May 21, 2008
Identity Theft

Identity theft is an annoying thing. It is when somebody else uses your name as their own and I have been the victim of this 3 times now.

Three times somebody have decided to write a comment using my name. That is, you will see a comment where "Thomas Baekdal" commented on an article, using my contact details and my website in the website field - making the impression that I had a specific opinion on a given subject.

The problem, of course, was that it was not I who wrote the comment, but somebody else. And today it happened again. A person from Korea wrote a comment using my name. It was an innocent comment, no harm was done, but I obviously deleted it anyway.

Identity Theft is very difficult to prevent, but what I do is three things:

All comments from my person is marked "Site Owner" and is orange in color - as opposed to lime. This indicates that my site has identified that the comment was written by me, from my computer. So if you see a comment that doesn't say "site owner", with my name on it, then it is a fake.

Every person that pretends to be me, or from baekdal.com is added to my block list. This person is blocked from writing any comment in the future.
I have added my name to my anti-spam list. So any comment made using my name (or close resembles thereof) is automatically blocked as spam.

I hope this solves the problem. But remember, I am the one commenting in "orange" - with the label "site owner". That is my mark of authenticity :)