SECURITY WARNING!!!

SECURITY WARNING!!! was Originally Posted on May 13, 2004 by lavarock

Are you as irritated as I am with those ads that pop up on your screen like a fake security warning?

Well I decided to take my revenge.

Every time I get one of those now, I look up the company who holds the security certificate. The last one WHENU.COM had a website. They even had the guts to proudly state in a news item, that they won a suit against some companies who objected to their ads showing up on other people’s WebPages.

Suspiciously absent from the companies website is any telephone number or street address, only email addresses for the company… I wonder why? You irritate millions of people worldwide and I am guessing that you really don’t want any of them to call you and waste a human’s time. It is said that at one time, their advertising sites were the 3rd most often visited sites in the world. When people accidentally click on these fake ads that is where they are directed.

This one company kept popping these ads up on my screen today, so I assume they REALLY want to speak to me and do business with me. I decide to call them on the phone.

I went to site and looked up registration data for the company. There is a regular phone number and a fax number. I verify the number through Yahoo yellow pages in New York. I call the phone number and get a voicemail call director. I hit the button for a human and get a voicemail box.

I press 0 and get a message to enter in the 3 digit extension I want. Since they wanted me to contact them, I randomly press 3 digit extensions and finally a woman answers.

I asked her why her company keeps wanting to contact me. She asks who I am and I say, “Mark”. She said she is not trying to contact me. I then asked how I could eliminate the pop up ads on my screen and she says I have contacted the wrong company and quickly hangs up. I wish I had remembered her extension, because I can prove her wrong the next time I fire up my browser.

I wonder if for the rest of the day, she let her calls go right into voicemail rather than talk with actual people…

I heard a story once where telemarketers were attending a convention in a hotel. A man found that they all were staying on the same floor. At 3am in the morning he started calling each room; waking up the telemarketer. They were incensed that someone would call and bother them when they were alseep or otherwise engaged? the audacity!

As I begin my business I am ever mindful that most people hate ads and spam. I will do my best to only contact people who have contacted me in the past, and then only once. I’ll send them to my webpage where they can sign up for my newsletter. Since that is “opt-in”, if they don’t sign up, they don’t get it. I’ll never be one of those companies who hit their potential customers over their heads until they finally give up and visit. THAT is not good business! But then again, we all know that! I even think that un-named woman in New York also knows that. If not, perhaps I should call back and explain?

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You know, I posted the above a few hours ago and a thought struck me.

Why don’t these computer virus writes at least do something constructive, like have their viruses attack the real spammers? Now THAT I would like to see!