Thursday, March 10, 2005
anti-scam marketing, earn people's trust while fleecing them?
I don't claim to know anything about the Secret Shopping industry, but I will say that it looks suspicious. I did a quick search for secret shopping on yahoo and while the top natural search happened to be Victoria's Secret, most of the Overture ads were focused on secret shopping and secret shopping scams.
Whats interesting to me is how can all these sites which claim to “help people” avoid scams afford to buy traffic off of Yahoo? See for yourself:
Notice anything funny? That's right. They all start with an article and they all end with “product reviews” designed to help people find legitimate companies to work with. Fortunately all of these companies charge a small fee which is no doubt shared with the helpful article's author.
For all I know these sites are all part of the same company, but it is interesting to see people market services from the standpoint of scam prevention. Hopefully people do enough clicking to figure out that the scam prevention isn't as angelic as it claims to be.
Whats interesting to me is how can all these sites which claim to “help people” avoid scams afford to buy traffic off of Yahoo? See for yourself:
- BeASecretShopper.Org
- Top Site Reviews
- Product Reviews
- Consumer Protections Compnay
- Mystery Shopping Scam Revealed
Notice anything funny? That's right. They all start with an article and they all end with “product reviews” designed to help people find legitimate companies to work with. Fortunately all of these companies charge a small fee which is no doubt shared with the helpful article's author.
For all I know these sites are all part of the same company, but it is interesting to see people market services from the standpoint of scam prevention. Hopefully people do enough clicking to figure out that the scam prevention isn't as angelic as it claims to be.
