/Big Mouth/ This one’s optimistic
04/10/2007 | Filed under Discover > Big Mouth
Life’s full of evil little scams that promise you the world. But don’t fall into their sticky traps – blog about it and search engines will do the rest for you
When you spend most of your time documenting the various depressing ways people try to abuse the internet – the scammers, the spammers, the sneaky marketers and all the other groups trying to make things that little bit more unpleasant for the rest of us – it’s easy to become jaded and assume that the Utopian ideals underpinning the net have long been buried. And then you get a visit from The Amazing Spider-Man.
Let me explain. A few weeks back, my wife went to a baby show. You know the kind of thing: a big, soulless venue, 10 quid to get in, stacks of exhibitors, endless firms trying to sell you stuff, and, of course, free prize draws. My wife duly entered some and lo and behold, she got a call a few days later. She’d won a free holiday!
It was nothing of the sort, of course. Just another bogus holiday club trying to drag her (and me) along to a high-pressure sales presentation where they would try to part us from huge sums of our very own cash, safe in the knowledge that the law didn’t give us a cooling-off period. She realised it was a scam, and that was that.
Except it wasn’t, because I blogged about it. After a bit of digging, I’d found some message board posts that made it abundantly clear that the firm was up to no good. Because it had taken a while to find them, I figured it was worth blogging about, so I quoted a few of the posts in my blog. I didn’t think anything of it, so I didn’t even consider crafting my content to make it more search engine-friendly. I just hit the keyboard, babbled on, hit publish and forgot all about it.
The hard sell
And then I started to get comments and emails. Anne, for instance, had received
the same phone calls as my wife. So had Fireman. Linda had dealt with a similar
company and spilled the financial beans, while saying that if you could resist
the hard sell and play your cards right, you probably could get a decent, cheap
holiday. But she also said that the hard sell was really, really hard.
As the company tried to recruit new victims, the people it targeted went online – and my blog was the very first result for “company name free holiday” and “company name scam”. Better still, the search engine intelligently quoted my post, skipping the intro and getting straight to the important bit. So when you searched for details on the company offering you a free holiday, the very first summary said “Bong! Scam sign number one!”
Given that holiday club victims get stuffed to the tune of £12,000, that one little blog post will already have cost the company a lot of cash, and it’s thanks to a search engine spider that put my blog post into the index when I’d barely finished typing. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new superhero: the amazing spider, man.
Gary was writing for .net in the Stone Age. He’s a journo and software expert. www.bigmouthstrikesagain.com
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Comments
Talia Nicole / 16/04/2008 / 06:42 / http://kitchenspiceracks.net
I filled out one of these at the mall, to win $10,000, and these people continued to call and call and call. My husband was pretty mad, and finally we just told them that if they call again they will be reported to the Better Business Bureau. They didn't call again. It's sad, but there are people who do fall for the "free trip" and get caught up and end up losing a lot of money because they couldn't say no after the hard salespersons.
I am glad the search engines were able to help others find out about this scam. Imagine if you had optimized for those keywords...
