Clues To Google Scammer Available At Other Search Engines

from the too-much-trust dept

Last week, we wrote about the scammer who somehow convinced a group of people who should have known better that he could sell them shares in pre-IPO Google. He took them for quite a lot of money. The New York Post has more details about the scammer, Shamoon "Sam" Rafiq, and has one very interesting follow up. They claim that if you did a search for Rafiq's name on Google, nothing suspicious would turn up. However, if you did the same search on competing search engine AllTheWeb, you would have been able to figure out he'd been fired for lying to a previous employer. Other search engines provided some additional clues as well. Of course, it would take quite a bit of detective work to track all this down - and no one was expecting people to check every search engine on this guy. However, doing a bit of basic due diligence (and understanding how so-called friends and family shares work) would have made some sense. Still, it's a bit ironic that anyone relying too much on Google would be fooled by this guy - while using other search engines could have made people more suspicious.

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