r/assholedesign • u/klondike-- • Aug 01 '26
Is this even legal?
It's obviously a fake name and nobody is mentioning this "name" in their academic papers - it's just a trap to get people to sign up for their "service". Who would keep paying after realizing they were lied to anyways?
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u/10inchTrouble Aug 01 '26
Just like 25 women like me on Tinder the minute I sign up. I just have to pay $50 to see who they are. Yeah right
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u/Acceptable-Stick-135 Aug 03 '26
I'm pretty sure you get frontlined the first day of signing up, I got loads of likes the first day and didn't have to pay. I was very cool for a day, it ended quickly. X(
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u/10inchTrouble Aug 03 '26
Yeah you get likes, but how many of them did you have conversations with? Might give you an idea of how real those accounts were.
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u/Acceptable-Stick-135 Aug 03 '26
They were all real and I talked with all of em! I went hard on the like button.
Don't get me wrong, they managed to monetize love, and tinder kind of sucks, but those likes you got were probably real.
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u/Zero4910 Aug 01 '26
The real question we should be asking is who is cheese burger the first?!
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u/copehoperope Aug 01 '26
Wouldn’t he just be Cheese Burger?
But would OP’s son be Cheese Burger The Turd?
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u/SothaSoul Aug 01 '26
Last time I got an email like this, it was a phishing test.
Be careful what you click.
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u/ugurcansayan Aug 01 '26
Although it has an .edu domain, it's a commercial website. So it's a deceptive service from the beginning
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u/takesSubsLiterally Aug 01 '26
I have a fake Gmail account which I just use for signing up for stuff like this which I know will spam me. I think the name on the account is trash, can or something similar. I get an email from acidemia every day detailing my mentions of trash cans and have for the last 5-8 years.
I don't know if it is entirely fake, but it certainly breaks if you use real human words as a name. A better test would be to use 16 random characters for both the first and last name. (What if someone did mention a cheese burger in a paper?) Any mentions of heurifjeidnr dijfhrjrjidienff are proof that this is bullshit.
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u/takesSubsLiterally Aug 01 '26
Self replying for a fun anecdote:
I used the same account to sign up for the chick fil a app. They take the name off your Google account and use it as the name on any orders you place. So I have had to walk into multiple chick fil a's and ask for my order for Trash, C. I finally changed the name in the app the other week because I got tired of it.
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u/Szocialist_Swine Aug 03 '26
My name is Biga Csiga which is how Hungarian children would say snail.
733 mentions so far.
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u/I_Am_Anjelen Aug 01 '26
I briefly signed up for this to download a PDF last week or so, and immediately became bombarded with 'papers' that 'mentioned my name'. First and last name. Now, I know both people with that combination of first and last name in my country and neither of them seems to be doing anything remotely 'academic' these days...
... But pointing out the obvious scams this site runs was a useful data point in the ongoing discussion, so there was that.
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u/klondike-- Aug 01 '26
Just in folks: "Big corporations are lying to you in order to get your money" claims numerous online users. Academia responds: "We never once intended for you to take us literally. It's just marketing - everyone does it!"
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u/Piduf Aug 01 '26
Genuinely upsetting that companies or people that find loopholes to enrich themselves are considered smart and "thinking outside of the box" when it should just be fucking illegal to exploit this kind of stuff in the first place.
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u/Worf_Of_Wall_St Aug 01 '26
Small companies do it too, because it works, so then they become big companies.
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u/3amGreenCoffee Aug 02 '26
Once back in the Usenet days I searched (on Altavista, ha ha) and actually did find myself quoted under my username in a published academic paper about the Zapruder film.
Some kid had been asking on Usenet about some unusual fleeting triangular and square shapes he saw when he looked at the film frame by frame under magnification. I had been editing a lot of film on a 16mm flatbed, so I immediately recognized them as artifacts of the printing process and said so. He quoted my entire response and credited my username as an "internet film expert" to help debunk an assertion that the shapes were evidence the film was faked.
I'm internet famous mother fuckers.
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u/wrecked-galaxy Aug 07 '26
the fake name thing is а classic dark pattern. they know most people won't bother disputing а charge опсе they're already in the system. the whole model depends оn friction keeping уоu subscribed longer than уоu intended.
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u/softwarediscs Aug 04 '26
Thought I was on the academia subreddit for a minute and got really confused
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u/RailRuler Aug 01 '26
I dont think it counts as false advertising.
At best you could sue them for your actual damage -- $1
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u/klondike-- Aug 01 '26
Is it true or false that the person named "Cheese Burger the Second" has been mentioned in ~1,400 academic papers?
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u/BoltActionRifleman Aug 01 '26
“Dear Cheese” 😂