A warning to internet business about SPAM.
admin on Feb 17th 2008
Anyone who has been using the internet as long as I have has fallen prey to at least one scam. My first experience online I was ripped off. I was just a kid then, but its sad to think of how many good deals I probably missed out on because it made me a skeptic for dealings online. What kind of a *&$# would rip off a kid for $30 worth of trading cards anyways? Still, even with my hardened skeptecism recently I managed to fall for another scam. I was buying a domain name in a field related to my business that supposedly was receiving a lot of traffic. The seller inflated the price and percieved value of the domain by showing statistics that lead me to believe I would be buying a substantial potential customer base along with the name. The reality is that he was forewarding the traffic from another domain he owned and as soon as the name was transferred the traffic dissapeared. Anyhow I took my lumps as I was the one stupid enough to fall for such a scam. I put down the scammers name to memory just in case the opportunity to recover a loss or get revenge ever came up, and I moved on.
A few days ago I recieved a SPAM email promoting tvboxnet.com This was an unusual occurence because I recently changed my email address and hadn’t given the new email to many people. This was the first SPAM email I had recieved since the email address change. It didn’t take long to figure out that the spammer and the scammer were one and the same. He was even so bold as to sign the bulk email with the same name as he used when pulling the domain scam. Under most circumstances I would just add an email rule to filter and delete future spam, but since this was so brazen I decided to visit tvboxnet.com and let them know what I thought.
Upon visiting their site, I found the section on affiliate marketing and read through their legal page. Their terms of service specifically prohibit their affiliates from promoting with bulk email. I wrote a short email to the site administrator explaining the situation, and provided both the email and affiliate link of the offender. Within a few short minuts I got a canned response quoting the no spam section of their T.O.S. word for word. I was expecting something like “thanks we’ll look into it” but the response I got was rather confusing. So I wrote them another email asking if the affiliate account had been banned, and offered to foreward the the spam I was sent as proof. The response to my second email was “No thanks, Were going to give him another chance.”
The only way we are ever going to eliminate the scourge known as SPAM is to eliminate the people who are funding it. From the time I first received the email I had already decided I wasn’t going to buy anything from tvboxnet.com simply because I had heard about it from a spam email. It doesn’t matter to me if what they have to sell is the next up and coming tech toy that everyone is going to want. The fact that they weren’t willing to take a strong stance against SPAM has earned them a boycott.
So why am I writing this post? Its simple really. I am hoping that the next time someone decides to search on google for tvboxnet.com my post pops up in the search results right along with the words scam and spam. This is a warning to all companies who advertise online. If you are paying for advertisement you MUST take an active roll in defining how your products are marketed. I fully intend for this article to do as much damage to tvboxnet.com as is possible. At the onset of all this I would have been happy with an apology and the knowledge that they were taking action. At this point it will take a lot more than an apology to make me go away.
As a parting thought, I urge everyone who reads this to boycott tvboxnet.com. Take it one step further and please stop buying things from companies you heard about through unsolicited email.