This may be old news to some of you, but if it helps anyone else I think it's worth writing about. For some time I've been trying to find information about a person that I know is misrepresenting herself to me. I had a cell phone number and tried one of those reverse phone number sites to verify her name. I admit that I had been warned by others that these sites were unreliable. But for $3.95, I thought what the hell. It claimed to have her name available, but to see it I had to pay the price. Once I did, sure enough - no name available. I forgot about it and pursued other avenues. Recently another site popped up claiming to have the information I was looking for. The site was "LookupAnyone". But they "guaranteed" their results - for $5.95 of course. What intrigued me is that they included a contact number. So I called the number hoping to have the operator do the work and verify I was getting good information before I paid.
It turns out this company is just another one of the "Intellius" sites. What was interesting was the conversation I had with the representative. After informing me that she couldn't actually do the checking herself (why should she when it was likely to be a waste of her time), she admitted that all the search places have access to the same public information and if I didn't get it there, Intellius' site would probably do the same thing. I asked why it was that their site, and all these sites, claim to have the information that they don't. She admitted that the websites don't actually do the search until you pay the money. I asked her if this wasn't a case of fraud when claiming to have information that you actually don't? She replied that "we JUST had a meeting about that... It seems the computer is doing it". How stupid do they think we are? The computer did it??? Why don't you just say the devil made me do it? I've been programming and teaching programming for around thirty years now. A computer only does what some person tells it to do. I guess this was the company line response to "why are you cheating the consumer?" And just as an added thought, has Intellius been around look enough to have addressed this problem long ago? More evidence of the company line???
So my advice... Stop feeding your money to these sites. Big business selling the public highly limited, out-dated, and useless information. Part of the same mindset that got this country into economic trouble in the first place.
0 comments