Israel’s News Blog Magazine: Daily Stories Video and PhotosDaniel and Shiri Evans (not their real names), owners of an independent travel agency, wanted something to boost their dragging bookings of summer tourism packages. The friendly telephone call they received from an Internet marketing company reportedly in the Netherlands, offered to sell them qualified leads of people planning to go on holiday in the near future. “Just complete the credit card authorization form we will send you, and we will open an account for you for N.S. 1,000 , and we’ll send you hot, qualified leads of individuals and families planning to book holiday tour packages by the summer travel season. Our price per “lead” is the equivalent of U.S. $ 5 and the profit you can make on each sale is considerably more. What do you have to lose?”
Well, the idea certainly sounded interesting, especially when told that the company had web sites listed on various ’search engine’ Internet sites that received literally hundreds of queries each day. Despite apprehensions about giving their credit card information to a strange company, especially a ‘voice on the phone’, Dan and Shiri decided to go ahead and try this for “a month or so”, assured by the salesman that they could stop anytime they wanted and receive a full refund of any unused funds credited to their ‘account’.
After completing the form and sending it back by fax (as required by the lead marketing company), it wasn’t long before the leads began to arrive by email. The initial deposit was taken immediately as well by the marketing company. What the Evans didn’t know was that most of the ‘leads’ were non usable, with either incorrect or false information, or with absurd requests that their travel agency could not fulfill, such as “swingers” weekends or ’sex holidays’ to Thailand or other locations; or low budget student backpacking safaris to South America or India, with little or no profit to be realized.
After more than two months and nearly 300 such ‘leads’, Dan Evans decided he had enough and requested to cancel the agreement. By that time, more than N.S.3,000 had been taken from their credit card, and by the time they finally were able to have the credit card company stop the payments, another N.S. 1,000 had been ’sucked’ off by the marketing company.
Despite numerous telephone calls, most of whom were unanswered with only a recorded message instead of a human reply, emails, and letters, Evans finally called off their efforts to retrieve their funds, which amounted to a total of N.S. 5,000, with few of the leads being usable.
Internet marketing scams, such as this one, are all too frequent in today’s web-based marketing and e-information oriented world. Whether they involve service industries, travel and entertainment, or any number of other areas, millions and millions of Dollars, Pounds and Euros are being ’slurped’ from naïve and trusting business enterprises as well as the general public.
Dan and Shiri learned a relatively cheap lesson, compared to many others who lose much more in similar fraudulent transactions. With the annual travel and removals season soon upon us, take these “words for the wise” to heart before agreeing to a telephone sales pitch.
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