I received an email today that was funny to me, but not to someone who is unsuspecting. I’ll let you read it.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Price [mailto:ann.price@topspot-promotions.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 7:14 AM
To: AskESET
Subject: Placing advertisements on www.welivesecurity.com
Greetings,
Topspot-Promotions, an established advertising company, would like to pay you for placing a small advertisement on www.welivesecurity.com for one of our customers.
These days we are using a few methods of advertising to guarantee that the ad we choose will fit the site nicely.
After reviewing your website I thought about an advertisement that fits perfectly a few pages on your website.
For full details please contact me at ann.price@topspot-promotions.net.
*If you have other websites which I can review for advertising please send me their URLs as well.
Regards,
Ann Price
Advertising Specialist
ann.price@topspot-promotions.net
To permanently delete yourself from our list, simply reply to this with a blank email and you will never receive any communication from us in the future.
For just a moment, let’s make the silly assumption that Topspot-Promotions is a legitimate company. Malware in advertisements is a serious problem. Companies like the New York Times have been bitten by this criminal ploy before. No, we’re not going to place third party advertisements from a clown with an email account on our website.
But, I did a little more research. This “established” advertising company registered their domain in late 2009. Yeah, established, but not for very long. According to 7zoom.com, topspot-promotions’ web site is worth $8,732 and they rank 300,039 in the world. You just would expect more from a web promotion company. I don’t know anything about 7zoom, but they say that ESET.com is worth $713,314 and ranks 3,573 in the world. We’ll have to work on that.
According to http://under-over-soccer-picks.blogspot.com/2010/08/topspot-promotions-is-scam.html topspot-promotions doesn’t pay their bills either. Not a good sign.
If you look at the website for topspot-promotions.net you will find that they do not publish a phone number or a physical address. This should raise about a billion red flags.
Even if topspot had everything in order and a stellar reputation it is virtually certain that we would not place a third-party advertisement on our blog.
They did take the time to email me so I will share my polite response with you…
Hi Ann,
I'm glad you like our site.
One of our requirements for placing 3rd party ads on the blog, from a company like yours, is that NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) must have reported the temperature in Hades as being below 0 degrees Celsius for at least a week. If you can provide a certified report we can talk.
I will say, you do come highly recommended though and I will certainly give your company coverage in our blog!!!
http://under-over-soccer-picks.blogspot.com/2010/08/topspot-promotions-is-scam.html
http://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8021&start=0
http://shessmart.com/tag/topspot-promotions-scam/
and....
http://7zoom.com/www.topspot-promotions.net
WOW, you ranked 300,039 in the world... let's break out the bubbly
Best regards,
Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education
ESET LLC
