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September 18, 2007
Scare-Spammer Rapleaf Finds Kindred Spirit In New Partner
"Collective nouns for a group of weasels include boogle, gang, pack, and confusion." -- Wikipedia, "Weasel"
Valleywag notes that Rapleaf, the social networking identity service with the odious scare-spams, has found a kindred spirit in its new partner, MerchantCircle:
A directory on its face, MerchantCircle at its root, it is a cynical, poorly-conceived search-engine-optimization play using deceptive techniques to harvest business data. MerchantCircle is notorious for autodialing merchants to build its database. The recorded message tries to dupe merchants into entering their data with the lie that someone has left a bad review. It's a classic bait-and-switch not unlike Rapleaf's "someone has searched for you" emails.
To repeat a piece of useful information if you ever get one of Rapleaf's smarmy "We just wanted you to know someone's looking for you on the interweb" scare spams, you don't have to sign up for an account to have your address expunged from its database:
An individual may request information removed for a given email address by emailing opt-out@rapleaf.com. This email address and information pertaining to this email address will no longer be displayed on the Rapleaf site and will be physically removed from Rapleaf�s databases.
Don't bother with creating an account to "manage" anything. You'll just be validating Rapleaf's creepy marketing and helping it make sure its data is good.
Just opt out.
Previously:
Posted by mhall at 6:03 PM | Add Comment
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