Archive for the ‘Scams’ Category

Niched jargon more overrated than sliced bread!

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

It’s amazing, every second person following me on twitter is a Guru … “Hello, my name is xxx and I’m a guru at internet marketing” or “Are you in need of more woman? Subscribe to my newsletter and get some tonight”

Or how about some real life examples, here are the Twitter Biographies of a bunch of so-called Gurus:

Everyone claiming to be a Guru is trying to sell you something you don’t need, especially all these hyped up MLM schemes which is nothing other than scams plastered with jargonatic adjectives.

Gurus - Do You Believe The Claims Made On Late Night Infomercials? Sign Up For Our Newsletter Today!

Do You Believe The Claims Made On Late Night Infomercials? Sign Up For Our Newsletter Today!

I’m reading through a marketing e-book which I got for free because I was able to respond and enter my email address before the respond-before timer ran out … actually it ran out and then started counting all over again telling me the free offer has been extended due to popular demand. And guess what, the e-book used to cost $1997 and I’m getting it for free, apparently I should be grateful for not having to pay $1997 for it. Just scanning through the index, I’m being bombarded with hyped up jargon …

Wait, just received an email from another one of these Guru marketers badmouthing the hype around the book I’ve just downloaded for free …

I’m a little frustrated with all the crap that’s going on.

There are SO many “miracle” product launches
happening, and people are shelling their hard earned
cash on every single one of them.

Today it was xxx – everybody
seems to be promoting it.

I’m not.

Not to say it isn’t a good deal or it won’t help some
people, but here’s the deal…

I’ve discovered a few factors that are consistent
among successful internet marketers, but one that
REALLY stands out is…

Where was I before I got distracted by another Guru that knows it all … oh, the index page of the book … the page where I downloaded it said something about the niche jargon being a little bit outdated and it’s being adjusted to reflect the jargon of WEB 2.0 (another overhyped keyword, I bet these marketers doesn’t even know what powers WEB 2.0 applications). Back to the book … the index reads like a typical marketing handbook, all fluffetyfoo and full of power punching poo that will make your product the niche that everyone else wants to do (while 5 million other people are trying the same thing after downloading the free ebook with the magic formula of how to make it online). Before I get distracted again, Viral Marketing, Marketing Funnel (another word for MLM where the people at the top of the pyramid just milks their participants for a lot more money), Dumb Down the Site, Powerful Admin Sections, Split Pay for Affiliate Programs, Pop-unders (It’s like a popup, only more annoying as it pops up behind your browser), OTO (The acronym for The One Time Offer Phenomenon), List Building, Lead Generation, Social Media (which is a buzzword for giving a company an online presence through whatever floats their boat), etc …

Online marketers are the new spammers of the internet, they aren’t good at anything, except for inflating their status by deflating the status of other marketers.

Spam - When You Aren't Any Good At Your Job, You Can Always Just Turn In Your Competitors.

When You Aren't Any Good At Your Job, You Can Always Just Turn In Your Competitors.

All these internet marketers have blogs, if you set your “looking for” status on Facebook to Networking, you’ll be swarmed with internet marketers trying to promote their blog which in the end might as well have been a Huffman keyword algorithm generating random hyped up buzzwords which holds very little value seeing as the “Secret To …” is always on another page for which you have to click a trackable link to an affiliate’s page.

Blogging - Those Who Have Nothing Important To Say Often Speak The Most.

Those Who Have Nothing Important To Say Often Speak The Most.

Forums dedicated to emarketing are just as bad, especially if the forum was created by a Guru who wants to sell a niche and have millions of users who worship him …

Forums - Multiply An Enormous Number By Zero And You're Still Going To End Up With Zero.

Multiply An Enormous Number By Zero And You're Still Going To End Up With Zero.

“Social Media” became a buzzword amongst some of the Gurus while the real experts will throw you with a brick if you just mention the phrase. If I were to meet up with a group of marketers and you start throwing me with the “Social Media” jargon, expect to be thrown with a brick and drowned under concrete, the world wants practical solutions, not hyped up rubbish. Giving a brand an online presence is fine, but it shouldn’t be the be-all of your marketing campaign.

Social Media - Maybe Your Peers Don't Make The Best Judges, Better Make Some Sock Puppets.

Maybe Your Peers Don't Make The Best Judges, Better Make Some Sock Puppets.

SEO Gurus, the internet is so full of people claiming that they are the best at cheating search engine results, it’s like calling yourself an expert at pushing yourself into the front of a row and getting payed to do so.

SEO - Let's Face It, If We Were Really That Smart, We Would Have Been Buying Generic Domain Names.

Let's Face It, If We Were Really That Smart, We Would Have Been Buying Generic Domain Names.

Most of them claim to be White Hat SEO gurus, in other words, they ask politely before they push themselves in front of the row, they follow all the so-called rules and regulations that were made up by search engine companies and they are generally too afraid to play outside the barbwire electric fence on top of the 10 foot thick concrete wall.

White Hat - Just Because You Follow The Rules Doesn't Mean You Can't Rank For Competitive Terms. Oh Wait, Yes It Does.

Just Because You Follow The Rules Doesn't Mean You Can't Rank For Competitive Terms. Oh Wait, Yes It Does.

Some of these White Hat SEO Gurus will tell you they specialize in link building. From what I’ve read in several sources, Google will actually penalize your page rank if you link to an outside source and not use the “nofollow” flag (unless the link is relevant, not sure how Google’s new double standards are working); thus link spammers will have their own site’s page rank dropped to zero pretty quickly diminishing the impact they have on the other site’s page rank.

Link Building - Look At Me Mom! Hey! Are You Looking? Over Here! Watch! Are You Watching? Please!

Look At Me Mom! Hey! Are You Looking? Over Here! Watch! Are You Watching? Please!

Black Hat SEO Gurus will always have a dark secret that nobody must know about, yet they want to sell you this secret on how to get an “unfair” advantage in the market. Some of the techniques include link building wherin the Guru does a link / banner exchange with random webmasters and then simply use the robots.txt / .htaccess to block all spiders from accessing the links or toggling the “nofollow” flag based on the user’s IP address so that spiders see “nofollow” and users doesn’t see it (which effectively leads to having only links pointing to your site and nothing pointing back to the other site according to the web crawler’s point of view).

The biggest “niche” is to scrape the web for content around a certain niche and simply steal that content for their own automated / generated blogs while stacking those fake blogs with a crapload of ads. This is especially true for Gurus trying to make money of the highest paying keywords (where the competition is tough, for $70+ a click on a Google AdSense ad, I can understand why being the absolute number one and getting the highest cut out of click-pie is so important). Get caught using Black Hat SEO techniques and your site might get blacklisted or severely penalized … but that’s ok, these Black Hatters have plenty of sites they can use to conduct their mischief and overpower the search engine algorithms.

Black Hat - Cloaking Scraped Content Written By A Markov Generator Is Just Another Way Of Enhancing The User Experience.

Cloaking Scraped Content Written By A Markov Generator Is Just Another Way Of Enhancing The User Experience.

Calling yourself a Guru is a dangerous thing, you better be able to live up to those incredible high standards if you want to go around calling yourself a Guru.

Any other annoying “Gurus” that you can think of?

SARS eFiling Scam

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

I don’t think I’m worthy a scammer’s time as I never seem to be getting any phishing scam, received this screenshot of a new SARS eFiling Scam doing the rounds, tried following the link, but it seems the phishing site is already closed down. What a pity, still wanted to click on “Why is my PIN required” to see what brilliant excuse they came up with.

sars-efiling-scam

Scammer offering SEM and SERP services, FAIL!!!

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

Back in October 2008 when I was still doing some work for Audio Auditing on the sideline, I received this email from a Nigerian (I assume it’s a Nigerian as most of the scam related mails I get are from Nigerians) offering me SEM and SERP services for the Audio Auditing website, what can I say, it was the funniest mail I’ve received in ages, it really made my day!

Hi

We are World’s leading and biggest Search Engine Marketing company. We can get your website on first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN. Please find some results below that we achieved recently:

 

Keyword:  Fancy Dress
First Page:  Google

Keyword:  Scanner Rental
First Page:  Google

Keyword:  Barrel Saunas    
First Page:  Google

With our services, your site can get huge amount of visitors.

Please reply to this email so we can get back to you.

Warm Regards
Satish 
Head – Marketing & Sales Deptt.

 

Unsubscribe: You can unsubscribe or opt out from mailing list by replying to  this email.


Today I’m in the mood to have a little bit of fun with this n00b and brag with my results on 419eater.com, the site where scammers are taken for a ride, made fun of and exposed for what they really are, idiots!

Take a look at the trophy room for example:

 

If anyone is interested in playing with Satish, you can mail him at aaron.hinton2@gmail.com, maybe we can work out a special deal where if he sends us a picture where he stands with a fish on his head, we will consider doing business with him, bwahahahahaa!


Antivirus 2009, infecting your PC … since 2008

Monday, January 5th, 2009

This is probably one of the sneakiest Trojans I’ve seen; it masks itself as an anti-virus and then infects your PC, absolutely brilliant!

Antivirus 2009 Technical Details

  • Full name: Antivirus 2009, Antivirus2009
  • Version: 1.0
  • Type: Rogue anti-spyware
  • Origin: Russian Federation, Ukraine \ http://antivirus-2009.com, http://antivirus2009-scanner.com, http://antivirus-database.com, http://antivirus2009professional.com

I’ve seen people’s PCs infected with this Trojan since the second half of 2008 (when it was still called Antivirus 2008) and later in December when it was called Antivirus 2009, another horde of infections took place that I know of. It always amazes me how gullible some people are, I mean installing a piece of software that calls itself Antivirus 2009 while it’s still 2008.

The typical place you’ll pick up this Trojan is on “adult” sites (which will prompt you to install a codec before you can see videos of naked scammers), on sites promoting piracy through making cracks available online as well as through third-party advertisers (on reputable sites) who will advertise this Trojan as a genuine anti-virus. Also on fake youtube sites or a couple of scammers on facebook are also promoting it (mostly users pretending to be females between the ages of 20 and 25 dressed in skimpy clothes who will then add you and send you a link to their webcam which will then contain a popup or something similar trying to sell you this crap).

I wonder if stats are available as to what the ratio of infections are between male and female computer users?

First it will tell you that your PC is infected, click for a free scan, then it will install a trial-version which will install other spyware on your PC and then it will blackmail you (with frequent popups ) into paying them $50 for the full version in order to remove the “detected” spyware.

antivirus2009

antivirus2009_fakescanner

Microsoft claimed that it removed nearly 400 000 such infections in December 2008 over a period of 9 days. Such has been the success of these scams that several of the fake programs have become infamous. WinAntiSpyware, Antivirus 2008 (recently updated to 2009), Antispyware Pro XP and AntiVirus Lab 2009 are all suspect, and no doubt others will soon emulate them.

If your browser redirects you to an online security scanner by Antivirus 2009 without a prior visit to one of its websites, it’s a good sign that your browser is hijacked by the Antivirus 2009 hijacker. If you can run an Antivirus 2009 system check, you’re also infected, best to kill it before it infects your PC any further and makes it any slower.

Remove Antivirus 2009 files and dll’s

av2009.exe
Antivirus2009.exe
shlwapi.dll
wininet.dll

Unregister Antivirus 2009 registry values:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\
“Antivirus” = “%ProgramFiles%\Antivirus 2009\Antvrs.exe”
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Antivirus
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Antivirus

 

When you’re done burning down the Trojan horse, install a proper anti-spyware and anti-virus to take care of the remaining rubbish installed by Antivirus 2009, a good anti-virus I’d recommend is Avast Antivirus Home Edition (it’s free, all you have to do is register it online) and get yourself a copy of Spybot Search and Destroy (also free with an optional donation if you want to donate to their organisation) or get Linux :p

Data Entry Scam

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

How many times have you seen these ads saying work from home and earn this much a month, or ads saying something like typist needed, all training supplied while giving unrealistic salary figures?

As usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, not to be pessimistic or anything, but getting the type of salary an engineer would earn for doing a typist’s work without any prior experience does sound a bit dodge.

Well, most of these (if not all) are scams, the idea is simple, you advertise a data entry or work from home job through whatever method you can, Google Ads, Social Networks, Newspapers, etc. (The people signing up are usually desperate for the income and are soft targets) When the person sign up for the program / job and pay the whatever amount is requested (already a red flag, no legitimate company will ask you to pay in order to work for them), they get an email or nicely typed out letter welcoming the applicant and asking the applicant to go do exactly the same (that’s the training), in other words, go scam more people in buying into this scam. In order for the applicant to regain his lost money (refunds does not exist with these scams), he advertise and advertise until he scams a couple of people (or in most cases fail in getting more people to join the program). In the former, the referrer gets a certain percentage of commission on the the person he scammed and a certain percentage of commission on all the people below the applicant. If the applicant fails, it’s not the problem of the referrer, he got his money and is already busy scamming more people in the hopes of building a downline of passive income.

People will use all kinds of fancy terms to make the data entry jobs sound viable, the best one is usually MLM or multilevel marketing which is short for legal pyramid scheme. What makes pyramid schemes illegal is the fact that you take money from people for nothing or the service of giving away your money itself, in MLM they add some type of product which is usually the “training” or some other stupid excuse for a product nobody would buy under normal circumstances.

These types of schemes are not sustainable, a couple of people get super rich from it while more than 88% of the people lose their money long before the whole system collapses.

You might as well go gamble with that money, the ods will still be against you, but at least you wont waste that much time trying to take other people’s money for something they never really wanted.

HOMEMARK Scam

Friday, February 1st, 2008

“CONGRATULATIONS you won a 19 Piece Knife Set from HOMEMARK. To Claim your prize call 011 430 6000. Quote ref:#####. Prizes excl P&P. T&C apply. Reply NO 2b removed” is an SMS I received somewhere last week, not very excited about the prize, I delayed calling them until yesterday, after going through the press one for this, two for that etc, I reached somebody saying “Congratulations on winning this 19 Piece Knife set” and he went on about the features and what is included, but in such an unexcited tone that I thought he was having a burial somewhere in the background.

After he went through the details of the knife set, I asked: “How do I claim my prize?” on which he replied, I’m going to need your credit card number on which I replied, “Can’t I pick it up at a local Homemark store?” on which he replied, “We’re a mail order company and only deliver, but I’m going to need your credit card number so we can deduct for handling and shipping fees”. If I remember correctly, he said the amount would be something like R9.40 for shipping and handling which apparently is from somewhere in Jo’burg to Cape Town.

Skeptical about the whole giving my credit card number over the phone, I said I don’t have a credit card, on which he just said “OK”, he didn’t offer an alternative way of paying and then a dead silence after which I said, “Thank you, but I’m not interested in this offer, have a fantastic day”

The whole thing smells like a scam to me, especially since I can’t remember entering such a competition and the fact that they are willing to give away a knife set worth “hundreds” but not willing to pay the shipping of “R9.40″, almost the same as those schemes saying you’ve won the jackpot, please send us your details so we can send you the money on which they request a handling fee or something similar.

I’m not going to leave it there, if they tried to scam me, they will probably try it with a million other South Africans, the whole thing sounded so legit on the phone until he asked for my credit card number :(

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