Archive for the ‘Web of trust internet scams’ Category
The developers of WOT aka Web of Trust, are in the business of selling security seals for websites, so they have a vested interest in making website owners afraid of negative ratings.
web of trust internet scams
Web of Trust mywot scams
Patsy says her site was ruined by WOT
I was given a bad, red circle rating on my site because i kept posting questions on the WOT forum. The reason i kept asking questions (there were about 4 or 5 questions i asked) is because i didn’t know i had received a reply, as the posts get lost in the thousands of posts on there. So, for punishment, they rated my site terribly. One member even said ‘bad customer experience’ and wasn’t even a customer of mine. I couldn’t do a thing about it, even when i asked them to remove unfair comment ratings…nothing!
As a result the website i paid one yrs hosting for has had to be shut down due to it being useless to me. Who the heck is going to go on there with a red circle?
I am looking into doing something about this, as i cannot help but feel it is not only unfair, it is disgusting. I was abused in the forum too, i was spoken too like i was an idiot. I was even called an airhead.
I’m not the only one to be abused on there either, i read through posts and found others accused of this that and the other.
I had a new business and now i don’t because WOT members decided to do this to me and why? all because i didn’t answer questions i never knew i had!
The questions I asked were. ‘Could you rate my site please?’ I put that twice as like I said, I didn’t know I’d got a reply. Oh heck! that’s when it all started to go very wrong for me.
All my life I have never been unethical ever!!! and now they made me look like that, that’s why I shut the site down, well almost down, I need to ask Go Daddy my host to shut it down properly. I’ve just removed all posts and pages etc at moment.
All this happened within the space of a week, just today, I closed my site.
(Site URL removed at Patsy’s request.)
Our answer
It’s too bad that your site and your small business were harmed in this way. Did you try contacting WOT? If so did they offer any kind of remedy?
WOT’s site ratings are subjective. If you look at their community you’ll see where a handful of individuals make a large percentage of the posts. Users who have nothing better to do than post negative comments (one person had made well over 50,000 posts when I last looked) are able to decide for tens, perhaps millions of users which sites are good and which sites are bad. I don’t imagine that it will be too long before sites who don’t buy into WOT’s badge program (i.e. don’t contribute to WOT’s coffers) will be rated negatively.
As far as we’re concerned WOT cannot be trusted to give accurate, unbiased information. We’ve published newsletters and articles asking for WOT to tell us how they arrive at their ratings – but so far, as of today no answer from WOT. It’s funny, when we were recommending them when they first started, they were in contact with us all the time. But when we recognized the how serious this “rating” game is, and how it could be used to shut down or seriously damage good sites, we stopped recommending WOT. And we considered how services like WOT could also be used to promote or denigrate political agendas, software developers, or businesses which may sell products or services which compete with WOT, or products they don’t happen to like. Services like WOT could too easily be use as censorship tools to be used against sites which have content that WOT finds offensive to them, or whose content may be in contradiction to their agenda or beliefs.
We stopped recommending WOT and all so-called safe-surfing toolbars. There’s too much room for chicanery and promotion of personal agendas and points of view. The fact that such toolbars could be used for censorship and promotion of whatever products or agendas WOT or its community decided to promote makes us even more skeptical. We will continue to try to educate people about the potential dangers of allowing communities of unqualified, anonymous users to judge web sites.
Besides all the other doubts we have about WOT and safe-surfing toolbars in general, the need for such protection has become questionable at best anyway. All current versions of Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chromehave excellent fraud and phishing detection and protection. The things we should be concerned about and focus our attention on are fraudulent sites, sites that distribute malware, and phishing sites. We don’t need to go back to a time when a small group of fanatics decide for us what is acceptable and what in not. Anytime anyone tries to tell you what you are allowed to see and what you’re not – there’s a danger lurking – it’s called censorship and that is a danger and a risk to us all
25 Responses to patsy says her site was ruined by wot
I use to use WOT to check out sites before viewing them, but when WOT started Redlining sites that I had been viewing long before I started using WOT, I removed it from my listed of “useful” programs. I would encourage Patsy to only take down her site temporarily (for a week or so), then put it back up. I certainly hope that a Hosting Service such as Go-Daddy would be cooperative in a situation as this.
WOT, like so many of the social networking sites, get ruined by a few fanatical jackasses who think of themselves as all-powerful. Time the providers of such sites make the rules apply to everyone, not just those who pay extra and abuse the privileges.
I agree with Daniel. Put you site back online, Wendy. I think there are plenty of people on the internet that don’t have WOT, or any other so-called safe-surfing toolbars, who will visit your
site. You’re giving WOT more power than it deserves. Keep on keepin’ on.
I don’t know what the content of your website is, or who you’re target audience is, but let your website stand on it’s own merit. People will visit your site based on your ability and efforts to get the traffic to it. That’s the secret anyway…..getting the right traffic to your website, and getting them to come back. Don’t let WOT dictate to you whether or not your website should be “up”. Yes, WOT does damage to websites that don’t deserve it. But they only reach the people who have their toolbar. I don’t have it. Nobody I know does. Many people I know have business websites. Those, that I know, who want some kind of validation displayed on their business website, find out what they have to do to get a BBB logo (Better Business Bureau)
WOT has to stand on ITS own merit and reputation. Personally, I don’t think they’re reputation is going in a positive, trust-worthy direction.
I found this Wikipedia article interesting…especially the paragraphs on “Problems” and “Manipulation”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOT:_Web_of_Trust
I have used Wot for a short time before and for the same reason explained earlier, I stopped using them because of their biased opinion on various sites that I was comfortable using prior to downloading WOT. I value Cloudeight ‘s opinion highly and have noticed not long after I removed WOT from my PC they no longer recommended WOT….Thank you Cloudeight.
I believe I know the user who is wrote this article. After opening four or five threads and never reading the replies, some people left negative ratings on her site. I do not know why she did not read the replies-as you can see from the forum page of Web of Trust, usually it takes at least 24 hours for a thread to fall off the first page. One could just look through those threads and find their thread-or push Ctrl+F and search for the title.
In ant case, there were three negative comments placed on her site. She told me that she was thinking about deleting her site, and I encouraged her not to do so, told her I would contact the people who left the comments, and sent all three messages. None of these people were my best friend or brother-in-law; my relations with them were, at best, neutral.
Within minutes, obviously before I would have expected to hear back from them, she deleted her entire website along with her Web of Trust account.
I still heard back from these users, though. The user who left a comment under the category “Bad Customer Experience,” changed it to “Ethical Issues,” because he did not feel that £150 was a reasonable price for building a website. Such is his view.
The next comment, was under “Ethical issues,” and it stated:
The site owner doesn’t respond to questions instead of this, owner creates more and more threads on the WOT forum, and also doesn’t care to reply to issues. I DO NOT trust this website and its owner only because of this issue.
This was true. By the time the website owner, Patsy, started reading replies, she decided, presumably, that it was too much to reply to them and deleted her website. I had asked the person leaving this comment to reconsider it, but I cancelled my request upon the website’s deletion.
The third comment, I believe, mentioned something about the site just taking a bunch of WordPress plugins and using them wholesale. But as the website was deleted, I was unable to investigate this claim.
I am not denying that censorship exists in Web of Trust, as it does in many other places. But not all of its members are engaged in it.
“I am not denying that censorship exists in Web of Trust, as it does in many other places. But not all of its members are engaged in it.” You’ve summed up in one sentence why Web Of Trust is no longer a safe surfing toolbar – it has become something much more – it has become a morality toolbar – a toolbar of censorship – that can and is being used to cast aspersions on Web sites which do not fit WOT’s community’s moral, ethical, religious, or political views. What, exactly, does the price one person charges to build a Web site have to do with being a dangerous site? You sum up better in one sentence what WOT has become and the real danger that lurks in a Web of Trust that no one should trust.
I can’t say it better than you already have, even though you seem to be defending WOT’s right to moralize and to censors site with which it does not agree. We sincerely hope that others will come forward to expose WOT as the danger it is. In fact, I personally see WOT as a much greater danger than many of the sites WOT rates dangerous. If we made a safe-surfing toolbar, I can assure you that WOT would receive a RED – DANGEROUS warning – because it imposes its communities political, moral, philosophical, religious, and societal beliefs on its users. And that is censorship – and as history so well teaches us – censorship never works.
As I read your comment, and thought about what WOT has become, I was reminded of a line from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “…those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”
But handily, it seems you have chosen to ignore the sentence proceeding it.
You just don’t get it, do you? What do Word Press plugins, retail sales, political, moral, religious beliefs have to do with dangerous web sites? Your comment is based on your opinion and you say “not all members engage in censorship.” That’s most likely true, but the 100 or so out of millions who make an absurdly larger number of posts – which cannot possibly be accurate, fair or based on any personal experience account for more than 30% of all site ratings. Yet WOT not only allows this to happen, it encourages it.
Apparently you’ve ignored all of the article from which the following excerpt was taken:
WOT engages in a leap of logic calling its millions of members “trustworthy” considering the fact that to be one of these trustworthy users all one has to do is provide is a name, an email address, chose a username and a password. One does not have to even have to provide a real name because WOT does not verify the identity or the backgrounds of their members. Because anyone with an email address can be a member of WOT’s community, WOT cannot with any credibility make the claim that even one of its members is trustworthy let alone that all of them are. Saying their ratings are “powered by a global community of trustworthy users” is false. WOT cannot possibly substantiate the claim that all of its members are trustworthy.
After reviewing approximately one hundred Web sites rated by WOT, it appears to us that WOT’s community is the foundation of its rating system as well as foundation of its problems. Its community may well have millions of members, but certainly not every member is trustworthy. And WOT exacerbates the problem by rewarding members who make the most comments and ratings. This system of rewarding the most active users has fueled a competition among some of its members, which seems to be out of control. Unfortunately this reward system is not based on accuracy or relevance of comments, or even on actual personal experiences with the Web sites rated – WOT’s reward systemis based solely on the number of ratings and comments a member posts. This system skews WOT’s ratings by burying real ratings of individuals who add their comments and ratings. For instance, when we used to use WOT, we rated a few dozen Web sites – as would be typical of most users. Most users are not going to rate thousands of Web sites or make thousands and thousands of posts. Those members who carefully rate web sites based on real experiences with those sites, are not going to have time to make thousands of post. But since WOT rewards those who make the most posts, there are some who seem motivated by that. When that happens the race is on to see who can be the top poster and all kinds of bad things start happening. In the end the legitimate users who carefully and accurately rate web sites have their posts and ratings buried.
The following information was taken directly from WOT’s site.
Here’s an example of one of WOT’s “trustworthy” members’ site rating/comment history:
SuperHero58
Platinum member
Member since May 2010
My activity score:45,106 *My ratings:338,666 *My posts:365,772
It is hard to imagine, a member who joined in May 2010 could post 338,000+ site ratings based on his personal experience in less than 330 days (May 1, 2010 – March 17, 2011).
We base this on information taken directly from WOT’s Web site The WOT community member known as “SuperHero58″ posted more than 1000 posts per day on average from May 2010 through March 17, 2011. That means if this person were using his computer for 10 hours a day, every day, without a break, this person has been posting almost two posts per minute – every day, without a day off, since the day he joined WOT’s community. No human being is capable of that, no one is capable of personally reviewing and rating that many Web sites based on their real experiences, in that short span of time.
We’ve reviewed and rated hundreds of Web sites and freeware programs for our newsletters over the past 10 years – and we can tell you it takes much longer than 30 seconds to review a site or product, let alone write a comment about it.
Rather than rewarding this member of the community with a Platinum Member award, WOT ought to be investigating him – and other members like him – because it is apparent to us that he is gaming and abusing WOT’s site rating system. WOT should be ferreting these members who are manipulating and skewing WOT’s rating system before they make a total mockery of WOT’s community….
You can’t tell me that one human being can accurately rate 1000 websites a day, every day for 10 straight months. You can’t tell me than any one person can make 1000 posts every day for 10 straight months. Period. Yet WOT does not remove these kinds of members, WOT rewards them.
You can defend WOT with your opinions. And you can make excuses for WOT’s moralizations and its subjective, unfair, and unreliable ratings. But facts are facts. WOT cannot be accurate or even fair if it bases its ratings on a small group of users – a gang of unsupervised members who run amok in its community, parroting each other’s ratings and making an absurdly large number of posts. And WOT giving these kinds of members awards would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.
You should check out the facts before you post – you’re not posting to WOT’s community here.
See http://thundercloud.net/infoave/new/?p=818
It also does not seem that you have heard of Web of Trust’s Mass rating tool:http://www.mywot.com/wiki/Mass_rating_tool for Platinum users only. Note that it can be used to simultaneously rate up to one hundred sites and leave comments on those sites’ scorecards-these comments count as “posts,” by the way. I believe what often happens is that one of these very active users finds a scam, along with 10-100+ affiliated domains, and then passes it on using the forum, so that other Platinum users copy and paste the list of domains.
While I do not have the resources to start investigating the sites mass-rated by a specific user for spam, phishing, etc., I presume that Web of Trust takes care of that, as they claim “Anyone who is caught misusing the mass-rating tool by trying to spam multiple comments will have their mass-rating privilege removed.”
We couldn’t have said it better or clearer. WOT’s rating system is so flawed that no one can rely on its ratings. Web sites that lean left are “good”, those that lean right are “bad”. Many religious sites which are not Christian are considered “bad” and any site with adult content is “bad”. WOT is nothing if not an ethical/moral censorship toolbar. It started out as an safe-surfing toolbar. Now WOT’s definition of “safe” is whatever WOT deems fit to be seen. It’s just plain old censorship disguised as a toolbar and you can be sure when someone makes 360,000 posts in 10 months that user is not making his ratings based on his or her “experience”.
Instead of sending its minions out to put out fires and to post here, why doesn’t someone at WOT write and explain how some of its community members can possibly have experience with hundreds of sites a day. Why won’t someone from WOT answer questions we raise of moral, political or ethical bias? WOT’s not supposed to be a cyber-nanny; it’s supposed to be a safe surfing toolbar. If WOT wants to change it’s name to WOM (Web of Morality) or WOE – more apropos (Web of Ethics), then users would not be misled into thinking that every site WOT rates dangerous is really dangerous – but may only be dangerous to some people’s religious, moral or societal beliefs.
There’s no room for censorship in a free society or on a free internet. As long as a web site isn’t breaking the law with its content then WOT should leave it’s moral nose out of it. If the site contains privacy-stealing software, malware, Trojan’s, spyware, viruses, or is fraudulent, users should be warned of it. WOT has no right to attempt to cripple legitimate, legal web sites just because they don’t fit into its moral guidelines.
As long as there are those who presume to pass judgement on other people’s beliefs, values, religions, or political ideas, and call them “dangerous”, those of us who care for freedom and accept that each of us has to accept the responsibility that freedom requires, must alway be vigilant of fear mongers and puritans who seek to tell the rest of us what to believe, what is good, what is bad and how to think.
It is bad enough WOT has become what it has become, but to watch it parlay its success which was built on an increasingly flawed system, into huge financial gains by selling its flawed morality rating system to police departments, schools and other institutions and further spreading its flawed ratings even further disturbs us.
Eventually though, enough people will catch on to what WOT is doing and WOT will be trying to put out fires all over the Web.
Instead of sending its minions out to put out fires and to post here
Who said I’m one of their “minions?” I came to post here out of my own free will.
And we can tell that by the Gmail address you use, right?
What does g-mail have to do with it? Is it somehow associated with WoT?
WOT has become a joke and we think you’re a shill. If someone from WOT wants to officially respond to how and why they reward people who make 325,000+ posts in 10 months based on “their experience”, we’d be happy to learn how this is possible. For now we’re assuming you’re a WOT shill hiding behind a G-mail address. Otherwise you’d have used your ISP’s or your company address since the public doesn’t see your address. Are you afraid we’re going to spam you?
You’ve posted enough on this site. If you want to post as an official of WOT with a real email address, that’s fine; we’ll publish it. If someone from WOT wants to explain to us and to the public how 100 people account for more than 30% of the site ratings and comments posted on the forum, we’re all eyes. If someone from WOT can explain how a human being can honestly experience hundreds of thousands of Web sites in less than year, we’d like to hear it. If someone from WOT can explain how religious sites other than Christian sites, sites with legal but sometimes radical views, or sites which contain legal adult content are somehow “dangerous” then we’d like to hear from WOT.
But you know we never will, because WOT’s poised to make a lot of money selling its “technology” to institutions like police, schools, and governments. And what they’re really doing is selling a censorship toolbar – not a safe-surfing toolbar. And it’s ratings are based on personal agendas, political beliefs, personal moral beliefs, and personal and societal religious beliefs – and WOT cannot deny that. And in all your postings all you did was complete an illogical circle. You don’t contribute anything to this forum – and your cheerleading and defense of WOT is no longer welcome.
WOT is more than welcome to reply officially; but we’re not going to allow their minions to keep posting on this forum. You have nothing to contribute here. You’ve had your say and those posts will be allowed to remain.
Just curious.. since Wot rates millions of websites, how do you happen to recall who patsy is and what website is hers? There is no last names, no site links, no information about the site other then someone named “patsy” has a site that sells things. Just like millions of other sites on the web.. its a site that sells things.
I interacted with her on the Web of Trust forum, and she told me that she deleted her website. Since this is the first and only time I have seen something like this happen on their forums, I assume it is her.
You sure do make a lot of assumptions. This lady’s site was ruined by WOT – or didn’t you read the original article (again)? She didn’t remove her site voluntarily, she closed her site because it was poisoned by WOT. Your defense of WOT is based on assumptions and trying to spin dark into light. We clearly showed where 100 people make over 30% of site ratings – by mass postings – while WOT claims to have millions of community members. Something’s very wrong with your arguments. Out of millions of sites and site owners you assume that someone you interacted with on WOT’s forum is the very same woman who wrote to us? That’s a huge leap of logic – considering WOT has, by its own admission, millions of community members and has rated tens of millions of sites. I think you’ve made it perfectly clear what your motives are and how you arrive at your conclusions — and more importantly why you arrive at these conclusions.
The whole WOT thingy is funny.
A few months ago, I joined in, I discovered that SuperHero account too (among 12 other “suspicious” accounts), made the same calculations like @infoave did and asked about it in the forums… next you know, I got the same “mass rating” tool explained to me by a guy who was later identified as “THE developer” (yeay, I had mail…). Oh well, after talking back and forth with him, pointing out potential problems with their unfiltered rating system and the “ethics related to the WOT-Badge, I could actually see my rating drop by the minute.
As it turned out, while talking “friendly” in my face, he used the forum to hit on my site… pushing it a bit by tuning his backend. Positive ratings dropped and meanwhile, around 45 positive comments have simply VANISHED from my site’s MyWot scorecard.
Now that was great… proving me I was more than right thinking that something fishy was going on behind the screens too. Next up, the forum started filling up with a dozen of flamewars; all directed towards me personally… from people that I never talked too.
MyWOT provides “trust”? Yeah, right… where I come from (pre-1997 internet and “ye olde BBS boxes”) we used to call stuff like that “useless spam” and “friggin flamewars”.
At first, I was annoyed by all this, a bit confused and a bit more angry… you know, the whole truckload of feelings a webmaster gets when he get’s hit in the face for no reason.
Yet, meanwhile I’m more relaxed and you can be too! Simply ask yourself: Who uses MyWot? Is it the multi-million dollar company implementing a MyWot bar in the IT infrastructure so every darn professional will see that negative WOT rating your site gets? NO! Is it an experienced internet user using the WOT toolbar? NO! So why worry?
My 2 cents? Get a life, simply “ignore the WOT” and you’ll gain a lot.
Two thumbs up for deciding to ignore WOT too btw. You rock! I would even vote for your site at MyWot… but as said: I don’t use it anymore. It’s the best for all of us I guess… let their service die in piece. AMEN
The bigger problem is that WOT (according to them) has sold its services to schools, police departments, governments and other institutions. That is what concerns us more than anything. Yes, it’s true, those who know what’s going on can ignore WOT but the millions who are not so experienced actually rely on WOT to provide honest, site information. It doesn’t. WOT’s red rating means to its users a site is dangerous but that is often not true. The site may contain political, religious, or other content which WOT feels is dangerous to its users. When ideas, religions, politics or questionable moral or ethical content are “dangerous” it becomes censorship. Censorship is much more dangerous than the political, religious, or moral content of any web site. WOT is has become a censorship toolbar. And the problem is, according to WOT they’re now working with schools, police departments, and other institutions. And that’s what concerns us.
This is the best post I’ve seen yet about Web of Trust yet. Tells it like it is.
Worst mistake that a site owner can make is to try and challenge WOT’s methods in WOT’s site comments and forums. The wannabe censors will be on you like flies on honey and your site will plunge even further in WOT ratings.
Their Achilles Heel as I see it are there vendor reliability ratings. They give websites that don’t sell anything bad ratings. For an example check out climatechangedispatch.com. It has a vendor reliability of 27 out of 100. Does it sell anything? No.
It has a Google (WOT reliability rating of 95) Ad, Amazon (WOT reliability rating of 95 ad) and a PayPal (WOT reliability rating of 94) donation button.
Look around and you’ll find many sites that don’t sell anything with low WOT reliability ratings.
The myWOT forum is overrun by zealots and self appointed internet censors bent on “punishing” anyone who does anything in the slightest that goes against their grain.
I’ve posted my interactions with them and why the tool is totally broken at the site linked to my name.
I’m sure it will have red from mywot users within a day lol.
myWOT isn’t trustworthy itself, so I don’t know why anyone would trust their opinion about any other site. Check outhttp://asafesite.com They are uncensored and even give you a free trust seal for your website. Also they rely on Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics which is much more reliable than anything WOT could come up with.
The site does not recognize real threats like FunWebProducts (SmileyCentral). We’re all for warnings about known malware and spyware – we’re against censoring content just because a bunch of attention hounds don’t agree with the content. There’s a big difference between censorship and warning users about potential phishing, spyware, adware, malware, and malicious software. One site doesn’t do much and WOT tries to be the Nazi SS and Gestapo – like book burning reincarnated.
Great idea with the blog mywot lies!
Ran across an interesting post about WOT that brings up a very valid point:
“The security site Web of Trust (WOT) is a broken system that sounds good on paper, but in the real world does very little to protect users from internet security threats. Due to an over-reliance on a user based reporting system, WOT regularly misses true security threats that spring up and disappear before the system has a chance to even recognize the threat exists.”
More here: http://scamfraudalert.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/mywot-com-is-a-fraud-system-that-fails-to-protect-people-from-real-security-threats/
One of our websites was hit on June 12, 2011, by one of the “Platinum” users using the “Mass Rating Tool”. If you look at all of his “Posts”, about a hundred have the same comment and rating, yes that’s the so called beauty of “The Tool” it allows them to “Spam” someone’s good name. I’m not surprised our site got “found”, my husband makes WordPress Themes and his link is in all of his themes, so yes our website name is associated with about…well according to Google…917,000 listings.
Anyhow, this “No Scams” person at “MyWoT” listed us as “Blog/Splog type link site to counterfeit websites, most likely from China. Beside bad shopping experience you risk credit card phishing.” along with about 100 other sites that day. Funny thing is, our server is in the US, we are in Canada, even though we have the word “buy” as part of our URL, we don’t sell anything. My husband makes free Themes and free Plugins for WordPress.org, as well as helps an awful lot of people in the world. That’s what really gets me is that one of their “Platinum” users can use a “Spamming” tool to Ruin a persons reputation. And I’m sure they will come back and say it was some anonymous person from the net who rated us…but it actually does show this persons user name and I found the page we are on from June 12 of his history.
Sorry I guess I just have to rant, because I don’t know the person who did this and it’s obvious they don’t know us with the comment they made about our site.
Yes, I have emailed, I doubt that it will do any good, seeing how it hasn’t done anyone else any good.
If anyone has any “words of wisdom” for me that would be wonderful. Thanks for reading my rant.
My website was rated only by myself as it gets low visits, it´s a non special small website, but because it is a website where i post protection against hackers in a game, I assume a hacker today came and marked it red. So whats the point of WOT? I used it and I am ashamed. Please don´t use this program it is I can imagine very harmful for big websites and also for smaller ones. Better find a toolbar or website reviewer that reviewes sites on not a personal emotional feelings but real statistics. A website is always green as long it has no malware nor viruses on it in my opionion. All other aspects the user himself can decide, we don´t need WOT as a nanny for our opinions.