Websites offer a substantial amount of information to their customers, subscribers and often the general public. Some websites, however require visitors to either provide personal information, set up a password and account and/or pay a fee for the access to specific, more coveted information.
Certain visitors to these websites, such as the site’s competitors, may want to obtain this information through methods such as data scraping (i.e., the extraction of data from a website through the use of a computer program) but may not wish to disclose their identity. These visitors, therefore, use false names and other fictitious information to establish accounts through which they can access all the data on the website. This practice will usually violate the terms of service of the website.
