iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/08/2026

The scammers marked up the price by 15%, then passed the order on to the restaurant, pocketing the vig: pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/p... 30/

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: This is your brain on fraud apologetics (24 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/08/2026

This scammer - based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room - had copied *hundreds* of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result *before* the real one. 31/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 05/08/2026

Remember: Google *knows* what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name. 32/

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