I’ll take “business ethics” for $1000, Alex.

The Internet provides an immense resource for businesses, entrepreneurs, and customers alike, and it does not discriminate. The Web does not favor the honest businessperson more than the dishonest one, or vice versa. Businesses can engage in all sorts of legitimate or shady practices, and unless people take the effort to inform themselves about technology and the way “businesses” try to victimize them, they may fall for a scam.

Recently, someone (or possibly a script) left a comment on one of my posts, leading me to conclude that it was a spam comment which was posted solely to hawk the company’s products. The comment itself was two sentences long and included a link to another site. That this blog received a spam comment is somewhat surprising, given that it only has a few posts and so forth, but I’d like to take the opportunity to remind everyone to keep up their guard when dealing with other people on the Internet.

When I first saw the comment, I figured it was probably a spam comment, but I decided to check it out, just to make sure. Their web site contained no address, phone number, e-mail address, or any other kind of contact information for the company or any agent of the company, so I checked the e-mail address that the woman entered in order to post the comment to see if a student had left the message. Since it was not a student, I checked out the profile that the person had on Yahoo. The profile listed a different name, a male’s name even, allegedly someone from New York.

Since the person claimed to be from New York in the profile, I searched the New York Secretary of State’s “Business Entities Database”, and it did not find any records of the company whose name was on the spam link that they posted in the comment. Needless to say, I was not surprised when the search on the secretary of state’s web site returned no results.

I put in the I.P. address of the person into this site’s query box to find out from where the comment originated, and, lo and behold, the e-mail did not originate from the United States at all. No, the I.P. address is assigned to an internet service provider who is apparently on the third floor of the the Ebene Cyber Tower in Ebene, Mauritius. In case anyone doesn’t know what or where Mauritius is (Don’t feel bad; I didn’t either), it is an island located off the southeastern border of the African continent. Many of us may know that Africa is the home of the “419” scams.  Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for the Ebene Cyber Tower links to scams that come from the building, but I cannot link to some of them because of the nature of the scam.

In summation, using a normally female name , a person, whose Yahoo profile lists “her” as being a male from New York and whose I.P. address clearly originates from Mauritius, posted a comment, advertising a product for some company, whose web site listed no contact information. A Google search of the name of the product revealed similar or exact duplicated comments on other blogs.

The whole point here it to draw attention to the fact that unethical people roam the Internet, looking for victims, because the Internet provides almost complete anonymity.  I would not buy a product or even use a free product from any untrusted source, such as an amateur-looking web site that did not have a legitimate, verifiable address. It is easy to create a web site today and claim to be a business.  Businesses need to earn trust by establishing their legitimacy and reliability, and I don’t trust random, anonymous people and businesses on the ‘net. Unfortunately, many people do trust complete strangers and buy from spammers, which is the real reason that spam is such a problem. It is profitable.