Share Your Experiences.com Scam
Summary:Has someone filed an "experience request" about you on
"Share Your Experiences.com"? (
Full commentary below)
Status:Probably not!
Example:(Submitted, June 2004)
######This is not commercial email.######
A user is attempting to share experiences and opinions about you
via our website.
The purpose of this email is to inform you that a posting has
been made about you at our website. This is email is not
commercial in nature.
If this email message was delivered to your spam or bulk email
folder please notify your ISP or spam filtering company regarding
this mistake on their part.
To view postings about you click here:
[LINK REMOVED]
Our Identity Protection System is a simple system in which this
website sends email messages to the Experience Request author on
your behalf, and vice versa. This website will never reveal the
identity of the Experience Request author to you, nor will it
reveal your identity to the author of the Experience Request.
The Experience Request author will receive your message in an
email sent from our website. He/she can then respond to your
message via our website by clicking a custom link that appears in
the email.
Communication then continues back and forth via our Identity
Protection System until one party or the other provides other
contact means (phone number, etc.).
IMPORTANT - To add this email address to our Do Not Email List
click here:
[LINK REMOVED]
Regards,
SYEC Support
SYEC Support Department
Commentary:
Submissions
indicate that a new wave of these scam emails has been hitting
inboxes.
Basically, the emails are just a hook to entice people to sign up
for the company's dubious "service". The emails claim that
"A user is attempting to share experiences and opinions about
you via our website."
If you access the website via the link provided, you can view an
"Experience Request" that lists some vague details. It may state
that the user has information about you, but does not say what
this information actually is. In order to gain more information,
you need to use the "Identity Protection System" to contact the
supposed user. However, to access the "Identity Protection System",
you need to pay for a "Premium" membership.
Even after you fork out money to sign up for the service, it
appears that the only way you can really find out what someone
was supposed to have said about you is by using this completely
anonymous "Identity Protection System". Apparently, the real
identity of the author of the request is not revealed to you even
if you are a premium subscriber. According to the site, "sharing
of experience and opinions at this website occurs via direct,
private email communication between two members using our Identity
Protection System". Thus,
anybody could have filed an "Experience
Request", including the owners of the website, and there is no
evidence that the user actually does have further information about
you at all. In any case, anonymous "information" such as this is
hardly worth procuring and certainly not worth paying for. What's
more, in order to access the alleged information, you are dependant
on the author's willingness to send it to you via the site's
anonymous email system. In other words, you end up paying for a
service that provides little more than a means of communicating with
an unknown user.
There have been quite a few websites that offer almost identical
services, including several "Word Of Mouth" sites. The sites are
very similar in functionality and style, and I strongly suspect that
the same people operate them all.
In short, this is just another grubby little scam that preys on our
natural curiosity. These emails should go directly to the deleted
item folder where they belong.
Write-up by Brett M. Christensen
