ネット匿名投稿のカラクリ
TECH_JAPAN Web
'Stealth marketing' by companies is polluting online forums
Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012 By AKKY AKIMOTO, Japan Times
You may have heard that the underbelly of the Japanese Web revolves around a massive bulletin-board service called 2-channel (pronounced ni-channel), where people can post messages anonymously. For Japanese, who find it difficult to freely express their opinions in public, that anonymity has meant that 2-channel has become a place of emancipation. As such, the site is mostly full of garbage and is often the epicenter of Internet "incidents." It has, though, also become an outlet for a lot of valuable information.
However, to sort though the huge number of posts on 2-channel can take time, and these days many people are not actually reading directly from 2-channel. Instead they read 2-channel matome (summary) sites and blogs that summarize lengthy discussions into short and concise reads.
Once the matome bloggers find an interesting discussion thread, they summarize what can sometimes be thousands of comments by cutting off all extraneous or "noise" comments. They also reorder comments, change the fonts and color of the text so readers can grab the gist of the discussion more easily.
The first summary sites appeared around 2004-2005, and gradually became popular with people who were tired of reading too many comments on 2-channel. Typically, these blogs have many affiliate ads displayed, and some of these bloggers have been able to make enough to live off their blogs.
Following the success of matome blogs, more and more bloggers have entered this field. Livedoor blog, one of Japan's largest blog-hosting services, is now home to many of these 2-channel summary sites, and the majority of the Top-50-ranked blogs are 2-channel summary sites. Last April, one of the top blogs, Itai News (Ouch News), surpassed 100 million page views per month.
One characteristic of anonymous forums is that it's not easy to define who holds the copyright of 2-channel discussions. As a result, many of the books and novels based on 2-channel texts have either given profits back to the 2-channel management or donated to natural disasters.
It is also near-impossible to trace the copyright of user comments, so it is often ignored. Summary bloggers therefore take that content and profit off it by attracting ads on their own sites. After learning that some bloggers are earning a lot of money by doing this — and are also rumored to be invited to entertaining company events — some of the 2-channel users, who originally posted comments, started to complain that summary bloggers must not earn money from "their" comments.
In an effort to lure more visitors, some of the larger summary blogs tend to edit and select comments arbitrarily and use biased headlines to make things more controversial. Once these posts are shared on social media, especially on Twitter, people are often misled because many of these blogs do not make corrections. This has led to an increasing number of users protesting against these blogs.
There are even rumors that some of the top editors at 2-channel — who are able to open new discussions — are secretly working with summary bloggers, guiding regular users to make favorable comments for affiliated companies, and steering users into making controversial arguments against rival, non-affiliated products.
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Users of 2-channel who are against such bloggers call themselves ken-cho, a newly coined term made up of the kanji for "hate" and "profit." In 2007, when "antiprofit" users of the site pressed the founder of 2-channel, Hiroyuki Nishimura, on the issue, he created alternative sections where comments are not supposed to be reused for outside profit. However, as there are users who don't care about the summary sites business, these sections were never as popular as the regular "copying-allowed" counterparts. That is, until this month.
On Jan. 1, a comment was made on 2-channel regarding a link on the website of an anime company called Shaft. Within the link — to a Shaft product on Amazon.jp — was embedded a Amazon Affiliates ID tag belonging to a 2-channel summary site called Yaraon. This convinced some people that Shaft and Yaraon — and maybe more companies and summary sites — are secretly working together to promote certain products on 2-channel to make a profit.
As many other popular matome blogs are known to choose mostly favorable comments on topics such as game consoles, anime, gadgets, and so on, some 2-channel users started to suggest that this is evidence of sutema (an abbreviation of "stealth marketing") managed by the companies and the blogs.
This led to much discussion on 2-channel, which was in turn summarized on the matome site Hachima-Kikou. But because the summary was done in a cynical manner it made some 2-channel users mad and Hachima-Kikou has now become the main target for antiprofit protesters.
The term sutema has since become a hot topic on the Japanese Web — not only rising on 2-channel but also on Twitter trends and in Google's hot keywords. And on Jan. 4, another stealth-marketing controversy made news, this time surrounding Japan's largest restaurant review service, Tabelog.
It was reported that Tabelog's reviews have been manipulated by third-party agents who receive payment from restaurants who want better ratings, or even to give rival restaurants bad ratings. The national media covered it, adding fuel to the stealth-marketing fire.
Around Jan. 8 many users began to boycott one of the main news forums on 2-channel, News Sokuhou Plus (Flash News Plus) — a main resource for summary sites, and a potential source of sutema. Instead, users migrated to News Sokuhou Ken-cho (Flash News Antiprofit). According to 2-channel's own tracking service, News Sokuhou Ken-cho is now the second most popular forum, while the original News Sokuhou Plus (without ken-cho) fell to fourth place — though most of comments there are protest messages, and garbage repeating "Sutema! Sutema," posted by people who want the original News Sokuhou Plus to become a useless, non-communicable forum.
Because of the protests, many summary bloggers are now struggling, losing content to use and edit. It is kind of funny that most of those bloggers are obeying the 2-channel rule, and not taking comments from the ken-cho-type forums.
Whether the stealth-marketing really exists as claimed or not, this incident has made Web marketers reconsider their use of such non-disclosed marketing activities. Though, sadly, I'm sure this won't last long.
Akky Akimoto writes for Asiajin.com, an English blog on the Japanese Web scene. You can follow him @akky on Twitter.
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凡人は最初は本気にしたが、Eメールのやり取りを通じ返答が機械的でおかしいと気づく。ネットで調べたら案の定。名前と国は違うが同じ内容の仕事募集。詐欺と分かる。クレーグリストは改めて詐欺の土壌になっていることに大いに失望した。
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Can i get in any trouble from cashing a check made out to me?
I posted an add on craigslist and someone sent me thisThanks for your email and respond toward the Cleaner position you did reply to on Craigslist, I'm Fred Mike and My wife' s name is Rose Mike, she's 5 months pregnant and this is our first born baby. We are relocating to the City from Denmark.I'm coming there to do some contract basis with United States Environmental Protection Agency(USEPA) on a private research work ,So i need someone who could help me take care of the house by doing some house work while am offto work. Someone that will also help in running some errands. I will be offering you $500 weekly, i will be needing your services for three hours at any suitable time of yours , Mondays through Fridays. I believe you will be fit for this position in as much you will prove yourself to be a reliable and good person. We have a financier that is based in the states and he will be handling the payment and some other expenses, so he will be the one that will be taking care of your the payment, I will instruct him to pay for the first week before my arrival so as to secure your service, actually i should have paid for more weeks but i will extend the payment if am satisfy with your service after the first week.
My financier will be making out a check to you before my arrival, you will be receiving a check of $2950 out which you will deducting your pay for the first week and you will be using the remaining to buy foodstuffs and other things needed in the house ,you will getting this foodstuff on the day of our arrival which is march 7th 2012. Actually all flights from the United Kingdom arrives at nights so you will be getting the foodstuff in the morning and making all other preparations. I will also instruct my estate agent to mail the keys of the apartment to you so that you can do all other necessary preparations before we arrive,I will also email you the shopping list.
You have to get all this shopping before our arrival so that we wont have to start running around when we arrive, So my financier would be needing the following Information to make out the check
Now if they send me the check and i cash it and it clears can i get in any kind of trouble at all? Is there anything illegal that can happen here?
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There is no job. The check is FAKE and will NOT clear, Yes, you can and will get into trouble with your bank for cashing a fake check.
There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money.
The next email will be from another of the scammer's fake names and free email addresses pretending to be the "secretary/assistant/accountant" and will demand you cash a large fake check sent on a stolen UPS/FedEx billing account number and send most of the "money" via Western Union or moneygram back to the scammer posing as the "financier" while you "keep" a small portion. When your bank realizes the check is fake and it bounces, you get the real life job of paying back the bank for the bounced check fees and all the bank's money you sent to an overseas criminal.
Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.
When you refuse to send him your cash he will send increasingly nasty and rude emails trying to convince you to go through with his scam. The scammer could also create another fake name and email address like "FBI@ gmail.com", "police_person @hotmail.com" or "investigator(at)yahoo.com" and send emails telling you the job is legit and you must cash the fake check and send your money to the scammer or you will face legal action. Just ignore, delete and block those email addresses. Although, reading a scammer's attempt at impersonating a law enforcement official can be extremely funny.
Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great jobs, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.
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Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.
Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.
6 "Rules to follow" to avoid most fake jobs:
1) Job asks you to use your personal bank account and/or open a new one.
2) Job asks you to print/mail/cash a check or money order.
3) Job asks you to use Western Union or moneygram in any capacity.
4) Job asks you to accept packages and re-ship them on to anyone.
5) Job asks you to pay visas, travel fees via Western Union or moneygram.
6) Job asks you to sign up for a credit reporting or identity verification site.
Avoiding all jobs that mention any of the above listed 'red flags' and you will miss nearly all fake jobs. Only scammers ask you to do any of the above. No. Exceptions. Ever. For any reason.
If you google "fake check cashing job", "fraud Western Union scam", "check mule moneygram scam" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near-victims of this type of scam.
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非常に便利な送金方法だが、ペイパル(Paypal)も注意しないと詐欺に利用される。
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There are plenty of scams using Paypal's name
1 - they send you an email saying money has been sent but due to new security measures it will not be credited until you send the tracking info. So you send the item, email the tracking info, then check Paypal and there is NO money in your account. You call Paypal who tells you they never emailed you, there was no transaction and they NEVER ask for tracking info before crediting your account
2 - they send you money from a hacked Paypal account, you ship the item, then the real account holder discovers the theft, reports it to Paypal and the money is refunded from your account
3 - they send you a fake Paypal email saying money has been sent but you have to click on a link to verify the transaction - which leads you to a fake but real looking Paypal log-in page that you log into -- and you just got your account hacked
4 - they send you money from a real Paypal account, ask you to ship to a certain address, then file a chargeback. If you did not check with Paypal that the address they gave you was the "verified" address and you sent anywhere but the verified address, they claim they never received the item and Paypal refunds them. It doesn't matter if you have proof it was delivered to the other address along with an email from the buyer telling you to ship to that address. If you ship anywhere but the verified Paypal mailing address, you have NO protection and Paypal will always side with the buyer
Unless you are selling through Ebay, make sure any listing says across the top and bottom in all caps
** LOCAL BUYERS ONLY, CASH ONLY, NO SHIPPING **
and ignore everyone who wants anything else