Scam

The other day, I received an email claiming I had been selected for inclusion in a very exclusive directory called Emeralds Who’s Who. My immediate reaction was to send it to junk. Then my eyes caught a glimpse of Roer.com – the brand name of my company.

The company where established in Norway back in 1994, and I also brought it with me when I lived in France for several years during the Dot.com period. Thus, the email was able to get under my guard simply by putting my company name and France into the body of the email. This was enough to catch my attention, and I started to read the full content of the email.

According to the email, I was a very accomplished business man. And to be honest, I am tempted to agree. I have had a lot of fun, and true, I have accomplished big things. But I usually do not brag about it, so not many people know.

Reading on, I learned that the

Who would not love to be part of that, huh?

They go on telling me about how the members help each others, creating business opportunities worldwide. Being an entrepreneur, global networks are always of interest.

A few lines of further reading bring on the sales message. One of the most useful sales tricks in the world of sales is to create a reason for hurry. Create a short-term offer or an opening that will close within a few days or hours. And make sure your client realizes the hurry. Yes, I am a sales professional with more than 20 years of sales experience. Yes, I conduct sales trainings.

Yes, I can recognize when someone is trying to pull my leg. Thus, I dismissed the time frame – as in my experience, if you want to buy something, you will usually be able to negotiate the same deal anyway.

Reading on, I learn that there is no charge for being considered into the Emeralds Who’s Who. That is nice, but I get the feeling that after the consideration is over, there might be charges.

Now I can click on a link, or copy-paste it into a browser, and they will take me directly to the application. And surely enough, a reminder of the hurry I am in if I want to be in the next annual publication. Signed by Anthony Miller, Research Director.

Temptation

No matter how tempting it is to click the links, I am a paranoid son of a b*tch. That may be what makes me good at security. So I do not click the links. Nor do I feel like taking part of a Who’s Who I never hear about before. On the other hand, there is a little voice inside saying:

I don’t know about you, but recognition is one of my main motivators. So I decided to spend a little time to look into this opportunity of fame. Perhaps it was true? Maybe finally someone had seen what I did in the past and wanted me to share that?

Another sales technique is to use the clients own motivation and need for recognition to make him feel good, and then want to buy from you. It is sometimes referred to as befriending, and is IMO a very important quality of a sales person. But, still IMO, the befriending should be honest, and truthful. After all, you want to build a relationship based on trust. So overdoing your befriending is not that useful.

Surely enough, I felt good. I had done something, and a research time had deemed what I had done as worth recognition in their publication.

Again, my paranoia forces me to do some research. I go to their website, which I find to be very pre-2000, a sure sign that they either do not know what they are doing, do not have enough money to do what they want, or that they do not care. None of which are good IMO, and I rise my guard.

I do find a physical address, some contact names and even a phone number. This is generally good, and as a result I lower my guard a bit.

Next step is to Google. I enter Emerald Who’s Who, and get an interesting list. Surely enough, the first couple of results points to their own website. Then there are several different sites and discussion boards claiming this is a scam. Many of those are years old, and the same scams are still taking place.

My guard is back up, and I start to read.

Pretty soon, I realize that the posts that are filled with poison against the Who’s Who are not a result of one or two people that are not satisfied with the services. I realize that my gut feeling was right all the time. The Emerald Who’s Who is one of several Who’s Who directories that only serve to scam people.

What I read is not fun, nor shocking.

I would normally just have deleted this email and moved on with my life. But this time I feel like I almost fell victim to a scam. And I tend to look at myself as a professional. A security professional. I should not be even remotely tempted to fall for something like this. And still I felt like this was an opportunity to get some fame and recognition.

I can only imagine how many people are falling for such scams. On the Emerald Who’s Who there is a list of Premier members (sorry, I have no idea what the pay for this). You can browse people on the list, and read about the merits of the victims. For example, you can read that a CEO (name not disclosed), enjoys golf and music, is married and has two children. And yes, full contact and website info is available. Go hustle!

Another one has a full list of accomplishments, image and contact info. Social engineering the people on these lists would be a dream!

And that is exactly what these Who’s Who directories are doing – they play you like a kid. They fool you into thinking that they care. They make you believe that what you have done means a lot to them, and that you are honored to be on their list. Most importantly, they use your own feelings and wish for recognition to charge your credit card ridiculous amounts of cash, they also put you out there on their lists to show the world how they fooled you.

So far, I have found several similar Who’s Who, and according to this great post over at Writer Beware (thanks Victoria), there are plenty of these sites. According to Victoria, these are other Who’s Who scams:

According to the comments to that post, you get the impression that there are a few people only who runs these scams, and that these people know each other, and compete. It seems like they all started in the same company, and then split up. To me it sounds like they are not happy with getting only a small piece of the cake, they all want it all.

I am not sure where they picked my name up, but it does not really matter. These days, it is extremely easy to find just about any name. And only a few minutes of research will be enough to make even the most careful ones lower their guards.

Did you fall for these tricks? How did you get out of it? What is your advice to others? When will such scams stop? How can we help each other to avoid such threats?

The letter I received from Emerald Who's who! Check out the blog post here and be sure to leave your comments!

I have removed the links in the post. No link-juice for Emerald!

One year ago, I wrote about Jamparii and their (IMO) bizarre method of raising funds for their business. As it turns out, the company was not able to profit on the rise of social networking websites, and failed to get the required funds.

According to Jim Tuffin, CEO and founder of Jamparii, they have now put the project on hold due to lack of funding. He says that all funds received are returned. I have no reason not to trust his words.

Jamparii serves as an example of how good (or bad) ideas need a critical mass to survive. Building a business is hard work and high risk. I usually see two main reasons young business fails:

• Lack of funding
• Lack of patience

Lack of funding is usually due to the fact that things takes much more time, and costs more money than first imagined. I have seen, and been part of, this kind of failure. It hurts, and it is not fun. The only way to deal with this is to get the funds in time, and enough of it.

Lack of patience is different - this happens if investors, or key members, stop trusting the product. This creates a downward spiral where all energy in the venture goes away, and takes with it the passion that is required to succeed.

Happily, way too few business creators know this. And if they know, they are able to push it aside and get their venture going anyway.

One year ago, I wrote about my thoughts on Jamparii, and I asked if it was just another scam.

Back then, Jim Tuffin, the CEO and founder, claimed that this would be the next great success within social networking. In a comment to my blog post, he also said that he did not want to involve professional venture capital, as they would require a high number of shares in exchange of their cash. Who would blame them?

Anyway, I would be very interested in knowing what happened to Jamparii, and their founder members. Do you know anything? Did you join? What are the prospect of getting your cash back? If you did not join, what where your reasons not doing it? Any news you have, please share!

Discovering Phishing and other attempts to empty your pockets may not be the easiest thing to do.

Most of us regularly receives emails asking us to verify our bank account, eBay, PayPal and other services by clicking a link. And unless you are on the alert all the time, it is easy to end up with empty pockets.

eBay has produced a nice tutorial where you are told how to spot a fake, and how to deal with it. The tutorial is eBay focused, but the actual methods are the same.

If in doubt - look at the tutorial!

The size of the hacking/scamming/phishing criminals are increasing. We all know this. The size of the criminals available creates new market spaces. We know that too. Criminals tends lack ethics. We see evidence of that all the time! 

And here is a nice story to show you again the lack of ethics amongst the criminals - Mr. Brain offers his free phishing kit to aspiring scammers. Nice one, Mr. Brain! I bet they love it!

Only drawback - Mr. Brain gets a copy of all activities and all the information collected from the kits. And the scammers themselves get scammed!

Why Mr. Brain does it like this? We can only guess. What we do know is that it gets increasingly risky to run scams and phishing - as ISPs and law enforcement are now actively on the lookout. Thus, finding an ISP and running your scam yourself is no longer the best method.

Add to that the increasing number of dumb n00bs out there, wannabies who like to be Great Hackers, but lack skill, understanding and motivation. What do you get? A market for hacking tools. 

As with legitimate business, many different business models exists - selling tools and kits directly, revenue sharing - and now "information sharing" without consent.

I am quite sure that Mr. Brain have access to the infrastructure necessary to monetize on the information. And I am more sure that his clients - the wannabies above - have no or only little clue on how to monetize the same information.  And the poor n00b ends up scammed.

I must admit - I love it. 

I am ROFL imaging their faces when they realize they are 0wned.

Dear anonymous (I would much rather prefer to say Dear John),

First - I post this as a blogpost instead of a reply to your comment on my post about Jamparii. 

Thank you for your input. As I know you are not only claiming to do what you say, but actually are trying to build your own tool for business networking, I would much rather that you did enter your own name, John.

However, what you are pointing at is true in all new ventures. It does take capital to build success. And there are several different paths to choose from. Jim has chosen one path, and John, you took another path.

My experience tells me that the path of money alone is not enough. To build a successful networking site, you need quality. You need content. You need active users. And you need a value proposition to your users.

Linkedin, Xing and Facebook are three successful networking tools, but they are very different. Ecademy and Viadeo are others. Myspace and Orcut are there too. Just to name a few of your competitors. They offer value. Distinctive value. And they have success. 

You need to present a clear value to me before I will even consider your new tool. No matter how you choose to finance you venture. Scam or not.

This is about risk as well. Do you have what it takes to break the bank? Did you consider all options? Have you done your homework, so you know how to position yourself?

What if you fail? What if it takes twice the time to break even? Or three times the time? What if you only secure half the funds you need? What if only one tenth of the required users actually signs up? 

So the question to you two competitors - do you have the BUZZ?

I get many strange invitations in my email. Todays selection is from a that calls themselves Biztime Limited, based in the UK. They have a new Social Networking idea - called Jamparii. Sure we can use that (pun). Their plan is to let me make a profit as they become the next MySpace and Youtube. In other words, they want my money.

The invitation came by an Ecademy group. I quit Ecademy 18 month ago because back then I felt many users where only interested in MLM and promoting scams. Even though I have canceled my account, and no longer are available on Ecademy, they continue to send me emails from their forums. That is another post, I guess!

So back to Jamparii - they ask me to give them £1 000,- in exchange for a Founder Life Membership. And a potential revenue share:

Our strategy is to create a small group of just 250 Founder Life Members, who will be the centre pillars of Jamparii and will benefit both as life members but also financially as shareholders. We already have a number in place but there are still plenty of places left. Your investment will be under £1,000 and you will have the opportunity to earn and win more shares during the first year or so.

 

So - I will win more shares during the first year or so. Sounds like the MLM game that took Europe by storm a few years back - you played around with virtual stocks, and made a profit based upon how many people you recruited. World Game Inc. it was called, before it was called a bluff.  

Further fuel to my presumption is the fact that 3 750 Founder members are also invited. So - we have Founder Life members who will win shares, and Founder members who pay to enter. Then add regular, paying members - they will provide the profit up the lane. Or so it may sound.

They start their story like this:

When we hear of the huge sums of money that are being paid for these web platforms do you wish that you had thought them up or had a stake in them?

Well here is an opportunity for you to do just that! - Read on and see for yourself!

 

I am sorry. If I had such an idea, last thing I would do is to tell everyone. I would have people use it. Not try to sell it like a scam.

Thus, I suggest Jamparii is a scam, and time will show who is right. I will have to appologize if they actually end up like MySpace or Youtube - walking away with a huge lump of money.

According to this dialog box popping into my face when surfing the net, DriveCleaner was very aware of the tracks left on my computer when I surf porn and other adult materials. And as a nice, and service minded application, it offers itself to be installed and scan my HD for any threats.

If I had been my father-in-law (or my mother), I would most likely belive this to be a truthfull and trustworthy application that I needed to install and use. Nothing really new about such nice tools yet. So where is the catch?