This fake kidnapping ploy started in Taiwan with Chinese gangs preying on Taiwanese students and the gangs involved have started up in Australia, targeting overseas students.

The parents of the ‘kidnapped’ student get a call saying their son or daughter has been kidnapped and the kidnappers seem to know about the student, thereby convincing the parents who then try to find the money to pay the ransom.

Their attempts to contact their son or daughter fail.

What has happened is that the gangs started by targeting overseas students (especially Chinese students) where the parents will have trouble travelling to the University.

They learned what they could about their targets initially then contacted the targets – claiming to be the authorities, telling them their life is in danger and they could be deported or imprisoned.

They learn more about the target so as to be able to convince the parents and they warn the target not to contact anyone or talk with anyone and to ignore phone calls, emails etc. as these could be false.

This is a nasty business as the parents will be terrified and pay a ransom and the target will be terrified to talk to anyone and in fear of prosecution.

The official advice is that anyone who receives such threatening calls they should contact the authorities immediately and certainly not just pay a ransom.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

Some Scammers will threaten you to create their backlinks or else.

People try all sorts of tactics to get back links to their websites or blogs. Often they are paid by someone to get those links because the more backlinks there are to your website –  probably the higher the website appears on search lists. So, legitimate companies do this but also scammers.

A lot of people do this for perfectly respectable reasons as they want people to see their website or blog but the scammers are in a hurry and use more nasty approaches, sometimes including threats.

An email from Billie Clancy claims he works for Bizcope SEO company in Bangladesh i.e. a company that among other things will try to get backlinks for websites.

He requests a backlist and a 5 star rating for his company on GMB and Trustpilot and offers to provide a backlink to our website in return.

Then he gets nasty

“If I do not see a backlink within 7 days then I am create one million toxic blog spam to you”

Then he signs off with “Best Wishes from Bangladesh”.

Maybe he is schizophrenic or just plain stupid.

Never provide backlinks to websites you do not know and trust as you do not want to be linked to criminal’s despicable and often illegal websites

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email