

$1000-a-day Pinterest scammer claims hoax - jond3k
http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-scammer-hoax-controversy/

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mrmaddog
This is a prime example of how to not write a correction piece.

The gist of the story is that they used a screenshot to verify somebody's
identity, and it turns out the person faked it. However, instead of saying "we
made a mistake and didn't verify our sources properly," they go on to spin
stories like "But is Steve a prankster, or is he a spammer having second
thoughts" and "Regardless of its validity, Steve’s story helped expose a very
real issue for Pinterest." Both could possibly be true, but they are just
speculating to save face.

The part that annoyed me to make me comment was this paragraph:

 _"So who is this spammer? Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell right now.
Even if another person claiming to be final-fantas07 came forward, the only
way that individual could prove his or her identity—a screenshot—could be
faked (again)."_

Really? A little bit of critical thinking and you could have him make a post
using one of his bots' account, or delete a post, or use any other more
reliable, actually verifiable source.

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igorgue
I wish I could make them read this:
[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-
mr-d...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2012/03/retracting-mr-daisey-
and-the-apple-factory)

So they can learn something about journalism.

~~~
smashing
OR you could just link here: <http://www.dailydot.com/ethics-policy/>

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matznerd
I'm from the IM community and $1000 a day is not unheard of, but most of the
other people using pinterest are not making this much, especially since they
stopped sending all pins to the front page (now only 1 per hour or so). The
traffic coming from Pinterest is also not converting that well, it seems that
the women like to browse and aren't that into buying. Regardless, pinterest
traffic can be used in a clean way to send traffic to a legitimate store, and
those people are seeing positive results...

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thornofmight
What's "IM community"?

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bira
Internet Marketing community.

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alex_c
The article keeps using "scam" and "spam" interchangeably. As far as I can
tell, no one's actually getting scammed in any way, it's purely spam.

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jgmmo
I'm just happy they didn't call him a 'Hacker'

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joelrunyon
Seems like a pretty lame "hoax." My money's on the guy fell for the appeal of
fame, quickly realized how it was going to impact his finance and backpedaled.

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mapster
Smells like linkbait to sell bots on the blackhat forum that was mentioned.

