Business people beware of this scam

Last week I had a phone call pretending be from the Manchester Chamber of commerce saying they were putting together a magazine. They made a mistake of not withhelding their number and it showed up as Blackburn so I knew it was a scam.

A day later I recieved a phone call from Christies Hospital with exactly the same pitch, this time witheld.

Today I have recieved a phone call from Greater Manchester police and guess what they are putting together a magazine which will feature new businesses.

It is the same company behind all three phone calls, the publications probably don't exist and of course they think new businesses are an easy target.

The sales pitch from each call has been identical.

I shall be sending an email to trading standards about this.

 

so, what is the scam then..?

 

AT its nothing new, or original.

I used to work (briefly) for a publishing house that did just this.

There are loads of free circulation magazines out there, and they will use any line they can muster to get advertising.

Feel sorry for the poor guy that has to make 300 phone calls a day just to earn a crust.

Anyone responsible for a marketing budget will be more than aware of the different types of publication out there.

 

The scam is the publication probably dosn't exist, it will be one big marketing company behind the whole lot.

I advertise in a local publication, it costs £22 an issue and has a circulation of 2000. I get a bit of business from that and they never did any of the hard sell, I contacted them.

The problem with press advertising it unless you can afford to be in every issue it has a very low response rate.

 

I've been getting loads of these calls as well, they've got my details from yell.com as I recently registered there.

I have to agree with AT; whether the publications may/may not actually exist (I've never seen/heard of any of them), the way the companies approach you/talk to you/attempt to pressure you into signing up on the phone I can't help but think that it's a big fat scam. They're all feeding you exactly the same lines.

I had approaches from 4 or 5 companies over about 2 weeks. I asked all of them to send me a sample of their publication as I wouldn't sign up to anything without seeing the product, they all said 'certainly sir', and hey, guess what, I've never received anything. Big fat f****n' liars.

Today I've had calls from two companies offering to do websites at 'subsidised' rates, more hard sell, more bullsh*t.... Frankly, it's all a bit tiresome. I haven't got any sympathy for the sales staff, the ones I've spoken to have all been tossers by virtue of the crap they spew and the companies they work for, I'm quite happy for them to be crustless. So there

 

I have been polite with them until today when I felt enough was enough. Funnily enough I also registered with Yell so I think it clear our details have been sold on.

The one from the Greater Manchester police press office made me laugh the most, two people have been shot dead in a pub in Salford so they will be very busy at the moment, not trying to sell adverts to some tiny self employed person based in a bedroom.

The other problem I have is my phone company is a VIOP one (Sipgate) and although I have an 0845 number the usual regulations don't seem to apply.

 

The best thing I ever saw when working for our company on a desk for a while was the faxes! Amazing amount of crap coming through there.

The very best one was a fax claiming to be able to stop all unwanted faxes coming through by signing up to their service, just call this number....


At the bottom, 8 quid a minute.

 

AT have you had the 'Data protection act' scam letter yet. We fell for it at a particularly busy time and didn't check up on it. They make the letter look very official.

Our fax get's about 1% real business faxes and the rest are for cars, strange diets, 'Government auctions' etc. OTOH our email seems to be going the same way now as well.

 

Had loads of them - more worrying is when the invoices start turning up because they've spoken to someone somewhere within your company that said yes....supposedly....

It is a sad state of affairs....I advertised a car in Autotrader last week, & had about 10 calls. But all of them started " Is your ***** still for sale?" "Yes" I said. " Well I have a couple of people interested in buying it & would like to send you the details..?....blah".....I can only assume that there must be a lot of mugs & that these outfits are making money from it ....depressing...

 

I actually lost it today because it has got to the stage where 80% of phone calls I am now receiving are trying to sell me somthing.

Things are quite bleak at the moment after a positive start