MyWOT’s Latest Extortion Scheme
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009Recently on the MyWOT blog, a new program was announced to “…earn some income.” It involves “allowing” websites that have earned a good rating with MyWOT’s community of users to place a shield on their site indicating such.
Although reputable services like the BBB already offer such a service with accreditation, MyWOT is undoubtedly going to use this as a way to extort businesses. Whereas the BBB is upfront with how they accredit businesses and use a fair, open and responsible system to examine companies, MyWOT simply pawns off the responsibility on users and can therefore easily manipulate its ratings. So if a company doesn’t want to pay, they get a poor rating. If they do pay, they get a nice shiny shield on their site. If anyone questions the poor rating, MyWOT simply says it’s because their “users” rated it poorly on their own.
It’s quite the racket.