Currently, I’m writing something about the use of online databases to search for people. There seem to be quite a few of these services—Truthfinder, Spokeo, Beenverified , and Peoplefinders, for example—vacuuming up the digital noise of the Internet, bundling it, and then selling it as packages of factual, current data about a given person.
Currently, I’m writing something about the use of online databases to search for people. There seem to be quite a few of these services—Truthfinder, Spokeo, Beenverified , and Peoplefinders, for example—vacuuming up the digital noise of the Internet, bundling it, and then selling it as packages of factual, current data about a given person.
As an experiment, I signed up for one of these to search my own name. The service I used returned 63 pages of stuff. Some of it was about me. Most of it was about other people with a similar name, information about previous owners of my house, and, weirdly, a list of mugshots of sex offenders living near me. I guess it was worth $5.99 for a one-time search. Turns out, that’s not what I was paying for.
Instead, I discovered I was billed for two other items: one for $3.99 and one for $35.47. I’m not sure what they were for, but I did call and threaten to start fraud investigations with PayPal and Visa. They canceled the charges, and just before I hung up, the woman I was speaking to mentioned the “next billing.” Next? Turns out I also signed up for a monthly subscription to this search service. That was not my intent, and I quickly had that canceled too.
This seems like standard practice for a lot of online businesses: mention what appears to be a one-time fee and disguise it as an automatic, open-ended payment scheme. I wonder how much money this mechanism generates each year?
I think the best way to approach many of these online services and businesses—many with no easily found physical addresses—is to use something like a Visa gift card instead of your regular credit card or PayPal, which is usually tied to a credit card. You can load the gift card with a small amount of money and not have to worry about some automatic payment scheme parasitizing your credit card.
See: How to Use a Visa Gift Card Online.