Phishing for Bloggers with Faux Sponsored Article Company

As a blogger with an eye open for content, I had an interesting experience this week. As a person, I almost got caught with some phishing bait. I was careful and maybe a little lucky, but I wanted to share the experience with other bloggers to help everyone be careful so that as a group we don't have to rely on luck.

Short History
A couple months back a new sponsored article company popped up on the web named Bloggerwave. They were located in Amsterdam, famous for its advanced trading systems, dikes, cafes, tulips and hackers, crackers and free love content sharing servers.

To date, many of the sponsored article companies have been based out of the US, even when they are owned or financed by people outside the US. This means that the owners of these other companies may not be subject to US law, but their officers and employees are (Like when you ask your chauffeur to speed to the airport to pick you up. If they get a ticket and you aren't in the car, its their fault or from the chauffeur's perspective, situs sucks!)

Many bloggers noticed that when Bloggerwave rolled out, they seemed to have copy/pasted some site design and site text from PayPerPost, one of the most successful sponsored article companies to date, even though they are not the oldest. Several of us carefully signed up to try out the new company.

By carefully, I mean we did not provide the personal information requested in the sign up form.

Long Story Short
As it turns out Bloggerwave ended up paying me for the only article I wrote there with a fraudulent bank account or credit card according to PayPal. PayPal does not provide 'seller protection' for services rendered as opposed to shipping a physical, tangible thing sold on Ebay, which owns PayPal.

So PayPal took the money paid to me and sent it back to the original bank account that it came from. I'm defrauded by $10 with no recourse (other than spreading the word and protecting other bloggers). I confirmed with PayPal on the phone that this could not be some innocent red tape mistake. They assured me that their investigators had found the transmission of the funds to be fraudulent.

Lessons Learned

1. Use a different user ID and password for each online account you set up with different services (for anything) That web 2.0 concept of the day, could be a phishing scam, to capture your preferred id and password and then use it elsewhere
2. If something doesn't smell right, don't sign up.
3. If you are willing to risk yourself, take practical precautions. Don't share real personal information, even if they ask for it.
4. Get in Touch and stay in touch with other people thinking about using the service too. The internet offers us a type of protection similar to that utilized by our 4 legged herd friends. If one person in the herd hears or witnesses something dangerous, they can rapidly put out the warning to the rest of the herd so that the herd can RUN AWAY!
5. If you are a blogger, be accurate, truthful and very very Vocal about your experience.
6. Get other bloggers to blog about the topic and link to original articles on the issue. This will build up pagerank for the problem and help other people from other herds or going solo, find the right information they need to avoid the problem company in the future.

If you would like to spread the word about this specific problem you can read more details Did Bloggerwave make a Payment with a Fraudulent Bank Account or Credit Card? or if you have been a victim of this company or other similar companies, you can see the short list of options that PayPal suggests to report these phishers / scammers to the US authorities. (I'm sure someone in the Performancing community probably has a great linkbait list of additional options that might help here too, please reply with your link and I'll support it heavily.)