Merchant Newsletter - October 29, 2005

Spam filters and Business Communications

Are you losing important communications?

 

Unscrupulous promoters are soliciting advertising for online, alternative or non-existent business directories. Although these directories appear to be legitimate Yellow Pages publications, they are not distributed to the public, posted on the web, or promoted as promised. As a result, the directories - if they exist at all - offer no benefits to businesses that pay to advertise in them. 

The solicitation to buy ad space may be designed to look like an invoice and bear the "walking fingers" logo and the Yellow Pages name. 

Neither the name nor the logo is protected by federal copyright or trademark registration. That's how fraudulent promoters are able to lead businesses to believe they are affiliated with local telephone directories.

According to one survey, nearly one-third of owners said their businesses have received bills for Yellow Pages advertising they never ordered. The Yellow Pages Publishers Association estimates more than $550 million each year is being collected by con artists soliciting Yellow Pages advertisers with bogus invoices for print and online directories.

A  fraudulent seller may send you a bill for unordered classified advertising soon after your ad runs in a legitimate publication hoping you'll be confused and pay his bill instead of, or in addition to, the one from the legitimate company. Before you buy advertising space through a mail solicitation or pay an "invoice," take the following steps:

 

  • Check out the company and its publication. Call your local Yellow Pages publisher to see if it is affiliated with the soliciting company.
  • Ask the publisher for written information about where and to who the directory is distributed.




Let's face it... Spam sucks, and it is not going to go away.  One solution that looks good (on the outside) are the Spam filters offered by Earthlink and PeoplePC. The way these work, is that when the user receives an email from a new source, an email goes to the sender, asking them to click on a link to verify themselves.

Emails coming from banks, financial institutions, government agencies, and yes, your merchant account. are often generated by servers that will never 'see' these requests for verification.   Even emails that are sent by individuals may not be verified, as employees are instructed to NEVER CLICK on a link contained in an email, as that the way that security systems get penetrated.

If you are reading this newsletter, you obviously don't have this kind of filter (yet).  Most Spam filters allow you to specify web sites as trusted sources.  This practice is called whitelisting.  In order to whitelist the sources of information, warnings, and the like concerning your merchant account, you should whitelist the following sites:

    MerchantAnywhere.com
    AMSIWS.com
    PriMerchants.com
    PaymentResource.com
    TransFirst.com




Your business can be featured in our weekly newsletter!  We are going to offer this for FREE as an evaluation for a possible service.  All you need to do is to send a description of how you use our service (Mobile or Internet), in 25 to 50 words- along with a description of your product or services (again in 25 to 50 words) to: Dennis@MerchantAnywhere.com with "FREE AD SPACE" as the subject line. You can also include a graphic (max width 280 Pixels) and a link to go to when clicked on!  We can re-size your logo or graphic here, so just send what you have, and we can fix it up for you.  Our basic mission is to help other businesses succeed, using our technologies.  We are constantly getting rave reviews and comments from our merchants, as well as a constant stream of referrals.  This is one way we can say:  THANKS

 

ORDER FREE MERCHANT MATERIALS HERE!!!

Copyright (c) 2004 Advanced Merchant Solutions, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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