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Beware of Tricky Web Solicitations

As anyone with an email account has probably experienced, there are lots of spammy and scammy emails being sent out there. Some are very obvious spam and have ED pill ads in them or are asking that you send money to Nigeria. But for the new business or new website owner, the spam scam emails change tenor. You may receive a very personal looking email that says they have been trying to contact you or even that they work for Google. They will then say they have a service that your company needs or it will be lost in search engines forever.

The truth is that these emails are just as useless and as spamy as the type I first mentioned. Since you registered a domain name, your contact info becomes available on public registries. The spammers use a robot to crawl public records and to help figure out what kind of spam they are going to send you.

My customers get inundated with emails from spammers all the time. And the emails get more and more creative in an attempt to be more convincing every year.  Below is one we received earlier today:

“Hello, I tried calling you several times today, and I’m not getting through for some reason. If your website does not have many Facebook Likes, why would someone visit your Facebook Fanpage? People Like you when other people like you. The more people that LIKE your website and fanpage on Facebook, the more credibility you will have with new visitors. It works the same for Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. When people visit your page and see that you have a lot of followers, they now want to follow you too. They too want to know what all the hype is and why all those people are following you. Get some free likes, followers, and views just for trying this service I found: http://.. redacted for safety.”

As you can see they said they tried calling several times. That is a lie. The chances that these folks will get your payment and do absolutely no work for it is very high. Keep your eye out for spam and scam emails. Only work with web companies that you can physically see or talk to the employees. Check ratings on the better business bureau. Type the company name along with the word “scam” into Google. You will see the complaints if they ripped off other people. These steps should help you minimize risk.