Sometimes Search Is Better Than The Cops

One good way to take a bite out of cyber-crime is to report scammers to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and the other search engines. How do you do that? By blogging about the details.

I came across a great post from David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning at 360i, called "How SEO Can Stop A Scammer," that tells how those who have been scammed or discovered someone was trying to scam them can post the details to their blog.

The search engines then index the information and suspicious people in the future can google (sorry G, it’s an official verb now) their would-be scammers and avoid them.

After reports of a Craigslist real estate scam, Berkowitz posted the names and details of it to his blog. Suspicious searchers stumbled across the information and added their own additions, such as new aliases, to the comment section, which gives more information to the search engines for future use.

And it works better than telling the cops, who work only locally. "By telling Google," writes Berkowitz, "the information is relevant to people when they need it, and it’s accessible to people who are several degrees of separation away from me."