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FastSpells.com Aftermath
Posted Sep 18, 2008 - 9:45:37

FastSpells.com AftermathI feel like I've actually accomplished something in this moment. It's pretty entertaining, and mildly incredible. In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined the power of this one little website.

It's pretty sweet.

For those who have been asleep for the last day, yesterday morning I posted a second article on FastSpells.com. It tells the story of how I dug up the identity behind the Scam Website FastSpells.com. After much digging through the internet, I found her name and birthdate and listed exactly how I did it. Everything except her last name (the one thing that's arguably not private) that I posted came from publicly available websites.

I'm very careful when I do things like this.

The reason I did this was because FastSpells.com was ripping off and scamming people, and there was no recourse for most of it, as they did their best to obscure their ownership. It made me sick to think that there was no recourse for these people... so I wanted to find them a way to fight back. Once the article was up, I sent out a tip to The Consumerist on the off chance they might post about it. I didn't expect them to really do anything about it, but I figured "What the heck?"

But then The Consumerist decided to cover it.

Then it became their most popular post of the day.

Within twenty-four hours, over 10,000 people had read about it on The Consumerist, and over 2,000 visitors had read the full article on TRHOnline.com. Some of my visitors apparently dug deeper, found out exactly where the person lives and so much more. Slowly but surely, throughout the day and into the night, the websites disappeared one by one. Now, as I write this, FastSpells.com is the only site that resolves to anything, and it's an "Under Construction" page.

Oh, and my website's host had to write up a whole article in their blog about the situation.

I think this is the power of people on the internet. When we put our minds to something, we can do great things for the common good. This should also be a lesson to would be scammers and con artists online: You will always make a mistake, and someone's going to find it. They'll exploit it, and you'll be found out.

The internet never forgets.
- Traegorn

Post a Comment
correction: FastSpells.com is also down now.  Supposedly 'down for maintenance', but I'm guessing it's for good.

Meep
It went up before and is down again.

I'm betting we've either killed it, or all the information on the site will change to remove the most offensive "spells" like their Health Spell page.


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