DaveBarousse.com

If you use the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget on your blog, you may have noticed some interesting visitors to your site recently. The two main characters that I have been seeing on numerous blogs that I read are vote4cleo and litllolita. They appear to be two young females soliciting votes to become famous models, but when you dig a little deeper, these girls aren’t who they say they are.

So who is the wizard behind the curtain? My guess would be DeluxeOnlineRewards.com, or some affiliate of theirs, trying to scam your vistors. How are they scamming my visitors, you ask, they seem like two young attractive females simply trying to get a little exposure. That’s exactly what most people think, but lets go through the process so you can see exactly what they are up to.

You start off by finding a photo of MyBlogLog user named vote4cloe on the front page of this site. Among all the normal readers that usually show up there, she seems a bit eccentric, so you click on her photo or name to see her MyBlogLog profile.

Once landing on vote4cloe’s MyBlogLog profile page, you have to click through to her site that is listed in the “Sites And Blogs That I Author” section. That’s pretty common as bloggers often check out the blogs of visitors who show up in their MyBlogLog widget (I often do). Plus, they entice the desire to click through with this little bit of text, “Help Cleo become a Victoria’s Secret Model!” I think that would grab the attention of most men and a lot of women.

As you’ll see after clicking through, you land on vote4cleo’s Myspace profile. Notice her bio is all about her trying to be a Victoria Secret model and some drama about it being her lifetime dream. Also notice the huge bold link that reads, “Click Here To Vote For Me!” After clicking on that link is when the fun really begins.

When you click through vote4cleo’s Myspace profile, you’ll land on a page that looks like a page owned and operated by Victoria’s Secret (notice how they call it Victoria Secrets). The text says that if you participate in their offer you’ll earn a $500.00 gift card. To kick off the process, there is a form in the middle of the page for you to enter your zip code. Since vote4cloe is trying to be a Victoria’s Secret model and the web page appears to be legit, this all seems normal.

You are excited about getting $500.00 so you enter your zip code. You are then taken to another form asking you to enter more personal information. Of course you want to get your $500.00 gift card, and you trust Victoria’s Secret, so why not fill this out? Before doing that you may want to have a look at the fine print back on the page with the zip code form.

DeluxeOnlineRewards.com IS NOT AFFILIATED OR ASSOCIATED WITH AND HAS NOT RECEIVED ANY CONSIDERATION FROM ANY OF THE ABOVE ENTITIES

THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT*Notice: To claim your reward you must participate in our program and meet all of the offer eligibility requirements as outlined in the Terms & Conditions before you can receive your FREE reward. Eligibility requirements include signing up for at least 2 Silver, 2 Gold and 2 Platinum offers. Available offers will vary and some offers may require a purchase to qualify. Those qualifying for Gift Card rewards will have the option of receiving a Visa gift card or a retailer’s gift card where available.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, vote4cleo is NOT a young attractive female trying to become a Victoria’s Secret model. She is an online marketer trying to get your information to sell. If you’ve made it to the page with the form asking for your email address, city, state, age, etc. then you are only a few keystrokes away from making vote4cleo a good bit of cash and increasing the amount of spam in your inbox.

After entering your information and submitting the form, you are taken to a page where you have to select at least 6 of the “offers” that are mentioned in the fine print above. Those offers include subscriptions to services such as Dish Network, Columbia House, Bad Credit Loans, etc. What happens here is the marketer will be getting paid for each lead they generate with your information. If you finally make it this far, congratulations, you’ll get your $500.00 gift card. You’ll then need to use it to pay for the 6 or more subscriptions you just signed up for.

This entire process may seem a bit strenuous, but it is obviously working for these marketers as we see these types of campaigns all over the internet. They wouldn’t be putting forth so much effort to dupe people into their offers if it wasn’t making them money. You can also see this technique used in combination with display advertisements such as the classic punch the monkey ads.

Although MyBlogLog has had their share of problems recently, I’m not convinced that this case is a flaw in their system. But isn’t it their responsibility to weed this kind of stuff out? Perhaps. But aren’t most blogs using MyBlogLog to generate traffic to ultimately sell something? Directly or indirectly, yeah, probably so.

I personally don’t want to see MyBlogLog infested with spammers, so I hope they do make it a priority to keep these kind of scams out of their community. It is fun to browse the blogs of those who visit my site. When most of the users who appear in the recent readers widget are “fakes,” I’ll be removing it from my blog.

After going through this process, one of the most interesting things to me are the comments that bloggers are leaving on vote4cleo’s MyBlogLog profile. Most were thanking her for visiting their blog, but I read several where the commenter was sincerely wishing her luck in pursuing her modeling career. That tells me that these people don’t have a clue to what is actually going on.