Category: Warning

The Clear Smart Fake TV Sales Scam

Clear-Smart advertise bargain price TVs on the Internet at clear-smart.co.uk

When you try to buy one – the card payment fails. Any card payment fails and they offer a further discount if you pay by bank transfer.

If you agree and pay – then your money is gone.

Meanwhile they fob you off with stories about the TV having been lost or damaged in transit or out of stock. They say anything to put you off for a while.

If you persist, then in time they turn nasty as they don’t like too many calls asking where the product is.

Then it’s obvious that it’s all just a scam – there are no TVs and having paid by bank transfer – the money is gone. Also, as they have your card details – your account may be at risk.

The moral is clear – always check carefully who you are buying from and NEVER pay by bank transfer or money payment agent as the money may be gone irretrievably

Clear Smart is a trading name for CS Online Retail Limited with registered owners – Charlotte Catherine Hicks and Nigel Peter Davis.

If you know anything about Clear Smart or CS Online Retail Limited then do let me know by email.

The Trading Options Scam

There are thousands of professionals who trade stock market options for a living and many do very well in this complex and risky world of finance.

Scammers like products such as Trading Options as there are cases in the news of people working from home making a fortune trading options, legitimately.

The scam is simple – entice people with tales of huge successes, the jet set lifestyle and leaving their troubles behind them.  Tell people they will make fast profits in a few hours a day, be able to give up their jobs and almost instantly achieve riches beyond their dreams. Then sell them rubbish.

For many people there is also an element of fear attached to the idea of trading on the stock market so to remove that fear the scammers may promise money back guarantees or the first few trades at no risk or a pot of money already in your account.

For example, a recent email states “Your account is ready and loaded with 5 Non-Risk Trades + 150% bonus!”

Followed by

No Risk No Reward? Not True!

But they know full well that although a lot of people can be enticed into trying trading but the vast majority lose money and give up.

There are perfectly legitimate companies offering stock market trading but the reputable firms do not cold call or send spam emails and they make people very much aware of the risks involved.

A recent piece of research showed that home investors who trade options made on average only 20% of the profits of those investors who steered clear of options.  So it’s better to avoid trading options unless you are an expert.

If you want to try trading then do find a reputable company and learn before risking your own money.

Warning: Online Advertising Networks

An online advertising network or ad network buys advertising space on any websites and sells that as package deals to advertisers . The key function of an ad network is aggregation of ad space supply from publishers and matching it with advertiser demand.

The advertising network market is a large and growing market, with Internet advertising revenues expected to grow to $240bn in 2019.

Online advertising may be on websites on desktop computers and mobile devices, in RSS feeds, on blogs, in instant messaging applications, mobile apps, e-mails, and on other media.

Large publishers often sell their remaining advertising space through ad networks.

Online advertising networks typically use these three approaches:-

  1. Vertical Networks: The network works with a group of publishers in an industry sector e.g. travel and any advertisers will be able to see where their adverts will be positioned.
  2. Blind Networks: These companies offer good pricing to direct marketers in exchange for those marketers not knowing control over where their ads will run. Blind networks achieve their low pricing through bulk buying of advertising space and mopping up last minute spaces available.
  3. Targeted Networks: these focus on specific targeting technologies such as behavioural targeting and contextual targeting.

The Issue With Ad Networks

Location: Most ad networks do not disclose where the ads will be placed for how many impressions.  So advertisers are in the dark to some degree and may end up with their ads appearing on sites they would not want to be associated with e.g. gambling sites carry a lot of ad network adverts.

Pricing: An advertiser may buy a package of advertising space that includes some sites they like. However the ad network may place very little on those sites as they are probably more expensive and instead place most of the ads on lower quality websites which will be cheaper.

This way the ad network can make larger profits at the expense of quality.

Relevance: Ad networks may place ads anywhere they can get bargains and this is likely to be sites that are irrelevant for the advertiser. This leads to poor results and failure to communicate with the chosen market.

Do you have an opinion on this matter? Please comment in the box below.

The Central Register of Companies

A letter arrived for Fightback from The Central Register of Companies and Businesses.

The letter looks official but is not addressed to a person or a job role, just to the company.

It starts off by specifying the company start date and address then comes the deceitful part.

Go to www.cregist.co.uk and pay for the publication of your company.

Lack of payment will result in lack of entry in the Central Register of Companies and Businesses.

At first glance, maybe that sounds bad and I’d better pay up quickly. But of course it’s just a  sales pitch wrapped up to sound like it’s an official requirement.

The letter continues saying the same things in different official sounding words.

In accordance with the current register rules (8 of internal rules), publication of an entry in the Central Register of Companies and Businesses requires payment of an optional registration fee of £200.

The letter does not class as a scam because the wording is careful to avoid actual lies. However, it is designed to fool people who don’t read it carefully and I suspect many businesses have signed up for what is essentially just an entry In a business directory without realising that’s all it is.

If you want to pay for an entry in a directory – that’s fine, but don’t pay for such things without reading the offer carefully.

Don’t be fooled.

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Warning: Antibiotics For Sale Online

An email from cahiphop.com titled ‘Excite your communications thirst”

In fact the email is trying to sell antibiotics and is nothing to do with communications.

The main selling point is “Good antibiotics made with love and care”

And it says

  • Shipping to anywhere worldwide
  • Lowest price
  • No prescription required

The statement about the drugs being good and made with love and care is worrying. No professional pharmaceutical company would state anything like that. As customers you want to know that a product is made according to the set standards not with love and care as if they are talking about cakes. You don’t want to know that it is ‘good’ but that it is verified to be at the required standard.

The seller appears to have no company name – just shortened urls advertising products.

I would not buy any kind of medicine from an online store such as this one. I would not feel confident that any products they supply have the correct active ingredients  and haven’t been cut with talcum powder, rat poison or whatever was to hand in the garage or slum where they were likely produced, to keep the price down.

This applies to any drug, but the world is increasingly facing antibiotic resistant bacteria and all antibiotics MUST be prescribed by a doctor and taken according to the instructions.

Allowing people to buy antibiotics online without prescription can only make the problem worse at a faster rate.

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Online Paid Surveys Can Be Questionable

There are huge numbers of people who would love to work from home, working when they choose.

And there are endless adverts on the Internet for these jobs, but sadly 59 out of every 60 such adverts are scams.

However, there are some real work at home jobs and filling in online surveys is one of them. Lots of sites offer these surveys and you get paid for filling them in.

Many of them have a poor reputation – tedious questions, not paying up, survey freezing near the end so you don’t get paid etc.

One such site that used to have a good reputation is the Australian group My Opinions at https://www.myopinions.com.au/ This is a well organised setup with lots of surveys and people have been paid and done well out of filling in the surveys.

Recently the website was taken over by a new company and some people feel the quality has dropped.

https://www.surveypolice.com/ is nothing to do with the Police – it’s just a website about surveys and people have added their views of myopinions.com.au and there is a lot of bad feeling about the company now.

It seems that some people have a good experience and are paid appropriately but others find that surveys free3ze at the end so they don’t count and some have been evicted from the survey site without reason and their payments not made.

Be careful if you start online surveys for money – make sure to pick a reputable company that always pays.

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