Online Dating: Buyer Beware!

by Cassandra Pybus

(AUS) Even reputable internet dating sites are not immune from scammers trying to to take advantage of vulnerable people.

Last summer I went to a wedding celebration that was an unexpected delight, not the least for the bride who met her new husband on an internet dating site. Having just come to the painful terminus of a three-year affair, I could not suppress my wistful envy at her glowing happiness. The champagne flowed freely and several friends became bold enough to suggest that I should try internet dating. After all, what was to lose?

I failed to disclose that after my divorce in 2007, when I was living in the United States, I had signed up with the dating website e-harmony, but found shopping for intimacy such a humiliating experience that I aborted the process by changing my email address. I knew that it was easy to reactivate my membership - I needed to pay some money, revise my geographic location and supply a valid email. So I did as my friends had urged. What was to lose?

At first there was a flurry of e-harmony emails proposing likely matches for me, but when none of those men chose to contact me, silence followed. I had given the whole business away when, out of the blue, e-harmony sent me a very encouraging request for contact from Alan from Artarmon, a widower of 60. His profile said he was a consulting engineer, who appeared to be intelligent and well read, in addition to being a handsome man, if his photograph was to be trusted.

I felt a quickening excitement: I was lonely and sad and here was a successful, interesting man who liked what he saw in me. I stared at his email for a long time, thinking that someone with my life experiences was an unlikely choice for Alan from Artarmon and the message seemed rather generic, as if he had sent it to lots of women fishing to see who would respond.

I took a deep breath and cautiously typed a response to express my surprise and ask if he really meant to address me in particular. Expecting that would be the end of it, I went to bed at midnight, determined to put it out of my mind, which I never managed to do.

Next day I was doubly surprised to find Alan from Artarmon had replied in haste to assure me that he was much taken with my profile. He said he really liked that I was independent and was not tied to one place and promised to write at length after he had finished at work.

Blow me down, later that day there was another email telling me all about himself. His real name was Charles Carroll - his middle name was Alan - and he was a drilling engineer consultant with a postgraduate degree from the University of Queensland, who travelled overseas a lot and was currently working for a company in Reading, England. His wife had died a few years ago and there was an adolescent son in school in Malaysia.

It was a really long email, suggesting he had plenty of time to kill in his hotel room in Reading. He provided a lot of personal detail about his family background, his personal take on ethical behaviour and cultural interests that were highly compatible with my own.

Charles was clearly keen to impress upon me that he was the real deal, and not some flaky pervert; he even provided his personal email address so that we could communicate directly, rather than pay e-harmony for the privilege.

It was all very reassuring and I indulged myself in a little flurry of anticipation as I read and reread his message. But nagging at me was the bit about his son: wasn't he a bit too old to have a child in school, and why would he send his son to school in Malaysia?

Google can usually solve all such conundrums, but my cunning interrogation of the web was unable to find the consultant drilling engineer called Charles Carroll. It was only when his name was matched with a phrase from his message that Google found him, or rather located a copy of an email message from him that was almost identical to the one I had received, with a few variations such as a postgraduate degree from the University of Virginia. This email was sent to a woman living in America through a different internet dating site and was now posted on a website called romancescams.com.

A few hours of compulsive web searching revealed that the photograph I had seen on his profile was stolen from a male model named John Daniel, and that this image, paired with many different aliases, had been posted hundreds of times on internet dating sites, as well as Facebook.

In reality, the promising widower from Artarmon in Sydney was a room of electronically savvy youth in Lagos, Nigeria, who could just as readily be a woman named Emma, as circumstances required. The common scenario was that Charles, or Emma, worked for an international construction company, or an aid agency, and in the course of developing an intense online romance would be deployed in Africa, where a life-threatening drama would require a major injection of money.

The revulsion and shame I experienced at having been hooked, if not actually reeled in, by this scam was much worse than humiliation; I was swept by a wave of nausea.

But why have such a visceral reaction? Like anyone who uses email I am continually the target of scammers, but this was much more insidious because it was communicated to me by a respectable business that traded on being empathetic and trustworthy.

A letter from Mobuto's widow asking me to launder her husband's ill-gotten millions does not land in my inbox as legitimate communication from my credit union, nor does a begging letter from a young man orphaned by a war in Africa get forwarded by Save the Children.

Moreover, the mercenary or compassionate impulses that are triggered by these familiar scams come a very poor second to the powerful desire for intimate connection. This is what makes the online romance business a superb conduit for criminal activity.

According to the FBI, the romance scam is the work of very smart and very dangerous people who have connections to terrorism and who rake in billions of dollars with the tacit support of the online dating industry.

In Australia, online romance scams cheated men and women out of about $23 million last year, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, whose website carries the story of one man who paid his life savings of $200,000 to the orphanage that Emma claimed to have established in Africa. With that kind of money in play, scammers will take considerable time to cultivate strong feelings of intimacy and trust.

People who think themselves in love are highly vulnerable and will throw all caution to the wind to make romance tangible. It makes this a particularly cruel form of theft; one that leaves its victims doubly traumatised. I felt nauseous after the simple exchange of emails, so what was it like for a woman so deeply in love with Charles that when urgent medical treatments were needed to save his life she was willing to exhaust her savings and then take an extra mortgage on her house. Having paid a total of $95,000, she was suddenly unable to make contact. She lost her heart and she lost her house as well.

In February the ACCC issued best-practice guidelines for internet dating sites, advising they post prominent warnings and institute internal vetting procedures.

Yet six months later, a very respectable dating site actually directed me to a notorious scammer whose bogus identity should have been detected by digital security to identify the common heuristics of scam emails and the originating IP address.

There are still no prominent warnings on the home page of e-harmony or other reputable dating sites like RSVP that are known to be thoroughly infiltrated by scammers.

You would have to search deep into the dating advice section of these sites to stumble across advice that they might be used by unscrupulous people for criminal purposes. In such advice the onus of protection is placed squarely on you rather than the business that is charging money for every hopeful communication they encourage you to make.

In my particular case, e-harmony was very prompt to respond to my outraged complaint: they removed me from the site, as I requested, and refunded my money. They also sent a computer-generated message, which doubtless went to numerous other women, to say that they had removed Alan from Artarmon from their service and that ''privacy laws prohibit us from disclosing the specific reasons for our decision''.

I doubt that privacy laws pertain to an international criminal cartel operating out of Nigeria, and it's more likely that the lucrative internet dating business is reluctant to confess to a business model that regularly exposes its customers to serious criminal fraud. Despite the intervention of the ACCC, when it comes to shopping for intimacy, buyer beware.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOUND HERE

Facebook: A Place for Cyberstalking

by Mat Bettinson

So says the National Centre for Cyberstalking Research

The first British study into so-caller 'cyberstalking' has fingered Facebook as the most likely avenue for the harassment suffered by online stalking victims.

Prepared by researchers from the University of Bedfordshire's National Centre for Cyberstalking Research (yes, there is such a thing), the draft report called Cyberstalking in the United Kingdom (pdf) has been presented to MPs as part of a parliamentary inquiry into Cyberstalking.

The report authors said that males were more likely to experience a "harasser" damage their reputation while women were more likely to "focus on fear of physical harm," the report said.

Most of those surveyed by the report had their initial contact with their stalker offline, although eight per cent initially met via social networking. However after the initial contact, social networking was the preferred method for cyberstalkers to harass their victims, ahead of webmail and text messages.

The report authors said that providers of online services had a "duty" to their users to combat cyberstalkers.

"There needs to be a clear process so users know how to report harassment and a time limit so a site must respond within a set number of days," report author Professor Carsten Maple told the BBC.

Online Reputation and Personal Responsibility

Sites are cropping up all over the internet that promise to protect your reputation online. This started me thinking about online reputation and personal responsibility in the face of an ever shrinking online world.

At what point does our personal responsibility for our own online reputation end?

In this internet age, your reputation is not just everything, it's everywhere.

Logging on to sites like FaceBook and MySpace, we are confronted with the changing face of society. A younger set perfectly content to put every detail of their lives online, without regard to the consequences. What effect does this propensity of information and lowering of boundaries have on the average individual's future? On the average company?

The answer is that it can adversely effect both individual and company in a variety of ways. Most people who have been online longer than ten minutes know the term "to get dooced" mean to be fired for blogging during/about work. The term was coined for blogger Heather Armstrong, who writes the blog Dooce, and who was one of the first bloggers to find out just how entwined your online reputation is with your offline one. It worked out well for Dooce (her blog is still going strong), but in most cases it works out poorly for he individual.

A company can face even more serious repercussions if its reputation goes in the toilet online. That is why so many companies are adopting strict policies blocking and/or regulating access to the internet at work. One slip by an employee on their personal site, blog or social network profile page can have a company facing serious repercussions for leaked products and other fiascos. That doesn't even begin to touch on how employee conduct may reflect on certain organizations that depend on having a clean reputation to do business.

Add in to the mix the anonymity of the web, which makes people lower their guard even further, and you can have a real mess on your hands. Most people will change their behavior if they think they can get away with it, and the web breeds an erroneous feeling that "no one can see the real you". In face, online, everyone can see the real you. All of the information that has ever been online about you, both private and public, is usually only a few clicks away. That's a sobering thought that most people don't ever pause to consider.

Companies have been cropping up in recent months to handle the new need for online reputation monitoring in the age of hyper connectivity. Some of these companies, like Techrigy, got their start as something else (in the case of Techrigy, a blog backup service is evolving into a reputation protector for companies). Reputation Defender is making a name for itself helping several women lawyers manage their images after they viciously attacked online. Other companies cropping up to help either companies or individuals keep their reputations and identitiy intact include: Stolen ID Search, MyPublicInfo, Claim ID, Naymz, Choice Point, and new uses for old school application LexusNexus.

All of those companies charge steep fee for what amounts to little more than damage control. Once your reputation flounders online, the ensuing ripple effect is often hard to staunch before it becomes a river. For all attacks on individual reputations, a little discretion fro the moment you first log onto a computer and start posting information about yourself would go a long way. Unfortunately, sometimes even the most cautious and circumspect can fall afoul of a vindictive soul (or souls). There are always going to be internet users who see the curtain of anonymity as license to be abusive and libel others, and they are hard to shake once they become fixated on someone.

Companies have their share of zealot opponents too, but they have an easier time dealing with them. By having a response come from the top of the organization immediately upon being faced with a problem, being sincere, and keeping the response as transparent as possible, a company can do much to staunch the hemorrhaging of its reputation due to one incident (the Gizmodo response to the indictment of its action at CES was one example of how not to act when your reputation is challenged online). If a company hasn't been careful with its reputation in the past, or simply puts out a terrible product or service that gets more than just a little bad feedback, they maybe they need to hire an online reputation repair service after all.

In my view, personal responsibility goes much further than damage control. Face the fact that unless you have been hyper-vigilant every minute of every day both on and offline, chances are you have something stupid, somewhere, sometime. Even greater are the chance that you or someone else got it on camera, blogged it or otherwise put it out there for the world to see. When that happens, being as forthright as possible about your own actions will go much farther to correct the situation than an online reputation management firm ever could.

In the end, your online reputation is up to you, the individual, and you, the company. Education is key - know where your data is going to be used, and how.

Pay attention to how you present yourself online. Take note of your actions and how they could be construed by others. Behave online as if your mother was looking over your shoulder, instead of as if you were hiding behind a curtain of anonymity, free to be as hurtful as you please. Remember that there are consequences for your actions, even online, though they may not be the ones you expect. If all else fails, face the music with square shoulders and a responsible attitude.

SOURCE

Managing Your Online Reputation

Doug Beckstead and Jeff Dunetz are trying this to combat their exposures. - EOPC

by Antony Mayfield

The measure of your reputation is what you do plus what others say about you. That was one of the first things I learned in PR. A reputation can be managed, and can be influenced by the things we do, but it can never be designed or decided upon by its holder. Reputation is earned.

As the social web has distributed the power and influence formerly held by the mainstream media, it has created the need for personal reputation awareness. And despite being a long-time user of social media, I found I learned some new things as I navigated these waters for myself. Below are three tips that I found useful.

1. You Are Your Network
I had a call from a BBC researcher asking for background on social networks. The breaking story that day was that personal details and embarrassing photos of the newly appointed head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, were splashed all over one newspaper. The source? His family’s Facebook profiles.

It made me think about my own family’s personal details and images. What if I became a story? What would a journalist find? My profile’s privacy settings were locked down, but sure enough, a few clicks showed that my wife’s was wide open.

It was a clear lesson: If you want to manage privacy, reputation, and your security to any extent, you have to think about those around you — especially those who are not as tech-savvy.

2. If You Can’t Delete, Compete
Although it’s a good idea to ask people to remove embarrassing content about you, in the majority of cases the best course is to make sure that you are the first and best source of information about yourself appearing on Google (Google) and other major search engines. “Crowding out,” or pushing that embarrassing party photo down in the search rank can be achieved over time. This approach is best combined with an ethos of developing a thicker skin.

The time may soon come when so much content about our lives is online that we get suspicious if we find no unpolished or slightly embarrassing bits about someone when we look. Why are they so perfect? What are they hiding?

Reputation is a messy and uneven business. Playing the content game is often preferable to an all out war — a battle you will most likely lose.

3. There’s a Cottage Industry Around “Reputation Protection”
In discussing online reputation with friends and colleagues, they predicted that there would be services that offer “the digital equivalent of tattoo removal.” While I didn’t doubt that there would be demand for this kind of thing, I wondered about how it would be realistically implemented.

There is, in fact, a small industry growing up to help people manage how their privacy is affected by the web. At the high end, rich and powerful celebrities now hire digital security specialists to help them lock down everything from their voicemail inbox, to their e-mail and Facebook accounts, and to look for the weak points where stalkers or prying journalists might try to get some juicy information.

For the rest of us, a host of services promise to safeguard your identity and reputation online — I even get one service free with my credit card. It tells me less than my Google Alerts, though, so I’m broadly skeptical about the effectiveness of services like this. At best, they should be combined with an effort to develop personal web literacy and an understanding of how to manage online reputation responsibly.

Conclusion
It is incredibly important that we help our friends, colleagues and families understand the social web. They make up our most valuable social networks. And when you understand networks, you understand that their success and well-being is intrinsically linked to your own.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What you know or don’t know about networks can influence how much freedom, wealth and participation you and your children will have in the rest of this century.”

It should be the goal of every web-savvy professional to have their online reputation precede them.

SOURCE

Man Arrested for Spam Threat

by Bruce Golding

Maybe he thought their slogan changed from the company you keep to the company you cheat.

A broke former New York Life employee was busted on charges he tried to extort $200,000 from the insurance firm by threatening to smear it with a spam attack of 6 million e-mails, the feds announced yesterday.

Anthony Digati, 52, allegedly vowed to use a "spam service" and his skills as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable."

The Chino, Calif., man also told his ex-employer that the price would go to $3 million if it failed to pay up by yesterday, according to a Manhattan federal court complaint.

Digati, who was declared bankrupt last year with more than $1.2 million in debts, allegedly targeted the company after becoming "dissatisfied" with the performance of his own universal life-insurance policy.

original article here

Woman Fears for Her Life due to Cyberstalker

by Angela Sachitano

FLORIDA resident Deborah Riley hasn't been able to find a job in months. Google her name and she understands why.

Log on to deborahkayriley.com and a website dedicated completely to trashing her repuation appears.

Comments like 'she is on cocaine and crystal meth' and 'sleeps with anyone on the first date.'

This is only a small part of what Riley's ex boyfriend, Alex Dimusto, is accused of writing on the site he created.

"I feel violated and hopeless," Riley said. "It seems like there is nothing in place to protect the victim."

Riley says Dimusto purchased her name and other similar domains like it a few weeks after she broke up with him in January.

She says he has continued to fill the pages with lies.

"I wrote to web.com and they sent me to the abuse team," Riley said. "They told me I had to get a court order."

Riley has gone to the courts to get the website taken down and is currently waiting on a hearing, which could take another week.

In the meantime, we got in touch with Dimusto over the phone today.

When asked if he created the site, Dimusto answered, "I did not but I might know someone who did."

But according to godaddy.com, Dimusto is in fact the owner of the domain 'deborahkaeyriley.com.'

We also talked with a lawyer, who says Riley could have a strong libel case on her hands.

"This could be actionable," said attorney Barry Balmuth.

Riley says she not only fears for her reputation, she fears for her life. She says she only dated Dimusto for two months and wonders how far he will go to ruin her.

"He has told me he is going to put me in a dark place where no one can find me," she said.

According to Balmuth, here is what it takes to prove libel on the web - or anywhere for that matter:

Statement of fact - such as "She's a drug addict." Not a stated opinion, such as "I don't like her."
Has to be proven false.
Statement made carelessly or intentionally.
Damage to reputation.

original article here

UPDATE: Doug Beckstead's Damage Control

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Back in Court With Second Lawsuit Against Dating Advice Site

By David Ardia


Pittsburgh lawyer Todd Hollis is back in court with a second lawsuit against the dating advice site Don'tDateHimGirl.com, whose users accused him of infidelity and infecting women with herpes. Hollis had previously filed a defamation lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court against the owner of the site back in June 2006. The Florida-based web site and its owner Tasha Joseph were able to have that case dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction.

Acting as his own lawyer, Hollis filed a new complaint in federal court in Miami last week, alleging defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and false light invasion of privacy. Hollis told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that

he reluctantly sued again in Miami because Ms. Cunningham refused to remove the numerous lies that her Web site has published about him. "I never wanted to file a lawsuit. I wanted my name cleared," he said yesterday.

Tasha Cunningham, formerly known as Tasha Joseph, launched DontDateHimGirl.com two years ago. The site allows anonymous users to post information and photos of men, often accusing them of infidelity and bad behavior. Cunningham told the Post-Gazette that she would not answer questions about herself or the lawsuit, but gave the paper a written statement:

DontDateHimGirl.com's mission is to empower women with the information and connections that help them make better life decisions. DDHG.com is fully protected [from defamation lawsuits] by the Communication Decency Act. ... Any attack or lawsuit put forth regarding DDHG.com will be dealt with strongly, swiftly and in a manner which will seek to end this type of erroneous, wasteful litigation.

As we've noted in a number of past posts, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act [7] grants immunity to website operators for these types of claims if the content is created by third-parties.

(Note: The Communications Decent Act governs EOPC as well.)

Update:

03/31/2008: Cunningham answered Hollis' complaint and filed a counterclaim against Hollis for defamation. The defamation claim arose from an telecopier document allegedly sent by an organization related to Hollis that stated as fact that Cunningham had been convicted of grand theft by the State of Florida.

04/14/2008: Defendants filed a motion for partial summary judgment. The motion argued that defendants were entitled to summary judgment on several of plaintiff's claims because certain examples of the disputed content were true and certain examples were entitled to protection under CDA 230.

03/2008 through 05/2008: Plaintiff and defendants filed a series of motions disputing discovery issues. These primarily concern defendants' requests for information from plaintiff and plaintiffs requests to depose individuals regarding defendants' reputation.

05/15/2008: Court dismissed Cunningham's counterclaim at Cunningham's request and granted Cunningham's request for protective orders that would prevent plaintiff from deposing certain individuals on the issue of defendants' reputation.

06/20/2008: The case has been dismissed with prejudice by stipulation of both parties. Details of the settlement are not yet available.

(as you can see - be careful about dragging people to court - because things about YOU will come out as well!)

Story of Internet Invasion of Privacy

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Calling In Pros to Refine Your Google Image

By Susan Kinzie and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers

At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, would type her name in a Google search box and brace herself: Up would pop page after page of attack postings.

Sue Scheff is destroying lives. She is a con. She takes kickbacks. She is the biggest fraud there ever was.

The stream of negative comments began in 2002 after a woman who had sought advice from Scheff turned on her. The postings appeared on PTA Web sites in Florida, where Scheff lives. On bulletin boards and online forums. There were even YouTube videos threatening her.

She sued for defamation and won an $11.3 million verdict, but the attacks only got worse. In December, Scheff turned to ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that promised to help her cleanse her virtual reputation. She no longer dreads a Google search on her name. Most of the links on the all-important first page are to her own Web site and a half-dozen others created by ReputationDefender to promote her work on teen pregnancy and teen depression.

"They created Sue-Scheff.net," she said. "They created SueScheff.net. They
created SueScheff.org. . . . They created my MySpace account, for God's sake. I didn't know how to do any of this stuff."

Google's ubiquity as a research tool has given rise to a new industry: online identity management. The proliferation of blogs and Web sites can allow angry clients, jealous lovers or ruthless competitors to define a person's identity. Whether true or not, their words can have far-reaching effects.

Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don't promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.

Still, Google is continually refining its search methods, which means that today's fix may not work tomorrow.

"This is a game that nobody can completely win," said Chris Dellarocas, a University of Maryland information systems professor.

Dodging Mudballs
The e-mails from friends started showing up three years ago in the Washington lobbyist's in-basket: Have you seen this?

Over decades in the capital, she had developed a thick skin. But after she took on a foreign regime as a client, an online magazine bashed her. The story was factual, but the tone nasty. Then a blogger wrote that she slept with someone to get a big contract. A political blog posted an e-mail she had written about secret campaign strategy. Truth mixed with rumor. Rumor mixed with lies.

Concerned friends sent her the links. Potential clients would say they had read about her on the Web.

Like Scheff, she realized that the items that made her cringe came up high on the Google results page and stayed there, month after month. Her firm depended on her reputation. The lobbyist would speak only on condition of anonymity because she did not want the attacks to resume.

"There's no policing, no rules, no standards," she said. Bloggers are "cowboys," she said. "It's the wild, wild West."

Then one day she heard a talk by Nino Kader, founder of International Reputation Management (IRM) in Washington. His new company, he said, could reshape a person's online image.

She signed up.

IRM aims to get lots of information out there about clients, in various places, so that a search gives a more complete and nuanced profile of who they are. Kader started with a printout of the top 100 hits on a Google search and went through them one by one, asking whether individual results -- such as her campaign contributions -- were good, bad or neutral.

He asked what she wanted the world to know about her. Then he started digging for good things, like an op-ed piece she had written and television interviews she had given that he could post on YouTube. He pitched stories about her to various publications. And he created links from popular sites to those online stories to entice the search engine.

Now her firm's Web site is the first result and other good ones follow.

Still, a story she hates remains on the first page.

"I'm in the early stages," she said. "I've already seen progress."

Companies like IRM try to outthink Google. Search engines comb the Web with complex and ever-shifting algorithms, evaluating relevance and authority by looking at many factors: Is this a government Web site? How many people have linked to it? And so on.

The point is, said ReputationDefender founder Michael Fertik, "Google's not in business to give you the truth, it's in business to give what you think is relevant."

The goal is to get Google and other search engines to seize on relevant sites that contain positive information on their clients and to downplay the rest.

Google does not object in principle to people adding positive content to outrank the negative. But a spokeswoman said in an e-mail, "if you use spammy and manipulative techniques to get this positive content to rank highly, we may take action on it."

Some companies create promotional Web pages for their clients with coding that makes them appealing to Google or create blog pages linking to the client's own site, ensuring they'll rise to the top.

Image Makeover
Geoffrey VanderPal knew politics was a nasty game, but the candidate for Nevada state treasurer wasn't prepared for the blog attacks. Supporters of his opponent posted charge after charge. He briefly considered suing.

But many of his tormentors were anonymous. And U.S. courts have generally protected Web site hosts from civil actions such as defamation, though that may be changing. Besides, he knew as a public figure he'd have a higher burden to prove libel.

When VanderPal lost the Democratic primary last August, he returned to private life as a financial planner. But the blog postings lived on, prominently, at the top of the Google results page. Potential clients avoided him.

He wanted to suppress the negative information about him, both true and false, so he turned to ReputationDefender.

The firm at first tried a low-tech approach: a polite request to a blogger to remove a post about his personal finances. But the blogger declined, saying the item was a matter of public record. Asking politely has backfired in a small number of cases, Fertik said, with Webmasters sometimes posting and mocking the requests.

So Fertik's team, which works from a Silicon Valley office, offered VanderPal its premium service, using various techniques to promote VanderPal's own site and suppress the blogs. That service now starts at $10,000.

Within weeks, VanderPal began to see "a remarkable difference." Though a few nasty comments are still up there, the first three pages are mostly clean.

"Everything's wrapped up in your reputation," said VanderPal, 34. "If you don't have that, you don't have much."

The reputation firms won't take on everyone. Fertik says ReputationDefender won't work with clients who want to suppress violent crimes, for example.

The clients the firms accept are varied: a real estate mogul wanting to move past a decade-old transgression, a prominent academic falsely accused of murder, a hedge fund manager who doesn't like seeing his old New York Times wedding announcement on Google years after he divorced and remarried, a college student who regretted once dressing up as a prostitute at a Halloween party.

Then there was the businessman who paid a Securities and Exchange Commission fine a few years ago.

"Does a person in this situation have a chance to start again?" Fertik asked. "Should this be the first or second thing that shows up on the Internet? Is it fair?"

ReputationDefender decided to work with him.

Staff researcher Bob Lyford contributed to this report.
Hat Tip To "Survivor" for this find!