Here’s a pretty good quote that sums up the scammers pretty well:

“They prey on people who are desperate,” says Ohio truck driver Robert Anderson, who fell for a home-based job opportunity that appeared to be from Google. “They make money by lying to people, promising them the world and giving them a guarantee they have no intention of honoring.”

I don’t have much more to add except that this sort of thing is showing up everywhere – email spam, spam accounts on Twitter, various ad networks, etc. Much of it is automated but the profit margins are high enough that they can afford to have actual people creating accounts, solving captchas, etc. so any company getting spammed with these schemes has to take a proactive approach.

As Shipwreck so presciently explained in 1985, the other half of the battle is knowing. Please feel free to send this article, or the one from ABC, or the Google Blog post around to any friends and family wondering about making money online. The truth is, may people make money with their websites, but it takes hard work. There’s no secret kit that returns cash with no effort and no investment.

The first thing I noticed was that the map display uses Google Maps, but the site actually uses OpenStreetMap data for gameplay. Actually, the first thing I noticed was that their servers were being absolutely crushed by all the people rushing in the play the game, but I digress. OpenStreetMap is a really cool project to build mapping data using the same model as Wikipedia – interested volunteers add and verify data and everything is covered by a Creative Commons License.

Building a game with this data is so obvious in retrospect that I’m surprised I haven’t seen it done before (if you’ve seen any other games played across a real world map like this, let me know in the comments below). Now that they have their servers sorted out, it’s a relatively fun game, though more simplistic than I had hoped. It’s so simplistic, in fact, that I’m going to tell you two ways to make tons of cash quickly.

Tactic #1: Do the math

The basic way to make money is by buying streets, which generate rent every turn, and building properties on those streets, which also generate rent. For now, I’m going to ignore making money speculatively by buying desirable streets and selling them for a profit later.

Streets always generate 10% of their cost in rent, but the rent of each building is determined by the building cost, the cost of the street, and a static multiplier for each building. You can see a full list of list of building costs and rents here, but the main thing to look at is return on investment. The more expensive the building, the lower the multiplier – so there’s no reason to buy anything but the cheapest buildings.

If you buy the cheapest property, the Green House, for $50,000, and place it on a street that cost $100,000, you will earn a total of ($100,000 * 10%) + ($50,000 * 10%) = $15,000. If you build that same house on a million-dollar street, you’ll earn ($1,000,000 * 10%) + ($50,000 * 100%) = $150,000. In the first case you get about 10% return while in the latter case you get about 14%. What’s more, since houses on million-dollar streets return 100% each turn, and streets only return 10%, it makes sense to buy houses rather than streets.

Here’s a spreadsheet with more numbers to illustrate:

Now since other players can eliminate your rent by placing hazards on your streets, it makes sense to diversify a little bit and buy a few. But you should always buy million-dollar streets, and favor the smallest buildings.

This tactic breaks down once streets become a scarce resource, but since you’re playing on a world map that’s not likely to happen soon.

Tactic #2: Cheat

I’m not actually recommending anyone do this, but since some users had impossible first-day totals my guess is the cat’s already out of the bag. A video game is just like any other system, and clever (and/or unscrupulous) players can take advantage of the rules or step outside the rules to gain advantage. In this case we need to think about the other ways players get money – when you sign up, you get $3 million and each day you log in you get $1 million. Since players can bid on each others’ properties, there’s nothing to stop someone from creating many accounts, and making extravagant offers for properties owned by one hub account. This funnels money to one player much faster than collecting rent would.

Is this abuse? I didn’t actually see a written policy forbidding it (though I didn’t read all the fine print on the site). But my thought is yes, it’s abusive, because it confers such a large advantage that it will tend to make the game less fun for other players. The folks at EA need to decide if this is the case and think about taking steps to detect this behavior, prevent it, and mitigate existing bad behavior.

Even if this is fixed, though, the math in the game is too simple and doesn’t lead to much interesting gameplay. The buying-and-selling of desirable streets adds some flavor, but it’s largely a gold rush for players who logged in early. If you’re not first in to get Pennsylvania Avenue or the Champs Elysees, your best bet is to find random long streets away from the cities and fill them with boring houses. Which is sadly similar to the development patterns in the U.S. over the last 60 years.

This is a very important story – these scams employ a number of social engineering techniques to seem trustworthy and they are tricking people who are desperate for work out of their money. The folks at GMA did a good job explaining the issue without getting too technical and confusing – please forward this on to anyone you know who’s wondering about schemes like these.

If you’ve clicked through and watched the video, you might have noticed something – they got my name wrong! I assure you that I am, and always have been Jason Morrison and not James Morrison.

Besides getting ribbed by coworkers ad friends, this naming mishap is propagating to local ABC affiliates. How long until I’m forced to change my name just to convince everyone I’m really me?

This is my second trip to TV as a Googler, last year I was interviewed on The Morning Show in Australia for our Google Docs-based baby name poll. This issue is much more serious, so I did more preparation this time. It’s hard to boil down important information into small pieces for broadcast news. My natural tendency is to explain, which works well when I’m giving a presentation on a technical topic but doesn’t work as well in a 90-second segment for a non-technical audience.

They actually filmed a lot more than what you see – it took about a half hour to get through all the questions and some establishing shots. I’m not too worried that they only grabbed a couple of snippets from the interview – I am, after all, just a geeky guy trying to warn people about uncouth spammers, not a television personality. It’s quite possible that I didn’t give them a lot of usable film. The important thing is that the info is getting out there.

By the way, this is one of the things I like about working for Google – I’m not sure most companies would go out and tell people about a scam using the company logo. I think in the long term, anything we can do to educate and protect our users is beneficial.

Also, notice that they put me right out in front of the camera – Google is one of the few companies that will send journalists right to someone who really knows about an issue, rather than always using PR professionals and spokespeople. I bet the idea of having a programmer speak on national TV is horrifying to most companies.

So how did I (or this James person) do? Should they hide me back in the cubicles?

No, I am not making this up. The AP is really asking people to pay them $12.50 if they quote more than four words of any story. A nice long sentence with 26 words will cost you $17.50. Presumably this includes headlines, meaning the AP could come looking for cash if you even link to one of their stories with the relevant text.

Let’s put aside the fundamental misunderstanding of how the web works for a moment, and put it in terms that most journalists should understand: This pricing scheme amounts to prior constraint on any substantive criticism of the AP. One of the most important reasons we have fair use rights is to excerpt material for commentary or criticism. The AP says that this effort is directed against copyright infringement and sites that scrape and monetize their stories, but quoting 5, 25, even 50 words from an article is in most cases not copyright infringement–it’s attribution.

The AP runs stories on medical topics all the time. If a doctor wants to point out an error in an AP story on their blog, we had better hope they have the cash. Could you imagine being misidentified as the suspect in a crime, only to have the AP bill you when you point out the correction? It’s not like the AP never makes mistakes.

Heaven forbid someone working for a competing news agency wants to criticize the AP’s coverage for bias or political slant. That would require quoting sentences from many articles – perhaps thousands of dollars.

The AP even has the gall to quote prices for educational use. I’m sure the numerous Supreme Courts deciding Fair Use cases over the years would be pleased – it goes against all precedent, but hey, a coupon!

Outside of criticism, the AP’s own guidelines tell you why this is so important:

We should give the full name of a source and as much information as needed to identify the source and explain why he or she is credible. Where appropriate, include a source’s age; title; name of company, organization or government department; and hometown.

If we quote someone from a written document – a report, e-mail or news release — we should say so.

It’s just as important for writers in other media to use proper attribution. Writers should use direct quotes when it’s the fairest way to represent what someone else has said or written. How would the AP operate if every source they quoted demanded payment up front?

But, of course, they would never:

It means we don’t pay newsmakers for interviews, to take their photographs or to film or record them.

This makes me sad. I’m a big proponent of professional journalism and I hate to see newspapers in such dire straits. But if this is representative of what the industry plans to do, I’m not sure they have much of a chance.

The design considerations for my home page are a little different from my blog – I don’t expect anyone to come back to my homepage again and again, looking for informative articles or useful info. The use case for the home page can be stated pretty succinctly: “who is this guy, and what does he do?”

I’m also operating under the design constraint of what I can get done while our 8-month-old is napping. This means a very simple layout – it takes time to come up with lickable web2.0 buttons and reflections. I’d like the page to be visually interesting, though, which is why I decided to use a big freaking photo in the background.

Normally I would try to avoid such a bandwidth-sucking design but bandwidth doesn’t seem to be the problem it used to be. I have some ideas on how to trim down the image size without impacting the design too much that I’ll share once I’ve got it up.

Here’s a screenshot of the first draft:

And here’s what it looks like, as of this post:

What do you think? I’m specifically wondering:

• Should I put a photo of myself on my homepage?
• Any typography ideas? Right now everything is Helvetica (or Arial, if Helvetica isn’t installed).
• The content boxes are floats, and they change position depending on the window size. Should I lock them down?

The only problem with doing a general web search is that not every site on the web is guaranteed to have good information. Some forums are more useful than others, and in the worst cases scammers and spammers spend lots of time trying to get their stuff in the index too.

So, I’ve created something to make it a little easier: a Google Custom Search Engine called Is This A Scam?

Wondering about a home business proposition? Drop a query here. Does your uncle keep falling for pyramid schemes? Send him this link and make him promise to search before he writes the next check.

Custom Search Engines are very useful and are incredibly easy to create. You can create one for your site, or one covering many sites under a certain topic, and you can even make money via AdSense For Search.

This particular search engine works well because I combed the web looking for high-quality sources of information about scams, fraud, snake oil, and consumer protection. The list well over 100 sites, including forums, blogs, news media, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. I’ll post the list here when I get chance.

If you’d like to volunteer to help out with this effort contact me. By the way, this isn’t an official Google product or service, just me in my free time using Google’s great CSE system, so the standard disclaimer applies.

Got bad results? No results? Have you seen a page in the results that has no business being there? Let me know in the comments below.

Here’s a screenshot of my pending comments a little while back. Notice the second comment, which slipped past Akismet:

Apparently some dude named Casey Fronczek wanted to let my readers know about his fishing trips. I clicked on the O RLY button, and here’s what Google had to show me:

This spam comment showed up about 17,000 times!

This is an interesting case because it shows that spammers aren’t always looking to place links or pass PageRank. They are always looking for some kind of payoff though, and you can see the roundabout technique here. Hopefully anyone interested in fishing trips in southern Florida will Google this guys relatively unique name and result in a sale. You may also see phone numbers, ICQ or other IM accounts, and similar contact information in some comment spam.

This is a little tougher to automatically delete because a spammy link is a really good signal for an automated filter. Hopefully if people have enough little tools, we bloggers can improve the state of the web as a whole. Get the plugin from WordPress.org, and please let me know of other good anti-spam plugins in the comments.

These get-rich-quick schemes are all over the place. They take advantage of the Google brand and the large number of people who are out of work now and looking for new opportunities. Read the article for more info but in general, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

The opening paragraph is a true story – so thanks mom, for asking about this an prompting me to look into this further.

Of those, what percentage of the time do you actually read and understand the blobs of tiny print?

I logged in to iStockPhoto for the first time in a while and was confronted by a change to the artists’ agreement. I was shocked, absolutely flabbergasted, to find the document clear and easy to read. I’m not sure this has ever happened before. I actually understood what they were talking about. Here’s a screenshot:

A few pointers on how to construct a similarly user-friendly legal document:

• Put a quick, “plain language” description at the top.
• Highlight text changes by coloring the new sections and visibly crossing out the removed text.
• Include convenient contact information at the bottom for further help and information. By convenient, I mean convenient for the reader, not convenient for your company.

Legal document usability is so bad at this point that I would advocate changing the law so that any terms document that didn’t meet the three point above would be automatically null and void. Kudos to iStockPhoto for getting it right.

Spammers create fake profiles for a number of nefarious purposes. Sometimes they’re just a way to reach users internally on a social networking site. This is somewhat similar to the way email spam works – the point is to send your users messages or friend invites and trick them into following a link, making a purchase, or downloading malware by sending a fake or low-quality proposition.

Spammers are also using spam profiles as yet another avenue to generate webspam on otherwise good domains. They scour the web for opportunities to get their links, redirects, and malware to users. They use your site because it’s no cost to them and they hope to piggyback off your good reputation.

The article got a write up in Information Week, which is pretty cool. Any way to let more people know about the issue.