Fake Lead Generation

There are endless companies offering to send out millions of emails to sell your products. Some are genuine businesses that take care over their mailing lists but many are just spammers who buy mailing lists from anyone and send out any rubbish they are paid to.

There is also a different approach where you don’t pay for the number of emails sent out but for the number of leads generated from the emails.

Generating leads means that someone (or a computer) has clicked on a link or returned an email in order to show further interest in whatever is being promoted.

This sounds like a better option for the business buying the service and in some cases it is.

But there are many unscrupulous people who when offered a payment for each lead generated, manage to create huge numbers of supposed leads, but they may be very poor quality leads. “Poor quality” in this case means people who are tricked into clicking or replying to something nothing to do with the item being promoted so the chance of them buying is very slim.

They are a variety of ways to do this, including:-

  • Offering entry to a competition with big prizes
  • Fake retail vouchers e.g. 100 pounds Marks and Spencer voucher for answering 3 questions
  • Massive supposed discounts
  • Clickbait i.e. the link is labelled with something to catch the eye that may be completely irrelevant to the actual link e.g. “Revealed: Meghan Markel’s Secret Past”

The easiest approach for the unscrupulous is to simply invent supposed leads or buy spam mailing lists and claim they have responded.

Protect your business – do not buy leads unless you are absolutely sure it is the best approach and the business you are buying from is ethical and can get the results you want the way you want.

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The Forskolin Scam

The title is “Add this flower to your diet and burn double the calories”.

So, it’s yet another diet scam with some supposed magic ingredient.

Forskolin is made from the root of a plant in the Mint family and it is native to Nepal, India and Thailand.

It has long been used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine and some believe it helps weight loss, asthma and a variety of other medical problems.

But there is very little evidence that it has any effect.

The scammers do like using new names for their supposed magical ingredient and Forskolin is a good candidate.

The use of language in the email is very odd

E,g, “you’ve probably heard how great it can be to get your body back”

And “There was a recent discovery that can put your body into Forskolin”

The title claims you can burn double the calories and later on it claims “you can even drop 5x more then before”.

Maybe the scammer wants to put off anyone with an IQ about 20 or maybe the language problems are due to poor translation.

Either way, it is just a scam of course.

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

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Clear Vison in 7 Seconds

“Medical experts are stunned by this Nobel-prize winning vision secret…” claims the email.

Of course, there is no secret and certainly no Nobel prize for scammers.

Novel prizes are awarded years after the discovery or experiment occurred and are known world wide – so how can something be a huge secret that will ‘destroy the foundation of the eyecare industry’ yet also be known around the world.

I didn’t notice the world’s eyecare industry collapsing over the last few years – did you?

“In fact, even folks who were once legally blind are now seeing in crystal clear HD vision”.

Seems there’s nothing this scammer wont claim.

HD Vision is a term from the world of computer screens and TVs – there’s no such thing as HD vision in humans except in the mind of a very stupid scammer.

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

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Facebook Listens to Your Conversation

People have wondered for some time how Facebook works out what adverts to serve up to which people and sometimes an advert that’s a little too accurate may turn up. That’s sets people wondering whether Facebook listens in on their phone conversations and there’s anecdotal evidence that seems to make the point.

At congressional hearings, when Senator Gary Peters asked Mark Zuckerberg (head of Facebook) if Facebook listens to users through their cell phone microphones in order to collect information with which to serve them adverts, Zuckerberg said “No.”

How Facebook Collects Information

The Facebook APP does request microphone permissions for any videos you post, as well as to identify music or TV shows when you use the “Listening to” status feature, but does not listen to your conversation.

It starts with your Facebook profile plus everything you post on Facebook. Facebook tracks you through Like buttons on other web pages. This is even true for people without a Facebook account.

It also:-

  • Uses data from its other APPS – Instagram and WhatsApp
  • Tracks data from APPS within Facebook e.g. quizzes
  • Tracks when you use your Facebook login to access other websites
  • Maintains shadow profiles on people who don’t use Facebook.
  • Records unique phone identifiers through in-app advertising to associate your identity across the different devices you use.
  • Tracks your location constantly
  • Tracks your purchases

If you have ever been surprised by a Facebook advert for a product popping up right after you were talking out loud about it, it may be that Facebook has learned too much about you but it won’t be from your conversations.

Most people dislike adverts but understand that advertising fund the websites and services and APPS so is a necessary ‘evil’.  Some prefer adverts that are relevant whereas others find that creepy or intrusive.

However, most do accept that targeted advertising is likely to become more prevalent and more accepted.

Facebook don’t listen to your conversations, but they can collect so much information about us that it may seem that adverts can sometimes be too accurately targeted at you.

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