A New Scam in Town

Suzanne Russo Adams from Ancestry.com/TGN has posted this notice on the Association of Professional Genealogists website. There are always those who try to cash in upon a name -- using one that sounds similar to a reputable site, as this posting shows.

-- Aunt Merle

From Suzanne: "We have recently become aware of three websites purporting to allow
family history research: SearchYourGenealogy.com, Ancestry-search.com
and Australian-Ancestry.com. The sites claim to have "the largest online
genealogical search tool" and promote themselves as the foremost
resources for genealogy, but from what we can tell, these sites are
nothing more than a series of web pages with links to other services.
These sites, in our opinion, are clearly fraudulent.


On each site, potential customers are lured to purchase under what we
feel to be false, misleading and deceitful promotional material, and get
little or no value out of money spent at the websites. Blog and message
board posts from the community confirm this opinion.


The people/companies behind the websites are buying very high level paid
search results on Google and other sites. In addition, they are using
trademarks of well-known websites, including Ancestry.com and
Genealogy.com, to get higher-than-normal natural search results. It
appears the site colors, fonts, and pictures on at least one site are
designed to mislead people in to believing the site is related to
Ancestry.com.


As the leading online family history company, The Generations Network,
Inc. and its website properties including Ancestry.com and its global
network of Ancestry sites, Genealogy.com, and Rootsweb, we want to
encourage consumers to validate and verify the legitimacy of a website
before providing credit card information or paying for services. TGN
will take appropriate administrative and legal action to do its part to
protect the community from these sites.

Suzanne Russo Adams, AG(r)