The Company is a SCAM and Doesn't Respond to Complaints
Complaint
Allen Williams
Country: United States
WOT is a serious ripoff and SCAM. They don't display their phone number, don't answer problems with their rating system and are unresponsive. They are ruining legitimate businesses and something should be done about them. They rate my website a Negative when it should be Question Mark because there are not enough ratings to determine. Yet, they argue with me for two months, don't fix anything and ban me from even logging into my account to track my ratings! All this and I paid them? I am supposed to be the customer? Maybe their location (Finland) protects them from US laws? I don't know how they
get away with such a large scam. Please be warned, they are a SCAM!
This is how the SCAM WORKS:
What happens is someone can login to the WOT account, and rate a site as phishy or unsecure for absolutely no reason at all. When this happens, anytime a customer goes to your website, a large popup will occur stating this is an unsafe site, and you should not proceed. This is ridiculous since WOT does not have any means of checking to see if this information is infact accurate.
They just go off of that single rating input by a random person. Now, the only way to have this popup removed is to either buy their "Web of Trust Seal" which costs $451/year, or have tons of people sign up for an account in their system, which in turn will bring the company more revenue as well.
Here is there 'game', you complain, then the stop answering your emails, then you complain on their forum and they 'block your' name and password so your account is virtually locked. They don't respond to any questions, there is NO SUPPORT and the support there is doesn't assist but gives you wrong answers and the run-around. So like God, they block you off your account so you cannot even answer malicious statements left by other WOT users that are inaccurate. I hope this company is closed down and will line up to sign a lawsuit against them...
No phone number, no response from company they are NOT a WEB OF TRUST but a Website UNTrustworthy!!!!
I have never hated a company as badly as I hate this company. Non-Responsive, Ludicrous Ratings, Playing with people's livelihood and They don't even respond to a problem When They Are Wrong! I truly hate this company.
Allen
get away with such a large scam. Please be warned, they are a SCAM!
This is how the SCAM WORKS:
What happens is someone can login to the WOT account, and rate a site as phishy or unsecure for absolutely no reason at all. When this happens, anytime a customer goes to your website, a large popup will occur stating this is an unsafe site, and you should not proceed. This is ridiculous since WOT does not have any means of checking to see if this information is infact accurate.
They just go off of that single rating input by a random person. Now, the only way to have this popup removed is to either buy their "Web of Trust Seal" which costs $451/year, or have tons of people sign up for an account in their system, which in turn will bring the company more revenue as well.
Here is there 'game', you complain, then the stop answering your emails, then you complain on their forum and they 'block your' name and password so your account is virtually locked. They don't respond to any questions, there is NO SUPPORT and the support there is doesn't assist but gives you wrong answers and the run-around. So like God, they block you off your account so you cannot even answer malicious statements left by other WOT users that are inaccurate. I hope this company is closed down and will line up to sign a lawsuit against them...
No phone number, no response from company they are NOT a WEB OF TRUST but a Website UNTrustworthy!!!!
I have never hated a company as badly as I hate this company. Non-Responsive, Ludicrous Ratings, Playing with people's livelihood and They don't even respond to a problem When They Are Wrong! I truly hate this company.
Allen
Comments
I have done what was recommended or at least a good bit. even after putting up not one but 3 privacy policies getting rid of the comment box , it is worse than no ratings at all, does not seem to matter what I do . Telling people I am not a vendor but still rate poor lmao? Makes no sense to me that I spend time to comply with what was suggested and works the opposite. Not as good a system as I expected. I mean how can a site go from green to red in a matter of an hour when it is just a promotional page to show my music and art.
You talk about cookies on my site but WOT has a ton of long term persistent cookies. I'm just going to rate my site red to prove my point
Putting up with abuse , my info plastered had to change a phone number I had for 30 years!! If this is what this " community " is about then it is not for me.
Trust goes both ways. It was shown my personal info is not safe here because it's ok to post it here although discouraged , according to the founder. And to further allow libel , is just too much of a disappointment
I must say this is a relief to know I am not alone thinking this is a business for them, What you described about the trust shield is the truth. My site rated excellent for the two weeks until people from the mywot community began lowering my ratings and claimed it was an unsafe site. Up until then I had accepted an offer to try their trust badge or shield free for one month, not 2 weeks into it I was informed my rating was poor and they were going to take my free badge away.
I thought wait a minute it was a free badge to try for one entire month. I got a letter asking how I liked my free shield, and I said well I have not seen it yet in action . I think it was a bad idea to accept the free one because that is how they hook you in.
A soon as they got my response that I was not going to buy anything because I believed the system is a huge scam disguised as something good as all scams are, my ratings plummeted to very poor within less than an hour after my response.
It proved that somehow they felt offended they would not get my donation or pay for a bogus trust shield. This proves that WOT is useless. And if it is all in the hands of the users then it is even more screwed.
I was not told the badges and shield have some real tracking and persistent cookies even after you disable the add on.
If a user exposes or brings up the notion that it is a scam, SAMI who also is administrator of the site negates everything and says it's a user run system. Blame the users.
I was harassed by a user at mywot who has multiple accounts maybe in the 100's. Somehow he has gotten past their so called security or is the security. He also took it upon himself to copy paste the Whois data containing all my info in a public comment. I know it is against the terms of use of any Whois database to do so. But they don't agree. They asked for a legal precedent to prove what I was saying.No matter how much I presented It was not enough proof that it is not allowed ,and did not remove my information.
Even if the information is public it is not subject of abuse. I complained to the founder of WOT SAMI who doubles as support . Which they do not have a proper way to contact them , yet to be trusted one must disclose our personal info and TRUST it won't be mishandled.
And if the founder SAMI himself can't offer any support except to ask the user to stop and to remove his comment. All the while my info for two weeks.was exposed ,
SAMI condoned and enabled a user of his site to abuse my information and libel me, and did nothing about it to help me. those posts will be there for ever even if a user removes them. How can I trust them.
Then I was told about the things I had to do to get better ratings, to get a shield, to donate money, to get rid of flash and widgets , to post a privacy notice about the use of flash, I complied with what they ordered me to do was under duress. My site's ratings are very poor and have gotten worse the more I have done to fix issues they brought up.
But I think what sealed my site's coffin was the fact I replied to their extortion e mail by telling them to shove their scam up their behind. So it proves everything you say here as the real truth about THE WEB OF DISTRUST that hides behind WOT.
WOT IS A startup company dedicated to make the web safer by running a scam on site owners and force them to buy a TRUST shield or else their ratings will certainly plummet into DISTRUST.
My site is not a vendor, and I don't have users or a forum and I Don't collect info . Yet I rate badly in all their categories. Is that not suspicious or what ??? Blame it on the algorithm right ?
What is worse is a user of mywot can't rate WOT. They shield themselves from the public finding out it is a scam and showing them how they feel for a change.
The founder SAMI is just gathering users so he can sell the company for millions of dollars . They brag they have rated millions of sites, but what does that really mean if it was the users who rated the sites not WOT.
If it is true the users determine the ratings, then they have many stupid users who never actually visit the sites they rate, they go by other people's ratings. It's like sheep . So their actual interaction with a particular site is zero .
The system for mywot users to gain points of trust which makes your rating weigh more,by rating 100's of sites the same as other users did. So if I disagree with 100 users about a site deemed excellent when I rate that site, my trust points get lowered or they do not climb because I can't be trusted because how can I disagree with 100 people.
This encourages cheating. They track you when you rate a site and based on how you rate, with the flow or against the flow a person gains seniority, it is encouraged to vote with the flow because that is how you gain trust as far as your rating capabilities. How dumb is that. If I vote against the flow then I am not trustworthy . If you rate your own site they know how you rated it and keep a record and if the administrator SAMI thinks you rate yourself too high they also rate you down. As a site owner you are at their mercy. Facebook rates number one in trust. How can that be with all the malware and tracking they use on people!!
So it is not about rating how you feel but how the masses feel. It is like a game for some users. To increase their stat points by rating hundreds of sites like the rest of the people do. It is a flawed system which leads to good sites that are small , to get rated down.
And it is small sites who need any reputation to be had, that succumb to the extortion about getting badge or shield in exchange for your money.
Money is what really buys trust when it comes to WOT. That is the scam.
On the other hand, on WOT I wrote a negative review of a popular website because my experience was profoundly negative. I was then warned about writing negative ratings about popular sites, but also told that if it was my experience, I should let it stand. It was, and I did, feeling a little surprised--opinion sites who expect you to agree with them are abundant. Often if you disagree, you are out. I am not, but the whole idea negates itself. It is an invitation to do something as childish as take revenge on someone you don't like, and my guess is that many mistakes are made, meaning a rating ends up on a different site than was intended--all it takes is a typo.
WOT is far too easily abused, but something legitimate is so necessary. Yet the comments on WOT when they match my experience help. I never knew about the money aspect. I did not know any money was involved, and that is valuable and disappointing information. You now have to pay for your reputation? Thank you for a much needed education. I have been warned away from truly malicious sites--it is a mixed bag for me, but if I had a website and paid for a seal in the situation you describe, I would be absolutely enraged. I never knew.
I registered them with Norton SafeWeb and SafeWeb has given two of them an OK and is still evaluating the third.
Then I went to Web of Trust and my sites were severely down-rated and defamed by WOT's forum moderators. Web of Trust is a company based in Helsinki, Finland.
Immediately after registering the sites with WOT, my BH logs showed a huge increase in bad actor traffic from European Sources, Norway, Sweden, Spain, England and other sources.
The bad traffic included Java1.4.1_04 probes of my sites and other probes which, when I looked up their IPs on whatismyip.com displayed a warning that hundreds of users reported the IP as the source of "Possible Forum Spammers".
WOT's forum moderators were hostile. Their forum moderators are US based to handle english language and seem to be inflexible and ego-blown, power-trippers.
Here are URLs which show what they did to my sites:
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/circanova.com
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/AvenuesPlus.com
They did this simply because when I bought the domain names on BH, BH kept the domain regristrant as private and I was unaware. I corrected the problem and WOT is apparently not willing to repair the damages they have created. WOT has set themselves up as the LAW on the internet, defining what is and is not trustworthy. Frankly, having domain registrant set private or public, has nothing to do with a site's trustworthyness. In fact, if you research domain hidden registrant, you'll even find that the US Congress had considered passing a law to force registrants to be private to block spammers. People pay other hosting services like GoDaddy to have the registrant hidden for this purpose.
It appears that instead of ensuring site trustworthyness, that Web of Trust cannot be trusted and is unethical in their operation. The bad treatment I received and bad actor traffic that has been accessing my site after registering the sites with WOT is evidence of this.
I have collected screen shots of the whole ordeal for legal reasons. The problems are so egregious that I have been compelled to write Senator Barbara Boxer for help regarding this issue requiring attention related to Telecom/Broadcast legislation.
Be Aware and let this be a warning. It's is up to each web developer how to view WOT's service, but I cannot in anyway recommend them.
If they have badly rated my sites for no good reason, then they have badly rated other sites similarly and their service cannot possibly be depended upon to help surfers identify good sites from bad. It would appear that the service has no value and is a trap where information about registered sites is made available to spammers and bad internet actors. IMHO: Use EXTREME CAUTION when considering registering sites with WOT.
If you have had similar bad experiences with WOT, please enlighten us all.
I suggest you all petition your Congressmen/Congresswomen about this. WOT is unsat and a danger to a free and secure internet.
Brian L. Donat
1) Hidden Registrant
2) Retaliation by WOT forum moderators for challenging their rating, not another user's rating, but WOT moderator ratings. And the rash of malware/bad actor accesses to my hosting account just afterwards, is a very very bad deal and security people everywhere should be alert to this.
Both Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools have 'disavow links tools'. You can use these tools to tell Google and Bing to avoid showing in Search Indexes the backlinks from WOT that defame your sites.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-disavow-links-0c56a26f
BTW: When WOT demands that you remove hidden registrant, don't do it. If you do they'll have access to your e-mail, phone and address and can use that info for evil intent.
An example of alledged admission on one of WOTs rebuttals: http://widget.venturebeatprofiles.com/news/view/wot?article=149166
"In November 2009, we introduced a product called WOT Trust Seals. If a site already has a good or excellent reputation, the website owner may purchase a WOT Trust Seal to display on their site to show that they are trusted. For more details on the WOT Trust Seals, you can read our FAQ, http://www.mywot.com/trustseal/faq."
Safe surfing,
Deborah
Web of Trust
Heres one that goes to the quick: http://www.scaminformer.com/scam-report/wot-wot-wot-services-oy-web-of-trust-wot-is-not-ratings-not-c46222.html
So I returned to their website and found
The WOT Web Seal costs $419.07 for standard and $694.23 for the pro version.
In the gangster days of the mob we called that PROTECTION MONEY. Remember the old movies. Pay up and we don't destroy your business. Only its done different in the cyber age. I reckon theres not only many more court battles ahead but some long jail time. Forget the payback tho as the moneys already across the big pond and they'll just pick up and file bankruptcy and start out fresh with another name. Brings up another point, took money from Americans under the guise of protection and went overseas with it. wouldn't that involve Interpol? (202) 616-9000 Phone for the American office. To the folks who still think this outfit is reputable, you're depriving a village, somewhere, of an idiot.
this is my site
http://www.massi7e.com
and this is my rate
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/massi7e.com
please rate me if you could
thanks,
The staff may claim that the views of members are subjective and not necessarily their own, but since they are empowering their members to destroy reputations, it's cold comfort indeed.
When numerous complaints are made against the same WOT member, for hate attacks based on lies and slander, why are they not banned? Why are they allowed to continue abusing people through the system?
I cannot work outside the home I am disabled but not on disability and this company is intent on shutting me down because of what? All I do is provide virtual assistance to others, website marketing and PR and ghost write articles for others How is that bad?
I will not post my site here I don't want those misinformed others to further stop my business
but I will be complaining to Facebook for this harrassement as that is where most of it is taking place
myWOT is a site for rating the trustworthiness, security and safety of a website. However, that is not what the users are doing.
They are rating sites based upon their own biased opinions.
And their main target is business sites.
Why?
Because that's where the money is.
Here's why I say that.....
The top users of myWOT create forums to post links to have other users give a poor rating. So, since WOT offers a solution to sites with poor ratings to purchase their WOT seal, it leads to the question,,, is there compensation of sorts for the top users that rate sites poorly?
(myWOT lists the badge on their page as a suggestion for increasing your sites rating, yet will reply to negative comments that address that issue that the Trust badge can only be purchased once you have successfully increased the rating of your site, after they also point out that the ratings can not be manipulated, so who knows what the real story is.)
If your site has a low score on myWOT....
It doesn't matter if you talk to myWOT.
They tell you to rate your own site, and to purchase their Web Of Trust seal.
It doesn't matter if you register and rate your own site. You have to take days of rating other sites first, and you have to agree with the WOT community when rating them. Then once you have established a rating history with them, then your ratings that differ with theirs "start" to count.
The ratings are weighted, read it in their own FAQ section. WOT users that have rated more sites carry more weight with their ratings.
The worst part is, if your site has a poor rating, and you post it to your Facebook page, your link won't redirect to your site. It gets a warning from Facebook that was created by their "trusted" partner myWOT and warns you to not visit the site.
If it weren't the affiliation with Facebook, I wouldn't care or even know about myWOT.
Even worse yet is that the top users of myWOT create forums to post links to have other users give a poor rating. So, since WOT offers a solution to sites with poor ratings to purchase their WOT seal, it leads to the question,,, is there compensation of sorts for the top users that rate sites poorly?