[conspire] Another Scam du jour?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> I was recently notified by a reliable source about 
> fastpeoplesearch.com
> Apparently they make a business of gathering personal information and
> making it public.  Just for fun, I did a search on Rick Moen.  They
> list several people by that name, but none in Menlo Park.

They doubtless picked up some big batch of data, probably keyed off
people's formal names, like maybe census or DMV records or property
records or voter roles or some combination of those.  Which explains
the omission, and is just a reminder that all datasets are based on
assumptions about what's worth recording and what's not.

(If you're a lawyer or government official trying to contact me, you
won't ask for 'Rick', because that's not my name for official
purposes.[1])

I wouldn't call it a scam, especially since they're not overpromising.
What they say about their dataset is 'FastPeopleSearch.com combs through
billions of available public records to help you find what you’re
looking for.'  I'm sure that's correct as far as it goes.

It's like many, many other such sites in trying to make money off the
upsell to non-basic 'enhanced' searches such as, predictably, reverse
telephone listings.  And other things:

o  Monthly reports are available for $9.95/month subscription
o  But as the 'best deal', you can get 3 months for $5.95/month.
o  Each background and criminal records report will cost $29.95

And... For the paid services, they promise arrest records, court records,
current and past contact info, reverse telephone lookups, addresses and
telephone numbers, AKAs, age, date of birth, relatives and associates,
background check reports, police records, search warrants, criminal
records data, public records data, bankruptcies, judgements, liens,
property records, marriage and divorce records, and birth & death
records.  And a partridge in a pear tree.

If you searched on my formal name (and you might want to also do your
own), you'd find a number of amusingly erroneous claims and obvious
results of data-handling errors causing garbled field contents.

For example, did you know that my address from 5/25/2012 to later on in
the day on 5/25/2012 was '1105 Altschul Avenue Menlo Park, Unit CA 940'
in Menlo Park?  I sure didn't.  Also, I lived at an address called just
'Altschul' in Menlo Park from 1/1/2017 to later on the same day on
1/1/2017.

They have many of my prior addresses otherwise correct, though the dates
and lengths of stay are dodgy.  The list of 'Possible Relatives' has
half a dozen correct ones and several dozen that are hilariously
mistaken.

Did you know that my e-mail addresses include deirdre at deirdre.net?  
Won't Deirdre will be surprised!

'Possible Associates' has two that are correct and one that is wildly
wrong.  I'm a bit wounded that they think I have only three associates,
and one of those is a stranger.  Hey, guys!  I have more associates than
Jimmy the Greek, and you're clueless about all but two.


Cutting to the chase, this is the same slightly befuddled data-grinding
model that's driven just about every money factory in Silicon Valley
ever since the War on Scary People from Scary Countries and the
concurrent War on Privacy started in September 2001:  Grab a
stupendously large pile of data, set loose a Bayesian classifier on it
for a very long time, and then grind out and sell for money claimed
correlations the classifier finds with zero attempt to determine whether
they are spurious or not.

The upsell services are ones that might require more specialised
data-grinding or (particularly) that they might have had to pay access
money for.  Probably the process is 100% software, no human researcher
involved, but this is the sort of thing people traditionally have paid
private detective firms to do.  (I don't know whether the PI-generated
ones had fewer hilarious errors.  Probably at least someone whited out
the obvious junk data.)



[1] Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah.
Some call me the gangster of love.
Some people call me Maurice
'Cause I speak of the pompatus of love.
People talk about me, baby.