I’m reminded of the gullibility of the masses when I read a post like CrunchGear.com’s post on Belkin paying for positive comments on Amazon. Now, I don’t know or care whether Belkin actually posted this offer. The point is that everyone assumes that they did. It goes unquestioned. But how hard would it be to post a job offer or an ad to hurt another company’s reputation?

Without proper checks and balances, the future of black hat marketing is sabotage. False profiles, false ads, false statements. It’s coming, and is already here. You just don’t know about it because you’re not looking.

At this very moment, I have some black hat related domains sitting in my domain shopping cart. The Dark Side is tempting. Make no mistake. How easy is it to make money at black hat? Just don’t get caught. But ultimately, you reap what you sow. That is a certainty. It’s a universal principle.

Several of you are going to launch services, either openly or in secret, that offer sabotage-related services. It’s going to damage company’s reputations. They will need hardcore reputation management. But as much as that would provide me with job security, don’t go there.

It’s going to happen, though. I’m as certain of this as I am certain that human cloning will happen (if not already). And when sabotage takes off, God help us all. Filtering inauthentic chatter will become an all new expertise.

Example: if you read the comments made beneath the post I linked to above, you’ll see someone impersonated me just to prove my point. The first and third comments are by me, and the second is by someone else.

But as I mentioned in my comment, some sort of OpenID would have to be accepted universally for all things Web in order to prevent identity theft and sabotage. Don’t think that people aren’t already pushing for that, either. Just like American Presidents and war, some of the ID protection people are or will be responsible for highly publicized sabotage and reputation theft in order to scare the masses into adopting their ready-made solution.

This is the way of the world, folks. Build the solution, then exacerbate the problem to nudge people in your direction. So it begins.

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