Yes, it happened to me too.  The first time I ever heard of them was when I got an email ‘reminding’ me to fill out my profile at LinkedIn.  That sleazy trick alone guaranteed I will never use their service, and I advise everyone I talk to not to use it either since it’s evidently run by slimy fraudsters.

Every now and then I create a new junk profile there just to search their listings and confirm they haven’t relisted me.  I suppose if I were really vindictive, I’d write some software to create massive bunches of fake accounts to help bump up their signal to noise ratio.

If still not evil, then increasingly incompetent.

Who is behind AllThis? Gene Linetsky, Paul Weinstein, Christopher Poseley
http://www.quora.com/allthis/Who-is-behind-allthis

If when you log in it doesn’t say at the top “Please confirm your email address” then you in fact did sign up since the only way to get rid of that is to click on the activation email link. A lot of people do and then forget that they did in order to look at a profile.

You can simply close your account. Just go to settings, click account and click “close your account.“

As far as I can tell, you get a certain amount of virtual credits free when you sign up, but since you have to give your credit card info, presumably you are also supposed to buy more virtual credits with real money.

Then you bid up the price (in virtual credits) of 10 minutes with people. They phrase it in terms of buying and selling, but I don’t get the impression that the holder of the 10 minutes can refuse to sell. If someone buys it at 10% over what you paid, they’ve got it, unless you buy it back at another 10% markup. Apparently you do get your virtual credits back when someone buys it away from you, plus a 5% “profit.” (The other 5% goes to the person with whom you’re trying to spend 10 minutes.) So it’s not quite as bad as penny auction — they don’t just outright keep the non-winning bids.

This goes on for 24 hours. After 24 hours, the person holding the ten minutes can redeem them. It is not clear to me whether bidding can continue after 24 hours, or whether it’s cut off at that point.

Once redeemed, the virtual credits go to the person with whom the buyer wanted to spend 10 minutes. They can then either use them to bid on 10 minutes with other people, or they can redeem them as donations to charity. Of course, All This takes a cut before the donation is made.

Time with people who haven’t actually joined, e.g. Rob Beschizza, is priced lower to start with — but can be bought and bid up just like anything else.

It’s that last part that makes me wonder how this isn’t fraud. IANAL, but they seem to be selling — for real money, or at least potentially real money — something that 1) is not theirs to sell and 2) they cannot deliver.

What happens when people bid up the price of ten minutes with Rob, but the winner finds themselves with something unredeemable, because Rob hasn’t agreed to sell his ten minutes in the first place?

And what happens to all those 5% cuts of each transaction that went to “Rob”?

It’s a great scam.  ”Friends” of a site create a profile for it on the site.  Then you can, from the convenience of your web browser, donate to the recipient on  kachingle.  Kachingle only takes a small cut of the donation before trying to contact the recipient to send the remainder, so it’s okay.  If the recipient never replies, after 180 days the remainder goes to a different charity.They recently tried to rebrand themselves a a micropayment site (you pay kachingle a set amount each month, and they divvy it up to sites based on a browser extension), but the basic “we collect donations for someone who hasn’t given us permissions to do so” still applies.

I’m not sure how soliciting to collect money on behalf of site owners, typically charities, who haven’t authorized you to do so while skimming off the top isn’t getting more attention.

Yet, sadly accurate.