Mybackgroundcheck.com is part of Pre-employ.com, a privately held company founded in 1994. See http://www.pre-employ.com/ My google-stalking has not disclosed anything related to online dating. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Tom Frenaye [mailto:frenaye@pcnet.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 7:25 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:17196] Re: Red Cross Update At 11:55 AM 9/9/2008, Andy Oppel wrote:

We are in agreement that the Red Cross owns at least part of the

overall problem. And I guess I wasn't clear enough in my note, but since the theme of the note to which I responded was basically trust, it was the trust problem that I specifically meant. Most of us generally trust the Red Cross to handle confidential data appropriately, and yes, maybe that is unwarranted. But we have no basis whatsoever for trusting <http://mybackgroundcheck.com>mybackgroundcheck.com. And having read the accounts of identity theft from some of the other companies that provide background checks, my I trust <http://mybackgroundcheck.com>mybackgroundcheck.com about as far as I could move Mt. Shasta.

Having said that, I am highly suspicious of the statement (related to

us by the Red Cross) that it is too difficult to have two consent forms, one for Red Cross volunteers, and another for their employees (and whomever else <http://mybackgroundcheck.com>mybackgroundcheck.com serves... if anyone). From an IT perspective, only the very naive would believe that claim. However, if <http://mybackgroundcheck.com>mybackgroundcheck.com was merely a paper company setup for the sole purpose of fulfilling the Red Cross contract (I've seen a lot of these in my travels with companies that held government contracts for various web-based services), and if they aren't actually doing the checks, but brokering for another company that has all the connections to do the actual checking, **then** it makes sense that they couldn't change the agreement -- if the 3rd party has only one way to do the checks, then you can't (at least legally) have people agree to one thing and do something else. ! Having come out of nowhere, I strongly suspect that this is the real situation. I think Andy and Bill have interesting points about the company used by the Red Cross for background checks. Early on in the discussions about background checks, a year or more ago, I thought we found that this same company had several web addresses serving multiple markets. I'm pretty sure they are also in the business, using a different name, of working with people-matching companies (online dating, etc) and that on request they provided background checks on the people that were matched... I would be interesting in knowing if it is a private or public company, and what their real corporate name is - what do we know about them? -- Tom ===== e-mail: k1ki@arrl.org ARRL New England Division Director http://www.arrl.org/ Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box J, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444