Today I was browsing this excellent site and found this shocking scam story –

I have, through this Website, discovered that I’m not alone in my problem of Internet dating scams. I have been a member of a prominent Internet dating site for some time but had never been contacted by any individuals remotely similar to this one before. At the end of March this year, I was contacted by a person representing themselves as Sara from Friendswood, TX using the handle of sunlovessweetness. Since Friendswood is only a three hour drive from where I live, I thought this might be someone worth getting to know. Especially as I travel to Houston and Galveston on a regular basis. After brief exchange of e-mails, along with pictures, she said she was now on a business trip to Nigeria. She supposedly was self employed, a former model, who dealt at the wholesale level of fabric business. She bought fabric in Africa for resale in North American markets.

One week into a three week trip, she discovered that the money orders she had brought with her to pay for the fabrics could not be cashed or accepted by the vendor. On top of that, her credit cards were maxed and she still had hotel and food bills to pay. Would I be able to help her? Naively, I agreed to advance her $400.00 to cover her expenses while she figured out how to handle this “situation”. We agreed that when she flew home she would fly to my hometown and then spend the weekend together at the beach in Galveston.

The following week, she came up with the following solution: a Canadian dealer she sold fabrics to notified her they were sending a payment of $7,500. She would have them send $4,000 to me and would I forward $3600 to her and keep $400 as reimbursement of the previous loan? Sure, I thought. She is just an innocent person caught in an unfortunate circumstance. About two weeks later, the money orders arrived. Well, to make a long story short, $4,000 in money orders arrived. I cashed them and had to send three wires totaling $3,600 to Nigeria.

The next day, I found out that two were rejected as suspicious by the wire agent. The same day, I received a call from my bank saying the money orders were fraudulent. Fortunately, I was able to recover all but $100 of the wires. Talk about being lucky that I didn’t have to eat four grand! I decided to give her the chance to explain herself. She said that her ex was “out to get her” and raged about how the Canadian vendor and the shipping company screwed her over. I made a phony offer to buy a ticket in the states for her to return home, but she insisted that I send money so she could use a local friend’s agent. After that exchange, I cut off all communication and reported this to the IC3 unit of the FBI. Just goes to show how hard criminals will play on your generosity.

Watch out for: naowill29@yahoo.com!!!

Jim, TX

So next time, don’t go around sending money because your eSweetheart seems in hot waters. =)

Here are 5 Really Funny banners created by ValleyOfGeeks.com. Really cool stuff if you ask me. =)

C-net’s Stephen Spencer blogged about commercial companies hiding their truly financial motives when trying to game digg. He gives an example of bait and switch diggbait:

Those who have cracked Digg tend to understand the psychology of Digg users. For example, these alpha geeks love lists. And they absolutely abhor SEOs, because they think SEOs are all trying to game the system on Digg. If they sniff out that an SEO is behind a Digg submission, the submission will get buried and the URL may even get banned…

Knowing this, it would behoove you to remove anything commercial from the landing page of your Digg bait before it gets dugg. Note how Alan’s Digg bait is devoid of links to or mentions of his consulting company. Instead, he links to sites like Makezine and Ubuntu, which would appeal to alpha geeks. Very smart.

Alpha geek status is a counter-cultural one. In its own (and very powerful) way it is rebellion, against social norms and common knowledge. Selling rebellion makes the selling a little more authentic, a little less commercial.

In case you hadn’t heard, Google is being taken to court again.

This time the threat is from Down Under, a competition regulator known as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Apparently a couple of car dealerships in Newcastle found their names being used in ads on Google - but clicking on those ads would take the user to a major competitor’s website. Because of this, the ACCC is charging Google with being “misleading and deceptive” about the nature of the sponsored advertising that appears throughout their SERPs.

The issue of advertisers using their competitors brand and name as keywords or ad text is nothing new. Here in the U.S. window blind vendor American Blind is set to begin their case against Google for the very same reasons later this year. Certainly there are ways to fight these unscrupulous competitors should you discover them. Should you find your trademarked terms being used, you can file a trademark complaint with Google (different forms exist depending on whether you are in the U.S. and Canada or outside the U.S.) But what do you do while you wait for Google’s customer service team to respond to this request? And what if you’re a smaller local business with keywords (like your business name) your competitor is exploiting that aren’t trademarked? In some cases you may be left with no choice but to fight fire with fire and start bidding on your competitors’ branded terms. That’s a fight that Google certainly wins, as more and more keyword inventory in Adwords is monetized.

The ACCC is taking things a step further this time though. Taking a look at the actual complaint filed, you’ll see that Google is being challenged about just how well they distinguish
between their paid and organic listings:

Further, the ACCC is alleging that Google, by failing to adequately distinguish sponsored links from “organic” search results, has engaged and continues to engage in misleading and deceptive conduct in breach of section 52 of the Act.

The Act in question here is the Australian Trade Practices Act 1974. Let’s take a look at section 52:

Misleading or deceptive conduct

(1) A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive. (emphasis mine)

(2) Nothing in the succeeding provisions of this Division shall be taken as limiting by implication
the generality of subsection (1).

If this is hinging on whether Google ads are likely to deceive search engine users, then a case can definitely be made. “But wait,” you might say, “Google clearly marks the ads as ‘Sponsored Links’ on their SERPs.” That may be so. Yet, as of earlier this year, 62% of searchers were still unaware of the distinction between sponsored and organic results. It’s not a stretch to say that Google is trying to take advantage of that. Why else would Google be doing things like giving the top three sponsored links real estate at the top of the page when it used to be the top two? More ads appear above the fold. Present day Google is built on the advertising dollars generated by Adwords, and those ads were carefully integrated into SERPs after Google spent years branding itself as the source for relevant results. One might say Google’s entire existence is built on deceiving it’s users into clicking on those ads (interestingly, the sort of behavior they frown upon with their Adsense publishers).

To be honest, I am not sure how far the ACCC is going to be able to go with this. As far as deception is concerned, Google is most likely going to point to two things; the aforementioned “Sponsored Links” text, and the fact that the display URL in Adwords text has to match the domain of the landing page URL. So there’s only so much deception that can be happening here, given that your competitor’s ad could say they are you in the title, but the display URL isn’t going to match up with that. Still, the ACCC is serious about this, and is certainly not afraid to toot their own horn, proclaiming this as “the first action of its type globally.” How much revenue would Adwords be generating if Google had to replace “Sponsored Links” with “THIS IS AN ADVERTISEMENT” under every ad? How many advertisers would be likely to continue advertising under those conditions?

Maybe the thought of that might teach Google to stop being so damn deceptive.

Boy! I love car salesmen. They can do anything to make you buy from them and increase their profits.
Here’s one trick that Used Car Salesmen use that I learnt a few days ago.

If you ever go to a used cars market and tell them that you want to sell your car, they will invariably ask you how much do you want for it. When you tell them your expected price, some would reply — NO WAY! That car can go for much higher than that.

All of sudden your ego takes a boost and you leave your car with them to be sold off.

After some days, you get a call from them saying they have an interested customer if only you could shave off $500 from the price. You get the same call again after a few days. Then again. And again and again!

You keep getting these calls till the price they are selling at is much lower than what you wanted. And you don’t even realize they went this low.

After all, in every call they asked you to just shave off $500… hardly anything against the price they said they would sell it off for.

It’s highly unethical but that’s how it happens!

Here are two more articles about dirty things cars salesmen do - MSNBC and Edmunds.

The FDA regulates certain advertising verbiage for food products. Stuff like “zero calorie” or “no sugar”, you can read the law but its boring. Doesn’t leave much for creative interpretation.

But wait, the FDA doesn’t actually require a food to have no calories to say that it has no calories? It can actually have up to 5 calories per serving. And something can say it doesn’t have any sugar, when it has up to half a gram per serving (that one isn’t too bad, but still!)

This isn’t a vague acknowledgment that lying exists in food advertising, this is an actual codification of false advertising.

Nielson has set the blogosphere abuzz with its annoncement that they are replacing pageviews with time spent as their new default sites popularity metric.
Obviously there are problems with the new metric, perhaps more than with the old one, and of course the key to this debate is that advertisers need to look closely at their goals before selecting a metric to base their media descisions on.
But this discussion raises a more interesting point: statistics can lie. And there is probably no are where they lie more frequently than when marketers (liars) sell their wares (you) to other marketers (moe liars).
Creative statistical analysis is nothing new and web metrics are some of the easiest stats to play fast and loose with. If your site is confusing and hard to use your pageviews may be low but your time on site will probably be high. If you publish crappy articles that people mostly skim and never read, break them up across multiple pages and watch your pageviews skyrocket (time on site will probably stay the same).
Good web analysts are (or should be) masters at coercing data to proove any preconcieved point.

BTW I wrote this on my blackberry so it’ll probably need editing. Sue me.

Sometime ago I had made a post about how Best Buy was ripping off its customers and in that there was a confession from a BestBuy Employee.

I had got this whole letter on a forum — a Yahoo Group to be precise — where someone had just posted the whole thing without reference. And, silly me just posted it like that.Now, this confession was supposedly first published on Consumerist and editor made a comment about it in the post.

We are sorry guys! It was not intentional and we really didn’t know it was posted on your site first. Otherwise, I would have surely linked. =)

We hate it when people use our content without attribution as much as anyone else. As a matter of fact, we have a whole category on Plagiarism, so you don’t expect us to do something as unethical as stealing content.

Now that we have linked you in that post — I hope it is cool with you!

Perhaps one of the more insipid (or genius) techniques a marketer unencumbered by ethics can employ is to sell resistance.

In one of my favorite bits of comedy, Bill Hicks tells everyone who works in marketing to kill themselves, and insists that its not a joke:

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing, he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart.”

In an overly comercialized world, the only things people believe authentic are those things with no monetary motive (obvious or hidden). Anything corporate or profit-driven is assumed to be just more marketing crap. And most of it is.

What could be less-corporate than rebellion? The act of rejecting society’s norms (which were established by “the man”, god, government, and corporations) is precisely the modern definition of authenticity in media. So it would make sense that the darker shade of marketer would seek to harness resistance to move units.

Rebellion is young and sexy. It creates an us vs them dichotomy, that not only gives us comrades to fight with, but a common enemy to unite us. It fulfills holes in self-identities while making us aspire to be bigger than we are.

Apple is probably the best, most recent corporate example of this strategy. While its obvious they are a financially-motivated company, their fervent devotion to thee anti-microsoft cause on seemingly moral groups transcends profit in the eyes of their fans. There are legions of Mac enthusiasts united against a vast drone army of corporate Microsoft ants.

The model is perhaps most obvious in the music business though, from the Sex Pistols to Rage Against the Machine; “The Man” will sell us anything that we’ll buy.

The fact that disruption plays such a huge role in the modern marketer’s lexicon means that the environment is positioned such that even the faintest whiff of resistance in online marketing sells itself. By utilizing social technology various websites claim to upset the established order and lay waste to vast swaths of corporate cube farm.

Adweek reports that the FTC is looking into stiffening restrictions on how companies use testimonials in the advertising.

No one argues that testimonials and endorsements are an extremely effective marketing strategy. What has caught the interest of the Federal Trade Commission is the way digital technology has changed the way companies can market their goods and services to consumers. That’s why it is considering getting more restrictive in its guidelines on the use of testimonials and endorsements in advertising.

The FTC attached two studies with its formal request for comments on the matter in January 2007, which concluded that testimonials could communicate a product’s efficacy despite disclaimers in the ads saying such results are typical for only half the consumers who use the product.