Forrest Fires and Gasoline

Over the past few years I’ve been trying to come up with some alternative for just saying “words fail me” or the ever popular “WFT?” to describe my reaction to the various acts of net lunacy I encounter. Yesterday’s example of someone treating Facebook and the World Wide Web like a slumber party for their three best friends isn’t really what I’m talking about here; that’s just a matter of people who didn’t grow up with the Internet trying to get their minds around the fact that the world we knew has changed beyond recognition. Sometimes I run across business concepts so flawed than any average six-year-old could point out the howling idiocy involved, but which seems to have slipped right past entrepreneurial businesspeople, investment bankers, and the New York Times reporter covering the start-up company. Times like today, and stories like this one…

According to the actual account as published on the New York Times website , there are a number of new companies launching that will do a quick background check on someone you met on an Internet dating site – frequently for as little as $9.99! – to make sure that your new friend isn’t a predator of some kind. It sounds okay on the face of it – all of the annoying television ads about 20% of all relationships now starting on line are essentially correct, and there’s certainly a level of anxiety inherent to agreeing to meet anyone you met online in the real world. But as James Brady Ryan’s column on Nerve.com points out, there is a hole in the logic behind this service that a small child could point out at once: all you know about someone you met online is what THEY told you – including their identity…

Unless your new virtual beau is unbelievably stupid – I mean cartoon character stupid; makes-Homer-Simpson-look-like-a-rocket-scientist-stupid – there’s no real chance that he is going to give you his real name in prelude to committing a major felony. By the same token, the hot chick you think you just met might just as easily be a gang of muggers, burglars, or identity thieves. Until such time as there is some air-tight way to identify someone you are communicating with online (don’t hold your breath) there is no way for such a service to verify anything beyond the criminal record attached to the name your correspondent chose to give you, which would appear to make this whole concept useless. Unfortunately, it’s actually much worse than that…

Suppose for a moment that you were going to attempt some nefarious act with a person you will pick up on line, and that you also knew about the existence of such “background check” web sites. The obvious dodge in this case is to find an identity that could believably be your own (correct age, race, description, etc.), which you can easily obtain by using such a service until you fine someone with a sufficiently clean background. Maybe you’ll select someone with a few unpaid parking tickets, or an old pot bust in college, just so as not to attract attention. Then, when you go online to look for your victim, you’d just use the fake (clean) identity you’ve just scammed up – making your victim even less likely to catch on to whatever crime you intend to commit until much too late…

It’s hard to imagine any such service lasting longer than the first wrongful death lawsuit when their first customer gets murdered by someone who used exactly the methods described here – and I doubt any disclaimer on the website is going to help with the defense, either. Everybody out there can do what you want, of course, but if it were mine, I’d just fold down these sites and fade quietly into the ether before anybody finds out that this particular howler was my idea…