Forked out $200 for a data broker removal service and got nothing

I paid DeleteMe $200 back in March to scrub my info from people search sites. They sent me nice reports every month showing progress. But I just searched myself on Spokeo and Whitepages and all my old addresses and phone numbers are still up there. Their claim was that they handle opt-out requests for 25+ sites but clearly that's not working. Either these brokers ignore the requests or the service is just taking my money for fancy PDFs. Has anyone actually had success with these removal services or is this whole industry a scam?

3 comments

3 Comments

ivanbell1mo ago

DeleteMe is basically selling you a subscription to "we tried" not "we succeeded". I paid them for six months and watched my info stay up on sites like Radaris and MyLife the whole time. The problem is these data brokers don't actually have to honor opt-out requests, they can just ignore them forever. DeleteMe sends the forms but they don't have any real power to make the sites take down your data. You're paying for a PDF report of how many times they clicked send. The whole industry feels like a scam because it IS a scam.

bennett.harper1mo ago

Echo what Ivan said and take it farther - these companies are basically selling you a placebo. The data brokers make money selling your info, so why would they honor an opt-out from some random service? DeleteMe just automates what you could do yourself with a free afternoon and a burner email. The whole model is built on you feeling like you're doing something while the brokers laugh all the way to the bank. Unless laws change to force these sites to actually comply, you're throwing money at a problem that can't be solved by clicking submit forms.

king.eric1mo ago

That whole "placebo" thing you said, that's exactly how I felt when I tried one of those services a few years back. My buddy @ivanbell actually warned me about it before I signed up, said I'd just be paying for a fancy receipt of attempts. But I figured hey, what's a few months of trying cost me, right? Fast forward and I'm checking the same sites three months later, my full name and old address still sitting there like I never did a thing. I ended up spending an afternoon myself just going site by site, and sure enough most of those opt out forms either don't work or take weeks to maybe sort you out. It's like paying someone to knock on a door that nobody's going to answer. Until the government steps in and makes these data brokers actually clean up their act, we're all just playing pretend.