About Us
Welcome to Hucksters.net. If you’re reading this, you’re probably either a victim of one of the subjects we’ve investigated, or you’re one of the people we’ve exposed. Either way, most of your questions can probably be answered over at our FAQ.
The short version is this:
We maintain the web’s largest database of verified spammers, scammers, and scumbags, and we’re not going to stop, because we love the internet.
Our main goal is to improve transparency in regard to internet dysfunction. As things like politics, cronyism, censorship, and other factors contribute to a handful of Big Tech companies controlling information flow online, we felt it was increasingly necessary for a straightforward database of verified “online” humans and their associated data points.
Hucksters does deep dive OSINT research to find out who is behind an email spam campaign, online scam, or other fraud, and then lists them here.
But why do we do all this?
Mainly, out of tough love — to encourage bad behavior to stop — and secondly, to protect innocent people. We don’t believe in being unnecessarily malicious or cruel, and on occasion we do remove profiles in our directory under specific circumstances.
What exactly is Hucksters.net?
- Adults only. We will not index anyone who is currently a minor, no matter what. This means under the age of 18 years old for our purposes. Likewise, we will not index anything (brands, etc) that you were a part of when you were a minor. It simply does not interest us and we want to have clear limits to our database. Note: there are very rare exceptions to this, such as when a teenager is part of a highly covered international news story and already has a significant online reputation… still, we will try to limit our index narrowly to the news events involved in making that minor famous, for example a 13 year old murder victim, or 17 year old world-record holder, etc.
- Online stuff only (mostly). We only index people and brands that have an online association. If John Doe works at McDonalds, it does not apply here. Even if John Doe works at Amazon, but in the back warehouse for shipping, it does not apply here. Our goal is to expose those efforts at selling and influencing the general public on the internet, not uncovering every last piece of someone life or activity. If it is not happening online, and is not seeking to control or influence others, or does not directly effect technical internet infrastructure (e.g. a web developer) then it probably does not interest us. Certain exceptions might be for low-profile government employees (etc) as our goal is to index any tax-funded professionals, so even if a politician, judge, or government employee (including public school teachers) attempts to keep a low profile, we will still try our best to index them as they are part of the political system.
- Influencers only (mostly). This is not a phone book. Our goal is to bring transparency to online sales and business operations because we believe it benefits the public to know who is trying to sell them something and what others’ experiences have been like. We particularly emphasize mass advertisers on social media and search engines, etc. An artist selling photographs on their homepage does not really concern us here. We aim to shed a light on things like scams, fraud, hype artists, and similar schemes. This does not mean that everything listed here is unethical or illegal by any means. But that is the entire point of allowing users to share their experiences.
You are free to leave reviews of these people or brands, as long as you use your real name and swear that you have direct experience with the things you talk about. You can edit or update or delete your reviews at anytime. The only time we will delete reviews is if we discover a false identity has been used, or if the review contains nothing of public interest (such as spam links, jibberish that doesn’t make sense, nothing but trash talk, or things like that).
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/the-dark-side-of-techno-utopianism