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[quote=Anonymous]Here's a report from the New York Times about how College Prowler (Niche)  impersonated colleges on line to drive traffic to its site.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/separating-real-from-fake-on-the-internet/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Here's what College Times had to say about Niche:

College Prowler. If you could combine an organized crime group with some annoying as heck telemarketers, College Prowler would be that monster. What used to set this company apart from most college review websites was their full-color guides you could purchase at most local bookstores (although, this part of their business recently died – before Web 2.0 caught on, College Prowler guidebooks had truly “snuck” up on the boring, outdated black-and-white college guides of yester-year.) At first glance, their website seems to be OVERFLOWING with useful data on thousands of campuses – things like “Drug Safety” or “Off-campus dining” have information that you probably won’t find anywhere else. Unfortunately, the source of most of their data is secret and unexplained, as their new parent company Niche.com arbitrarily mixes data from government databases, school administrators, and students themselves, without communicating to visitors which data is which.

Yes, they literally allow campus marketing directors to login and update school profiles however they see fit. In effect, the Prowler team has attempted to create a complex website structure aimed at ranking high in Google results and to keep users clicking around the site – which, by the way, you can’t do unless you register a new account and submit more personal information to their marketing team than even the IRS asks for.

College Prowler has also been caught committing fraud against Facebook users, and censoring and redacting their “open” scholarship database. In short, the site is a massive ponzi scheme setup and run by Mark Kantrowitz and friends – the guy behind FastWeb (FinAid.Org) – and Prowler’s acquisition by TMP (Monster.com) only seems to have quickened their pace.[/quote]

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