I’d like to take a moment, if I may, to reproduce here a letter which I am heartily tempted to send to a certain company … let’s call them the Pinternet Pearch Pegistry … from which I receieved an envelope in the mail today.
Ahem.
You, sirs and/or madams, if I shall be so flattering to assign gender to a group of people slimier than the basest algae – you disgust me.
I hold in my hand something that is made to look for all the world like a bill, for your fly-by-night search engine submission service. You actually had me going for a minute – “When did I submit my website to a pay service?” I thought. “Did I not notice a $50 charge somewhere?”
Then I saw it, in lilliputian print: “This statement is a solicitation and receipt of your payment will confirm annual subscription.” Funny how a solicitation has a due date? And an account number? That it lists service charges and claims to have been printed in November?
You filthy, greedy little coterie of fuckfoons. How many hapless fools have been suckered in by these blatantly illegal deceptive tactics? How much money have you made by bullying website owners into paying your bullshit fifty dollar fee because they saw the word “due date” and thought it was legit? And since when does submitting to search engines like Google and Yahoo cost anything?
You are not fit to grow on last year’s pizza. And after I figure out who to forward this little joke to, there won’t be enough of you left to grow on last year’s pizza. May you receive the swift kick in the collective groin you so obviously deserve.
We get a similar thing at work, but it’s for “Yellow Page” advertising. To further entice the idiot at-large, they’ll send an actual check for about $10-20 and on the back (in fine print, of course) is an agreement to pay $30/mo for two years to be listed on some obscure website.
It’s very long, but basically it’s about a guy who recieved a fake cheque in the post, some sort of crap about “buy our product and you could be recieving this much money”, he paid the cheque into his bank account to see what would happen and they actually cleared all $95,093.35 of it.
Yeah, our record label got one of those. We are EXTREMELY picky about the search engines we submit to, so we knew they were full of shit. We don’t particularly need/want any little dinky and obscure search engine that has no traffic to list our site.
Amusing anecdote:
One dumbass search enigne also promotes their “translation service.” Crayons, did you know that English is understood only by (some tiny percentage) of all Internet users? Contact us NOW, Crayons! For a nominal, additional fee, YOUR Crayons website can be translated into THESE languages. CLICK HERE to see a sample of your index page, Crayons.
Our primary website is already translated into the two languages that best suit the demographics of one of our artist. The transaltions were done by professional translators and proofreader. But hey, for fun, I took a look …
The worst Babel Fish type translations ever seen! A white, female singer-songwriter became “an enhanced African male.” At least they brightened the day off our entire staff – da-amn it was funny!
I guess they really count on the fact that the victims of their spam can’t read the languages of their “translations.”
How do I go about reporting these assmonkeys to the FTC and the Postal Inspectors? I’ve already got the address of the Oakland Better Business Bureau office (since the shitflaps are located in Pleasanton).
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service website has directions on how to report fraud and other shady dealings involving the mail. They also have a list of their regional offices.
This link will take you to the FTC’s online consumer complaint form.
Read all the information thoroughly to makes sure you’re sending the right stuff to the right people.
I got one of these too! I actually wrote the check out and (thankfully) casually asked my mate if the name of our private site was changed. Ripped it up but good. I should have saved it and reported it (slap), but it felt so good.