Brian Crecente — another a fellow absorbed fetus in Gawker's bulging, all-consuming belly of blogs — wrote us with a truly scummy scam running in his neighborhood, hyping on parents' crazed paranoia of pedophiles:

This morning a crew of pamphleteers hit my neighbhorhood (I live in subrbia Highlands Ranch outside of Denver) and stuck little notices to everyone's door.

The notice read: "ATTENTION NEIGHBORS: A Sex Offender Moved Into This Area! We are asking everyone to become aware. Find out who they are and what their address is.@ www.defendmystreet.com."

I heard all of my neighbors talking about it and quickly hopped to the site
where I discovered a field for my zipcode and email address. I entered both (fake) and it just passed me on to the official, and totally free, state run sex offender's list with the search results for my zip code.

I did some brief digging and found out that the site was registered on Sept.
4 by Domains By Proxy, a company that registers site names for other people
for privacy reasons. I've also called the local sheriff's office, which promises to investigate.

Besides the obvious fear-mongering, I can't figure out what this is all
about. There has to be cheaper ways to build email lists.

Frankly, I find it absurd that sex-offenders (even when wrongfully convicted) can never serve out their sentence for the crime, especially with the lack of murderer or violent criminal tracking lists. But I assume this is market research for some sort of paid anti-pedophile service, which is as sleazy as it goes. Anyone else run into this? Got any information?