full_entry: October 2013 Archives

I get scam attempts:

(Letter to Head of Brand Business or CEO, thanks)

Dear Sir or Madam,

This is a formal email. We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on October 15, 2013 that a company claimed Hora Tech, Ltd were applying to register "diaspoir" as their brand name and some diaspoir Asian countries top-level domain names through our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we would finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we could handle this issue better. After the deadline we will unconditionally finish the registration for Hora Tech, Ltd. Looking forward to your prompt reply.

Best Regards Derek Lau Senior Consultant

Tel:+86-551-6349 5334

Fax:+86-551-6349 5344

Address:HuiZhou Ave. 856, Hefei, Anhui, CN

A quick google of the first sentence of the second paragraph reveals a hoax-slayer page about this scam, along with plenty of examples of its use. Nothing to worry about.

First SEO spam in a while:

Hello,

I came across your site (http://www.diaspoir.net/) and would like to discuss the possibility of having a guest post on your site.

I’m working on behalf of my client who is able to create articles including travel, shopping and entertainment amongst many other things.

I hope this would be something of interest and would very much like to hear back from someone regarding this guest post opportunity.

Hope to hear back from you soon.

Kind Regards,

[NAME REDACTED]

[COMPANY NAME REDACTED]

You know, right down on the page here, just about where the email address is, are three little paragraphs of text which say:

• Unsolicited Bulk Email (spam), commercial solicitations, SEO related items, link exchange requests, and abuse are not welcome here and will result in complaints to your ISP.
• email the webmaster
• Any email to the above address may be made public at the sole discretion of the recipient.

I don't think I'd pay for services from a company which apparently can't read the paragraph above and below the contact email address...

I've redacted the responsible company for a few reasons. The main reason is that I don't wish to invite assholes into my life, and SEO spammers whinging about how I am "defaming their personal braaands" by reporting accurately on things they have actually done match that description pretty well.

Also, it's not that obvious from the email, but the company is an SEO consulting company that boasts of using meta-tags and keywords to attract Google attention, which makes them borderline scammers in my book. Real SEO is good content and appropriate semantic markup, not keyword and meta-tag spamming.