There is a new web browser plugin called WebofTrust which is a “free Internet security addon for your browser. It will keep you safe from online scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites. WOT warns you before you interact with a risky website.”
Unfortunately, it seems that my domain somehow made it on a list of sites that promote a get-rich-quick scheme by buying links on Google Adwords. The original page seems to be here, where I am associated with some guy named Scott Hunter. What makes it worse is that a user on the MyWOT Forums is was* telling people to blindly rate all of these listed sites negatively without even actually verifying the content. As any regular reader will know, I have never posted anything to do with any of these Adwords schemes.
As a result, my site has been labeled as a scam site! Users visiting my site will see a pop-up indicating I participate in “phishing or other scams”, and that my site is dangerous.
*Update: It appears I was confused with my-moneyblog.com (note the dash), which is indeed a spammy site and is pretending to be me on some level. The original WoT forum member has edited their post, and the negative reviews have been removed. If you use this plugin, please feel free to rate my site honestly.
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Left you a positive rating. Hope everyone can help this get fixed!
Thanks Jenny!
Can I help without having to download something?
Jonathan, did my part, always enjoy read your blog !
Unreal is there a way without the plugin?
I downloaded their plugin and gave a positive and accurate rating. It will be easy to uninstall the plugin afterwards, and it is worth it if it helps Jonathan continue to share his insights and anectodes with us all.
Thanks for all the great articles!
I also added some comments to the forum where they listed all the “fake news sites” hopefully they’ll be removing this site from their list-of-horrors soon.
I rated you up and my account is over a year old. Your stats are recovering quickly,
Hey Jonathan!
turns out that it is http://www.My-MoneyBlog.com by Scott Hunter – see the dash. people are confusing your site with scott the scam artist. i would try to get the people on WOT to take back their negative comments. FYI.
This is a bit ridiculous, I commented (along with several other mymoneyblog readers I’m guessing) about how this site is 100% legitimate.
What a joke it is that there were so many group-thinking people posting negative reviews based on a forum post…
I just installed the plugin and gave you a positive rating and comment.
I gave you a positive rating
just in case you haven’t noticed, if you go to my-moneyblog.com, that guy put “mymoneyblog.com” on his banner.
Left you a +
I downloaded the plug-in and rated you Excellent and a few other sites.
Gave you an excellent rating because you deserve it. Keep up the great blogging!
Mateo,
You can delete that other post I made. The problem as you noticed seems to be the one page where I put SPACES between the words in the domain name to prevent people from clicking on them and apparently that caused some confusion.
I fixed that page. Now let me see if I can get the WOT people to stop their insanity. 🙂
Mateo,
Looks like the my-moneyblog.com site is hosted via NameCheap. Since the site made the mistake of using your actual site name in the banner I would recommend you at least attempt to contact their abuse department and file a complaint.
I just got a site shut down for stealing ALL my blog content, so I’m not sure if your site name in the header graphic will be enough.
Thanks everyone for their assistance, and thanks to the WOT members who have revised their previous ratings. I’m almost to green on all four measures, and people at least no longer see a big scary pop-up when visiting my site.
OK. I posted over at WOT explaining what happened as well and pointed them to better pages to get their lists from.
Jonathan,
I don’t know, scott hunter seems pretty ligit. He’s got a picture of the check from Google and everything – even a picture of his new car! Plus his RSS feed has 28,000+ subscribers.
Seems like you could take a lesson from a guy who has learned how to make money by just a few clicks of the button at Google Fast Cash.
Web of trust… more like web of distrust.
I too gave 100% good rating
Wow, this is a major bummer. I’m grabbing the Firefox extension now. (Didn’t know that extensions were on the reg version of Chrome now).
@teeej – I can only hope you’re being sarcastic. If not, let me photoshop you an RSS feed image that has 945,444 readers! 🙂 Real ones are pulled from google.
Hey Jonathan,
Paul Schlegel (see posts above) is the founder of workathometruth.com and I think he has me confused with you. I approached him last night to have him change his blog list to add the dash on the website and he did!! He has been awesome about the whole thing. I think he at least deserves a shot out. Anyway, here is our conversation:
http://www.workathometruth.com/blog/2009/09/27/submit-questions-here-temporary-solution/
wow I’d say it’s a pretty good sign that you’re popular enough to be cloned by a scam artist. Congratulations! Sort of. Glad to see it’s getting sorted out.
Dont know if it is still important, but Ill be happy to give you a rating in WOB when I get home tonight.
Mateo,
You’re right. I didn’t realize MyMoneyBlog wasn’t your site. I think it’s a tribute to MyMoneyBlog that one of their subscribers would take it upon themselves to help out in the way you did (not too take anything away from the initiative you took of course).
Hurrah! No more “scam” ratings! You guys rock. Again, thanks for everyone who helped or even wanted to help, I understand not wanting to download extra things. I am also thankful for the members of WoT who promptly removed their negative ratings within 24-48 hours after being notified of this error. Thanks also to Paul Schlegel for his efforts in fixing this. Everything it seemed was done with good intentions.
You are back to ‘Excellent’ status! We can always remove this from Firefox if we want to. Although I kind of like how they have a color blind friendly option.