Greedy Thieves
Friday November 04, 2005; part of: Net stories

Silly company names are the postal service equivalent of spam filters. Just as I always give the Independent's City Road postcode on forms which want to know mine when it's none of their business -- and the fax machine's number for voice calls -- my entries in domain name registries show that I work for a company called World Domination Enterprises, or sometimes Spooging Moose Corporate Communications. These are names only a database could love, so when any envelope turns up for either of them I know it's an attempted con.

This afternoon brought a cracker. An outfit calling itself the Internet Listing Service sent a fake invoice demanding suggesting that I pay £65 or "best value" £260.00 for five years. And what to I get for this? A "Website Address Listing", which means "domain name submission to 20 major search engines". I'm pretty certain this is the same bunch of conmen who ran a slightly different racket as registrars until caught by the Trading Standards Authority. The print saying "This is not a bill. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated." is now about three times the size that it used to be, and much more prominently displayed. UPDATE still, apparently, illegal in the USA.

It's hard to believe that anyone will fall for this version, but how many suckers do they need to cover their costs?

Posted by andrewb at November 04, 2005 08:00 PM
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Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make italics bold and other silly effects easily.
  • Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
  • Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
  • Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
  • A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
  • I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.
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