Shout about it from the rooftops.

Recently we’ve had a few people contact us saying that scammers are abusing their name. We have a pretty standard reply to that, and I’ll lay it out here. Scammers use these names as they feel they can do so with impunity. It’s not a good feeling to see your good name being abused by scammers, and we totally sympathise with people about it. However, asking for the thread to be removed, or the person’s/business’ name removed from the thread does a lot more harm than good. Let me explain it this way. Imagine the place you live. A neighbour has been phoning people up claiming to be you and asking them if they can borrow some money, with no plan whatsoever to pay it back. People are eventually going to approach you asking for that money you lent them several months back. What would be the natural reaction to that, to want to hide from everyone the fact that the person is pretending to be you and allow them to continue, or to let everyone know that the asshole is stealing money from people by using your name and make sure no one else falls for it and will blame them and not you? Exactly, right? It’s the same thing with online scammers. The absolute best thing to do is to let everyone know what’s happening. We’ve seen a charity that helped children in Africa do it after a particularly evil scammer pretended to be them. We’ve seen people do it after they were contacted and even threatened after people lost money to scammers pretending to be them. We’ve seen charities do it after scammers tried to say they were the boss. Trying to get the information removed only allows the scammers to continue abusing the good names of people. Warning people and publicly distancing themselves from the scam is the absolute best way to go in these cases. Make it so that if anyone does even an ounce of searching they’ll be warned away from the scam and the scammer will eventually change script to something that works better. It’s never going to stop it 100%. That horse has already bolted. It will however help minimise any damage the scammer does in his quest for easy money.