning sceptics that call the scam out as having “not having actually tested it”, as being “tools of the industry”, as “closed minded”, and even creating confusion about what a “scam” is.

If you’ve been around the seedy underbelly of the Internet for a while, you will instantly smell a scam (many of the experienced posters on the forums clearly do), but the scamwasher is harder to pin down than a shaved Vaseline-smeared cat. And so they manage to hoodwink enough people to make the time and effort they expend worth it.

It’s a slightly scary business, because scamwashers are so good at it. They now exactly how to game the search engines, they are fearsomely good at rhetoric and misdirection, and they ruthlessly manipulate the inherent weakness of “independent” review sites.

So just as botnet masters and malware writers started engaging in their nefarious activities for kicks, and then to make some cash, and now use them as a business platform to rent out to other shady operations, so these scamwashers could become “reality for hire” merchants that can play havoc with a brand, undermining its SEO activities and online reputation overnight in a flood of manufactured online reality.

Will it happen? Maybe, maybe not. But the power of the Internet has so far demonstrated a unique ability to bring out the worst in dodgy people. Combine that with the ability to outsource manpower intensive techniques to virtual teams in poor countries, and the possibility becomes rather too real.

Just another day on the World Wild West.

(PS -- and because karma lives in bittorrents, some kindly souls banged up the water4gas ebook on torrentreactor