Hi all. ive been reading and using this site for eons and appreciate the help and humor. my question is a bit odd but it hit me theres a font of knowledge here so someone can fill me in.
I get spam/ BS calls many times a day and have been incredulous at the constant new tricks "they" come up.with to circumvent any and all done to stop it. I look up many many numbers a day online. my observation that stuns me is how hijacked and spammed the search returns are when I look up a number. im.sure you've done it yourself. I use Google and yahoo and others but I'll focus on these 2. putting in a number, unless its a business or actual number of someone on some WhitePages site that rarely gives publicly available numbers ( or the sites that then want you to pay $) the returns are ALL crazy website names with paragraphs of phone numbers and usually foreign names attached , or, paragraphs of that bot -generated pig Latin gibberish. many of the web site names seem to be long abandoned political sites in Taiwan or random business URLs from shoe stores to cruise lines to sentences. you'll get pages of this. in digging I'll find the same 1 number listed in 8 states with 15+ people's names attached to on 15 listing.
I've written to Google dozens of times and yahoo which is useless. some of these returns are sponsored ads. if you go to one some ask for you to put the number in. there's ads all over but nothing overly much. some have fake reports of numbers people reported and marked ok or suspicious. they have pages of phone numbers, all out of order, and of course you'll never find the one you looked for.
I imagine eventually you'll hit a virus or Trojan or maybe someone is making 3 cents off your ad revenue but I'm dying to know what and why these sites are there. I see it as tons of stolen or hijacked or hacked sites being blatantly used to ...what? I asked Google and yahoo why they're ok with their search results being owned by utter garbage that's being put up. its not safe and who are all these people? why are all.these sites up when its taken over the search?
thank you and stay safe. wash your hands like you're washing Jason Momma :)
+3
MikeHuntleton
| 4 replies
Search engines such as those you mentioned offer website owners the use of API scripts to aid in the collection of their websites for searchable data. Many people create websites simply to try earning a few bucks and of course since Smart Phones have become much smarter than the users, phone number look ups have increased due to call spoofing. Most of those "word salad" search results that only leave you wondering 'what the heck' go to a phone number look up website and don't offer anything but confusion for the visitor. Those are merely meant to get web traffic so they can earn an extra buck from the ad revenue....more traffic, more Ad Revenue.
The ones that display the actual number you are looking up are slowly getting buried by these "word salad" sites, making it important to bookmark a good site (such as this one) and use the internal search when looking for reliable info.
On top of those are the scammers who use "anti SEO" tricks to either hide their scam numbers or to prevent their rivals numbers from displaying when they are searched.
Oh, yeah, the one where I wasn't quite sure what was being asked and offered what I knew about those "word salad' anti-SEO posts made by scammers on many phone look up sites.
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+1
aslaug
thank you, guys! I had this page bookmarked but in all the current excitement...cough...I forgot to check back.
I use duck Duck duck Go a lot and wrote to them to ask since their returns are just as corrupted and nonsensical as Google or everyone else. one of the owners was nice enough to reply. wow..and I've written Google about eleventy hundred times with no reply.
he said they're aware the search returns are " poisoned" ( great way to describe it) by these spammers and everyone is trying to figure out how to end it. I deleted the email but he said they were working with suppliers of the data and fancy stuff like Mike above mentioned.
today I got 32 spam calls all bots, saying my car warranty was expired and so my world is coming to an end. the bright spot in this is I found if you put something like " Prrt zeebeInK Kapop64==:" on a search engine, it/that/She/They have a number, too, and Amazon will claim to have it for sale. im this bored.... thanks again for replies!!
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Kay
I also long ago concluded that looking up phone numbers in google was generally useless. I use this site and 2 others that are intended to deal with robocalls. For a while, I just stopped answering calls from unknown callers on the theory they were likely from scammers and that it just marked my phone as callable. Now, when convenient, I do answer calls because it gives me the opportunity to report them on this site and the two others, assuming this is one way to help prevent them from scamming others. And the ad revenue then supports this site and the other 2.
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