I’ve Got a Bridge I’d Like to Show You

The gullibility of the general public in the Internet age is a matter of almost constant wonder and amazement to me. In a time when information on virtually any topic you’d care to name is available to anyone with an Internet connection in a brief online search, you would expect that people would be able to see through almost any confidence scheme. However, as the ongoing success of the various Nigerian bank frauds proves, this is not the case. All over the world, adult people – many of them otherwise intelligent! – are falling for scams that make the original “Brooklyn Bridge” con look positively elegant. I still think that stealing an entire university is crossing a line, though…

I got hold of the story off of the always invaluable MSNBC Technology page , but you can also pick it up from the Wall Street Journal story , which actually gives a clearer view of the problem. The basic idea is that some person or persons currently unknown (but almost certainly felonious) copied the entire website from Reed College, a small private school in Oregon, changed the name of the school throughout to the fictitious “University of Redwood”, and included their own contact information – a blind mail drop and forward operation in Torrance, California. Even the faculty and history pages from the Reed College were copied, resulting in some claims that are more outrageous than funny. Even worse, the fake school’s site is on Go Daddy.com, and the company is refusing to do anything about the con, saying that the copyright infringing material had been taken down…

The really upsetting part, at least to me, is that even if Reed College is successful in their legal action to have the fake site taken down – for that matter, even if they recover enough money to drive Go Daddy off the Internet – there is nothing to stop this group of scam artists (or the next group) from setting up shop on another server somewhere outside of US jurisdiction and doing the same thing. In fact, there’s no way to stop dozens of similar groups of criminals from doing the same thing, and if they are a little more careful about where they “harvest” their fake faculty biographies and fake campus photographs, it might be years before anyone even notices a crime is being committed. As the folks from MSNBC correctly note, all the scammers have to do is collect the “application fees”, wait ten to twelve weeks, and then send “rejection” letters to their would-be students…

Now, I’m sure some of you are pointing out that this is a relatively easy scam to defeat. All you really need to do is look up the rankings for these made-up colleges, or do a brief Internet search looking for any mention of them in any legitimate source, for that matter, and you’ll rapidly find out that no such institution has ever existed. Failing that, you might notice that the scam site has no voice telephone numbers (only a fax line), which should raise at least a few warning flags. Some of you are also probably pointing out that anyone who is dim enough to fall for a scam like this is probably too dumb (or too ignorant) to go to college in the first place. And that might be true – but I don’t remember anything about it being legal or ethical to make money by bold-faced lying to the gullible. If selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is a crime, then this is too…

I’ve been saying for some time now that life in the Internet age means adapting to new rules, just the way telephones, telegraphs, televisions and movable type did. There is no way to get the genie back in the bottle; all we can do is to double- and triple-source all information, never send money to unknown people or institutions (no matter how legitimate they appear to be), and never hazard money you can’t afford to just throw out a window on Internet offers of this type – anymore than you would just give money to a guy who says he has a bridge he’d like to show you…