Reputation Defender

[nooni]

Web of Lies

People of the Web - Web of Lies

(^ includes video for those too lazy to read :P )

When your online identity has been tarnished, Reputation Defender will help you clean it up.
By KEVIN SITES, FRI FEB 22, 2:26 PM PST

When Salina Rahim saw the MySpace page she nearly reeled back in her chair. The name and photograph were hers, but the profile description was complete fiction.

“I would have been horrified, absolutely horrified, if any family members had seen that,” Salina says from her tidy, one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

The profile described the exploits of a lusty “cougar” obsessed with sex and on the prowl. Even the book section read, “I’m too busy trying to please men to read books.”

It was piled on heavy enough, she said, to sound like it came from the imagination of a man — her rejected ex-boyfriend. To increase her torment, he took G-rated photos she had given him and added X-rated images of other women he found on porn sites.

Problems like Salina's are by no means limited to MySpace. With the explosion of social networking on the Web, many people maintain profiles on multiple sites, giving potential cyber-bullies plenty of targets.

And the task of removing unwanted personal information from the Web can be daunting. Just this month, a report in the New York Times highlighted the difficulties some users encountered in fully deleting their Facebook profiles.

For Salina, a modest 35-year-old fashion design student born in Great Britain to Indian parents, it was a devastating blow to her good name and reputation. It was also potentially dangerous — 75 MySpace users emailed her looking for a “good time.”

Salina confronted her ex-boyfriend and says he admitted to creating the profile. She decided to get a restraining order against him, which provided some protection against future harassment but did nothing to destroy the bogus MySpace account. We contacted the man named in her restraining order, but he claimed not to know her.

Next Salina emailed a generic MySpace customer service account but says the response left her confused and didn’t help bring down the page. That’s when she contacted a company she had heard about on a TV talk show: Reputation Defender.

Less than two years old, Reputation Defender is the brainchild of a savvy, shaggy-haired 29-year-old Harvard Law School graduate named Michael Fertik. He had the foresight to see potential value and profit in straining out some of the garbage that flows thick in the Internet’s information pipeline.