I got a strange phone call today, on my cell phone, from a person claiming the need to update my registry information on the singingtree.com domain. Of course this was just a scam, but it would have almost fooled me if I hadn't already gotten so many of those stupid fake invoices from the "Domain Registry of America" and whoever else decided that their contribution to society would be to try to trick people into wasting their money. Looking on Google, I find that many other people have received the same phone call.

Like the others, my caller, also a woman with what sounded like a northern Indian accent (Bengali?), first claimed that she needed to update the contact information, giving me the long-gone address that is already in WHOIS. I told her that my real registrar would have to call me if they cared about that, which they don't, and she insisted that her company ("Domain Registry Support") was just a "process notifier" and that "it's really OK" and "don't worry about it." When that didn't work, she said that all she really needed was to send me some urgent information about "changes that are going to affect my domain," and that it was very important that she get my (nonexistent) FAX number.

"What changes would those be, exactly," I asked.

"Changes in the Internet."

Oookay... At this point I told her that, if she was in fact trying to do something legitimate, it was too bad for her, since domain scams are common and I had no intention of giving her any information or cooperating in any way. Oddly, she didn't just hang up, she gave me a Web site (www.domainregistrysupport.com) and phone number (1-800-591-7398) and said to check it out and call them back when I convinced myself that it was legitimate. Unfortunately for her, that company name and phone number point you straight to the previously mentioned scam warnings in Google, so I'll probably not be doing that.

Which brings me to the point of writing this .. It's not that I think I have discovered anything new, I'm just doing my part to drive the scam warnings up in the Google rankings.

And on a tangent, I have been thinking for a while about the fact that today, search engines like Google serve as de facto arbiters of credibility. I'm not sure this is a good idea, since they were not designed for it. This case is just a tired old domain scam, but imagine the invisible influence Google (or Yahoo, etc.) could exert by tampering with search rankings on a few strategic phrases. Holocaust denial sites on the first page of a search on "World War II," for example.

On the other hand, imagine a hypothetical troublemaker employee with low-level access to the systems at Google, pushing a site like Bush Lies near the top of the results for "George W. Bush," in late October before the 2006 midterm election. Hmm...

30 Nov 2005 02:00 PT - persistent link - trackback - 0 comments