It’s just amazing what some people will do for attention.
Scott Allen, of The Virtual Handshake and Entrepreneur.com fame (he blogs for http://entrepreneur.about.com) has been joe jobbed! A Joe Job, as defined by Wikipedia, is “an incident of spamming designed to tarnish the reputation of an innocent third party.”
What they’ve done with Scott is taken his name and email addressed and spammed the hell out of a lot of blogs… some of which hadn’t heard of him. They’ve sometimes inserted his telephone number, and other times used his wife’s name.
Thankfully, he’s taken some sage advice and reported the incidence(s) he’s aware of to the FBI internet crime devision. Since the joe jobber has implicated About.com, I’m sure their mighty legal department may have something to say regarding it. If you want to help the case, and help clear an honest man’s name:
How You Can Help
If you have received one of these bogus comments in my or my wife’s name (Jayne), please do the following:
- Leave it up until I can capture a screen shot as evidence.
- Make a note of the raw IP address.
- If you can, please make a note of any other comment spam from the same IP address. This is particularly important.
- Contact me with the information.
- Once I’ve confirmed back to you that I’ve got the screenshot, delete the comment.
If you would like to support me in helping keep my name clear and catch this perpetrator:
- Please post about it in your blog and link back to this post.
- If you see fake comments in my name like the ones above, please contact me with the URL so I can gather evidence and contact the blog owner.
Tags: Scott Allen, joe job, spam
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