Harvesting Telephone numbers - Vision aka VARDIS - beware!

I tend to get telephone calls like this 2 or 3 times a month, calls normally come from either Manchester, London or Liverpool, the guy who calls from Liverpool has been calling me for the last 5 years his voice is so distinctive it's always based around holiday planning charts for either the police, fire brigade or Great Ormand St hospital. I give them so much verbal abuse I'm not sure as to why they keep calling..

Glad I had a browse around here.

Signed up on mylocalservices today. Within 10 minutes of registering my business here, I had a call from a bubbly woman asking me if I'd like to consider a place in their publication to promote my business.

Never the sort to agree to anything that costs me over the phone, I've asked for them to send me full information in the post for me to consider at my leisure.

I'll await their "information pack" with guarded interest.

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EDIT : Further to this, I received a call a short while ago from someone claiming to be from the West Midlands Police Initiative offering advertising space. Suffice to say the offer was defelected and I asked for details to be e-mailed to me. Unsurprisingly, they have yet to arrive. :P

Steve : Thanks for your call - it's good to know that you guys take this kind of nefarious activity seriously.

Hi Andrew, sorry for bothering you by phone, but saw this and wanted to jump on it straight away.

I think in this case it's coincidence, as you have a free listing, and theres no way they could know you have just signed up. What was happening was they were targetting any new Paid Listings, which we display on our home page, and normally hitting them within 5 mins of signing up.

After assurances from one of their Directors that they won't do this again, we have planted a couple of fake listings and it looks like they are sticking to their word.. for now.

But if anyone does get hit by these guys within say 10/15 minutes of signing up with us, please let me know.

It could well be it's another directory thats been targetted, as a lot of people will list on various directories around the same time, but if we can work out where they are scraping their data from, we can give the relevant site owner a heads up!

Hi All

I joined a couple of weeks ago, if I remember correctly, it was at some ungodly hour in the morning. I had a call shortly before 10:00 the same day asking if I'd like to support the "charity".

My reply was "I've just been reading about you so I think we'll end this conversation now".

FYI Steve, this is the only site that I've signed up to.

Regards

Dave

Hi Dave, thanks for the feedback, bloody frustrating, looks like I'm going to have to get heavy with these clowns again next week!

** Feels a rant coming on **

Like Steve said earlier in the post we got scammed a while back, we always take these kind of calls a lot more cynically now.

Personally i like to contribute directly to Mare Curie Nursing Home as my father passed away in their care & i urge everyone else to find a Charity of their own choice & contribute to it directly & not give in to these pressure sales calls that we all seem to get.

I dont doubt for one minute that some are legitmate & its a shame that these lose out to the idiots that are attempting to rip us off. What a pity we have to resort to these kind of posts to protect ourselves & potential Charities lose out

We had calls from several companies saying that they were a charity and wanted to know if we would advertise in a local magazine (can't remember the names). It just so happened it wasn't long after I registered my husband's business on online directories.

If anyone calls me asking to give to charity I always say send me some information in the post and I'll have a read through. I mean I want to see what my advert would look like in the magazine before I paid! Guess what, to this day I have never received any documentation in the post for any of the companies.

I'm sure some are legit, but I decide who I want to give money to on my terms.

Oh, and just had a call from Vision! literally 5 minutes ago.
Missed the call, but googled the telephone number!!

Hi,

They did actually post me an invoice and a copy of what my advert could look like in the brochure. I took everything to the police. The woman in the funeral home in Liverpool whose address they were using said I should inform the trading standards as this has been going on for years and they were trying to do something about them. I called Trading Standards but they were not interested therefore handed all paperwork into the police.

Sandra

Just an update, these clowns still show up from time to time. Vision aka Vardis aka Streetwise aka godknowswhat

Our spoof listings landed another marketeer this morning, though this one was a legit company, and we've just the received a humble email apology from the Director, asking us not to take it further

Was actually good fun, Clive was leading the caller on while I was on the phone to the callers MD. The phrase Trading Standards - Honeytrap and gotchya seemed to do it

There's a good thread ongoing on the Consumer Action Group which is full of stories of woe. Standard response seems to be if you did get suckered, just ignore it. All the threats are hot air and they won't take you to court.

Consumer Action Group - Advertising - Small Companies beware