I seriously think it was all the crazy warez custom title screen that could be larger then the actual game. Back then you had to be "known" and go through the initiation of making sure you weren't someone that could harm them through intent or stupidity.

The only renaming to avoid detection I knew of was when fast modems were becoming a commoditized but FTP had started taking over as a transfer mechanism. Did you ever trawl through anonymous ftp servers looking for directories named ". ", ". .", "...", " ." etc.?