Author: comptroller

Time-Wasters Update

“If there was a small tweak you could make in your daily routine that would make you drop 3 dress sizes in one week, wouldn’t you want to know it? Well?” . Quite an opening line in the sales pitch but obviously lies. The maximum weight loss possible in one week due to complete starvation is about 4 kilos and that’s only possible with a great deal of exercise on top of the starvation so anything promising you can lose 15 pounds in a week with no effort is lies.  

“Get rid of Arthritis in 21 days”. That’s the claim in a latest set of scam emails.  Arthritis is a set of complex debilitating joint problems – some of which can be alleviated with anti-inflammatories and/or painkillers and some require more specialist help or surgery. But there are no magic answers – e.g. you cannot fix a problem of worn out damaged knee cartilage with 21 days of anything.

Oh dear! My Yahoo account has been marked for immediate shutdown due to non-verification unless I click a link to verify within the next 24 hours.  The message is from asadimohammedreza @yamil.com which is obviously not Yahoo mail, just some dumb criminal.

An email tells me I can make $3,000 from home per day with little effort. If it was true there would be millions if not billions of people wanting to take the opportunity, but of course it’s a lie.  Sadly, over 95% of Work at Home offers are fake.

Big News! Scientists have discovered that 93% of all skin problems have one cause and you counteract this within 2 minutes per day with this new scientifically proven cure. Nope. Scammers pick up on anything in the news that looks like people may be dumb enough to go for a scam magic remedy and skin problems have been newsworthy recently.  

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Neighbourhood Watch Week

Neighbourhood Watch logo

The week commencing 17th June was Neighbourhood Watch week.

It was a reason to look at the great work done to protect communities by the Neighbourhood teams across the country.

You’ll find Neighbourhood Watch online at www.ourwatch.org.uk

They claim to be the largest crime prevention movement in England and Wales with 2.3 million member households and their mission is to bring neighbours together to create strong, friendly, active communities where crime and anti-social behaviour are less likely to happen.

There are numerous examples on their website of the great work being done, such as the one below.

Pocket Park

There was a disused lay-by that had attracted drug dealing and fly-tipping and  the idea was to turn it into a pocket park. At the same time, a campaign was in progress to turn a disused shop front into a Window Gallery. The two projects were to help create a more vibrant, safe and connected community.

The team kept pressure on the local council by emailing and holding regular meetings with various councillors and community groups. They attended ward panel meetings with police, councillors and other groups locally in the belief that if they kept the pressure on they could eventually effect change.

It took six years for the pocket park and 18 months for the Window Gallery.

They took pictures regularly of the degradation and vandalism and shared these with the council. Every time a crime occurred in the lay-by they ensured it was reported and reported any fly tipping etc.

They created social media groups to keep momentum and team spirits up.

The council funded the creation of the pocket park with agreements from residents to lightly maintain it –   picking litter, weeding and watering it regularly.

For the gallery, they applied for funding and approached local businesses. They gained funding from several streams including the heritage lottery fund, the St James Big Local community group and a local estate agent.

Well done the local Neighbourhood Watch team of volunteers.

If you have any experiences with Neighbourhood Watch  do let me know, by email.

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The Problem of Automated Competition Services

If you host a competition on your website you may find that hundreds of emails or online entries appear but they all have the same format and just have a person’s name, phone number and address.

If there were any questions to answer in the competition they wont be in the submissions.

Q. What is going on?

It’s likely your competition has come to the attention of one or more online automated competition entry services.

These services charge people a monthly fee to enter them automatically into lots of competitions.

Services such as

  • Win24
  • WeWin4U
  • Prizewise
  • Prize500
  • PrizeDrawCentre

For some competitions maybe that isn’t a problem, but for others it can a big annoyance and even overwhelm the number of genuine entries by individuals.

One of the companies listed above guarantees each person at least 1,000 competition entries per year.

Automated competition entries are of little benefit to a website running a competition as there isn’t anyone looking at the website – just software.

How To Avoid Competition Spam

  • Don’t offer an email route to enter the competition – only through a form on the page
  • Don’t have a competition where only name and address are required to enter – include at least one question to be answered and preferably one or more questions that are open rather than having multiple choice answers
  • Use a form with a CAPTCHA to stop the automated entries
  • Consider making users login to enter your competitions, but you might lose some people that way
  • Make it a rule that automated/bulk entries will be disqualified and do disqualify any that get through

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