The local police force ended up visiting our client today after Monday's extremely close successful scam attempt.
The policewomen advised our client to reply to his email saying something along the lines of, "your a scammer!". This is not good business sense as there is still a fraction of a percentage that this could be a legit sale. While the odds may be extremely bad, like one in a million, you never know when you'll be that one in a million.
Our client would have spent a half hour venting in the email, while the scammer would have spent 10 seconds reading it and then simply hitting the delete button. Which would be a complete waste of time for our client.
The last thing you want to do is come off appearing unprofessional, even though it is very suspicious scammer like activity. So a simple response like, "I am sorry sir/ma'am however at the current time we can only accept western union money transfer or money order".
This way, if you do happen to be one of the one in a million that have an actual potential client on the other end, you'll still appear professional and you won't waste your time venting to someone who won't spend 10 seconds reading your well written email.
Today on my way home from having lunch with local business wizard Sebastian Manago I stopped into another client's shop to see how things were going for them.
The client was all excited that they had another major sale from their website. The sale was for $1300 worth of product, however the client had requested that she withdraw an extra $600 and send it to her shippers agent (TNS Express Courier) in Jefferson City, Missouri via Western Union Money Transfer.
Immediately alarm bells went off and we discussed the transaction. I informed our client that this had sounded like a scam and happens very frequently. Our client then immediately went and got her paperwork on the situation as she agreed it sounded like a scam from the start however she was more assured it wasn't a scam because the credit card transaction went through, however she did not have a name of the card holder.
The initial email was sent to some Wool Company in the Yukon however our client was Blind CC'ed on the email. Therefore the target was multiple business owners, however the default addressee in the email was not our client. The sender, John Spyke, was using a Free Yahoo Email Address.
The John Spyke sender had made mistakes which implied that he wasn't sure who he was sending the emails as. In some cases, he wrote his name as John and in other cases he wrote it as Mike.
The TNS Representative that was suppose to be contacted had a @Yahoo.com email address, which also sent up some red flags as most businesses don't use free email address providers. It doesn't say much about the business when they are using a free email address provider when they could own their own domain name (@theirbiz.com) for the cost of 3 coffee's a month.
After contacting TNS Express, they informed us that all their representatives use a @TNSGlobal email address and that they have no offices in Jefferson City!
Our client also had their own suspeciousons as the John Spyke would not give them his contact number or mailing address. Phone calls made to the store were listing a blocked number as a return phone number.
While many people would think that a instance like this would only cost our client $600, it actually goes a bit further then that.
$600 sent to the scammer via Western Union
$1300 in product sent to the scammer.
$700 paid to the producer of the product.
$35 Western Union Money transfer fees
And lastly hours of headache
In the end, our client called Western Union and they were able to send the funds back to our customer. The visit to this client ended up saving her lots of headaches and a good sum of money.
It is 1pm on a Wednesday afternoon. Currently the power is out all across our fair isle, Prince Edward Island (with the exception of Summerside as they have their own power grid). Although there is this power outage, all dotServing sites are still operational. dotServing is not being affected by the power outage.
It's business as normal. However for most other Island based companies, they're down. I'd hate to be a Island business with no power.
dotServing - not even the power can take us down!
Welcome to 2008. My new years resolution is to blog more, which is the same as CNN reporter Anderson Cooper.
I've prepared some 2007 stats, we have:
Never kicked someone off our servers because their site was using too many server resources. This is pretty incredible seeing how we have lots of clients! But is because we do not oversell like other hosts do which means more resources to our clients.
Fired two clients. One hosting client for being constantly extremely vulgar & one web development client for also being unprofessional..
Our Web Development team at least tripled in clients.
Completed 1 seminar to the Greater Charlottetown Area Chamber of Commerce on search engine optimization, next year we plan on doing 2!.
Completed major upgrades to 80% of our servers increasing speed and allowing users to use even more resources..
dotServing.com/.pe.ca/.ca used 1107.59 GB of bandwidth.
As a follow up to my first Stores Online entry, I received a phone call from a Stores Online representative saying that they had another offer for me since I past up the first one.
But first, something which I did miss on my first post was the free meal. I sat through the free training session wondering when they would be bringing in the free lunch! It wasn't till the end that I realized the free lunch would be the last thing they do. Okay, sure I thought. As long as I didn't have to sign anything. And then, right before the free lunch they announce that before they give out the free lunch, they are going to start the sign up process.
At this point in time, the Stores Online staff members walked around enticing people to signup. They went to each individual sitting down before issuing them their lunch and questioned them about what they thought of the seminar and if we had any questions. In the end, I didn't perform so smoothly with my story. I goofed and told him I was self-employed and was involved in a lot of risky transactions. I informed him I was involved with trading stocks, and was a gambling man on the local horse races. At this point in time he proceeded to tell me that I was in a risky business and that Stores Online would be the perfect match. He encouraged me to signup and pay the sign up fee, at which pointed I informed him I had no money and my girlfriend was coming to pick me up and I'd pay him then. He then proceeded to ask tons of questions about myself, and I am sure he realized that I was not into stocks as much as I had told him and I wasn't much of a gambler.
None the less, the questioning was over and out comes the free lunch.
A couple weeks later, they sent me to their second offer website at http://www.storesonlinesecondoffer.com/.
On this website they report, "NOTE: This special reduced price is available for a limited time only." and "This offer is for a limited time, Call Today!".
A quick search on the Internet Archive.org (a official library, according to the state of California) shows that this limited time offer has been around since June 2, 2007. A rather long time for a limited time offer. Not to mention, that June 2nd was the first time they Archive.org archived the site. So there is a possibility this offer was around a lot longer.
The cost for people within the United States is $3199 but for Canadians there is an additional $200 fee (Canadian Dollar has been worth more then the US dollar for how long?).
The original charge was suppose to be $5300. With this limited time offer, they desperately dropped it to $3199 which is a drop of $2101.
While writing this entry, I also found out that Stores Online is a owned by a publicly traded company called iMergent, Inc.
iMergent, Inc recently reported that in its last quarter it had lost $800,000. Shares dropped immediately 22% to $17.26.
A look at this article reports that:
The company said the number of people enrolled in the training workshops where it sells software had declined.
I wonder if this includes the free seminar that I had attended, where they stated numerous times that they are not going to try and sell anything!
On top of this, the report concludes:
Imergent can't conduct business in California and North Carolina because of injunctions issued in response to state allegations the company failed to make proper disclosures, Chief Executive Officer Donald Danks said in a conference call with analysts Tuesday.
Interesting? Well, a bit. But then you read that this company has had issues with its financial statements for a long time. This is apparent when reading the MarketWatch.comAnalyst Estimates.
Now, the bad news.
On October 19, 2007, the Federal Court of Australia New South Wales District Registry ruled on a request for an injunction by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The court declined to enter an injunction that would bar iMergent from conducting business in Australia.
This company has obviously caught the attention of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) which "Promotes competition and fair trade in the market place to benefit consumers, business and the community".
Today I took a look at LinkedIn, the business social networking site. I think the site is interesting and is a great networking tool! My public profile on LinkedIn!
Tonight I attended a Stores Online presentation in Charlottetown. I had heard so much about these presentations over last year, I decided to attend one, to see what it was about.
The presentation had a lot of good points. It talked about the internet and how people are going online more for their shopping needs. A good question and example of this was when the presentor asked the crowd how many people bought something online five years ago. Two of the 32 people put their hand up (I didn't). Then she asked how many people purchased or planned on purchasing online in the next couple months. Sixteen people raised their hands.
So, credit to them, they did include facts that were legit and real, however other facts they mentioned were completely out of whack.
According to StoresOnline, if you are looking to have a website built you must do the following:
Pay someone to design your site.
Pay a programmer to program your designed site.
Pay a database programmer to integrate a database with your site.
Pay for hosting fees.
Pay for a shopping card.
Pay for search engine optimization.
Pay for reporting tools.
Pay for someone to secure your website.
In the past decade of developing websites, I have never heard of someone having to go through these steps. Perhaps in Utah (where StoresOnline's headquarters is), this is normal.
There are two steps required in creating your website:
Research and pay for someone to design/program/setup your database/shopping card (if needed)/Optimize your site/offer reporting tools, also known develop your site, most commonly referred to as a web developer.
Research and pay for hosting fees.
Thankfully, at dotServing we handle it all.
The cost to develop a Storeonlines website was $2700. The hosting fees/support/general assistance with your website was an additional $2600 per year!
Today we received a Domain Name Expiration Notice from the Domain Registry of Canada for a couple of domains names that are expiring. The letter sent looks like an official government letter that the federal government would send you.
The catch is, this document is from a private company based in the United States. A quick call to their 1-800 number shows that the person on the other end knows very little about Canada, yet the company she is working for is called "Domain Registry of Canada".
Further looking into this concludes that the Federal Government put out a warning about this company.
A major maritime corporation (with more then 600 maritime employees) recently approached dotServing in regards to building them a Human Resources application. The Human Resources project will start off on their website, which they royally got ripped for (They spent $30,000 on the site, which probably equals out to be around $2,500 an hour as the site is not that impressive. The site was designed and developed by a local maritime firm).
The goal will be to have a client management system that allows end users to submit resumes via their ASP built website. The Human Resources department would then have access to view all resumes within a Microsoft Access program. The program would allow them to manage all resumes and applicants via this fully developed program.
For a company that normally does not take on Windows based projects, this will certainly be one of the bigger projects we have worked on. Our previous experience in Microsoft Access is very limited but none the less we have done 4-5 smaller Microsoft Access based projects!
This will be a great challenge and when completed, it will without a doubt be one of our bigger projects.
dotServing is looking for a another member to join our dotServing Creative
team.
Would be able to design in xHTML/CSS
Would be knowledgeable in PHP/MySQL
Would be familiar with web usability
Would be able to produce examples of their work
Would be self-motivated
If you feel you fit the above criteria please email us your resume and examples of websites you have built. Our email for this position is may3designer@dotserving.com
Be warned: Today is April fools day. The fools are out fooling. I've yet to be fooled, but have fooled some fools. Just a reminder that is is April Fools Day!
With most web hosting companies backups are simple. Each night or week, your data is backed up onto a secondary hard drive. Then, if you ever need it voila it is right there. But what happens if the backups just ran an hour ago and you need your data from 2 hours ago. Or more commonly, what if upload a new website file 2 days ago and weren't aware of a bug that is now destroying your website?
Don't you just wish someones you can go back in time and correct that simple mistake? Well, with most web hosting companies you can't. They usually have 1 backup of your account on file. Yippee, its almost thrilling but its not.
If your a 9-5 Monday through Friday person, you leave the office Friday after a working on a project. Friday night/Saturday morning the backups run, Saturday night/Sunday morning the backups run again. Then your in the office Monday morning and find out you made a mistake on Friday as you were rushing to leave the office. Time to extract your backup. Ohhh but wait! Its no good anyway since it is from Saturday night/Sunday morning.
So, what do you do? You turn back the time machine to the week before, get the one file you messed up and rework on it. But, that option is only available to those with a time machine!
And since most people don't have a time machine, we've invented one!
No no no, not that type of time machine! A backup server! Yes, for those unaware we have a server dedicated to just backups. Nothing more or nothing less.
To recap!
Once a night every server makes a complete backup of every site on your server. If your a reseller, it makes a backup of every account under you. If your a normal shared hosting client it makes a complete backup for you too!
Then, once a week that data is transfered onto our backup server.
Thus leaving us with two complete backups of your website! One right on the server, the other at a remote location!
Welcome to the new dotServing blog! After some debate we have decided to release a blog system for the company.
This is going to be where we are informal to let you know our thoughts on certain things. When I say our, I mainly mean mine since sadly the other guys aren't too keen on blogs, for now! Surely I am hoping they'll pop in something every now and again!
I am sure I can convince Phil to write something on internet safety!
This is the work area for dotServing! The actual offices are located upstairs. But really, who needs desks when you got couches!
Just kidding, we all like to sit at a desk every once and a while!
