Friday, December 27, 2013

I had a call from the scammers again

G'Day Folks, as a post Christmas present I had a telephone call this morning from the scammers.  I wrote about this some years back in my post about internet scammers and this mornings call was so familiar to the previous ones it was immediately clear what was happening.

No I will not be signing up at any price and I will be getting in touch with the people who sold them my details.

It's pretty easy to spot these scammers.  First phone call is chatty and light with a few questions carefully placed to determine if you have any money, if you have any desire to make any money and what your desperation level is.

This is also where the lies begin.  As an example, I was told by Sean that he had been recently talking with a "New York Times Best Selling Author" who was making more money a month than he (Sean) could imagine.  I have chatted with NYT Best selling authors and know from them that that status doesn't necessarily translate into any significant money.  Quite apart from the other part of the lie, what would an author who was financially successful even want to talk with a company about making money online?  BS Sean.

I did the usual search for scam experience PMI and scam Professional Marketing International.  Here are a couple of links you should read for other peoples stories.

http://www.utahconsumeradvocate.com/complaint-forum/professional-marketing-international-pmi/

http://community.ebay.com/t5/The-Front-Porch/Professional-Marketing-International/td-p/2059054
particularly the post by roadmasterdog as he gives a list of company names they use.

http://www.scambook.com/company/view/115926/PMI-Success-Academy

http://www.scambook.com/report/view/135999/PMI-Education-Dean-Graziosi-Success-Academy-Complaint-135999-for-$12,740.00

http://scammedbypmi.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/any-other-victims-of-pmi-scams.html

So don't just take my word for it, do your own search and read some of the pages you find.

Now some advice, never give out your telephone number in any form online.  It's the Internet folks, why do they need to know where you live or what your telephone number is?  The only places I will do that is to use it for security confirmation for a signup like PayPal, Google or Facebook.

Give them the number for the local Consumer Affairs office, the local politician who you don't like, any Union Official, the local Police department, any of the pay-per-call phone services, or just 123456789.

For those of you who may be looking for a way to make some money online I will tell you what I'm doing which is working.  I'm not making much money yet but it is actually working and it is repeatable and scaleable.

I have written a book in a very small niche market and have it selling on Kindle.  This book took me less than 6 weeks to write and publish.  It was initially published on CreateSpace which is also a Amazon company and it sold 1 copy in a year, I transferred it to Kindle and it sells a couple of hundred a month making me about $100 in royalties every couple of months.  Like I said, not much but there are no costs involved in this.

I did buy into a training course with Geoff Shaw and the training is excellent.  You can read about the writing of the book and the publishing on my other blog at http://bearlybooks.com/do-you-want-to-write-books-or-sell-books.  I know that you understand that there is a cost to get the Kindle training but it is cheap and superb.  If you buy through my link here I may get a commission on the sale, you are probably grown up enough to know that it doesn't cost you any more to use this link or another one.

The same thing with this other link I am about to give you.  This is another training system which allows you to build whatever type of site you like.  There is tons of guidance, a huge helpful community and all the support you could possibly want.  This one is a bit more expensive but there is really only one annual fee and you can join for free, read all the info, hang out in the forum until you are ready to commit.  Talking about freebies, here is one on how to write for the internet.  I'm sure you'll find this useful even if you don't follow up with any of these other suggestions.  Get it here.

Last one.  Any of you have a WordPress blog?  Those of you who do will recognise that there are lots of updates for the core software, the themes and the plugins.  You need to keep all of these up-to-date which means you really need to check every few days and do the updates.  This is a pain but necessary.

I have a solution for you.  A free to download and use desktop program for Windows and Mac OS X which handles those updates for you.  Just start it up every couple of days and run it, go do something else.  Write a blog post perhaps?  When you are done you can print out a report to file as a record of what you did when.  You can also do backups and restorations with the same tool.

Yes it is free but only for a single site, if you want to use it for multiple sites, which you can, there is a small monthly fee.  The site is WP Maintenance Robot.

There is an additional tool here as well.  This is totally free as well.  The program is called No Brute Force.  It is also a desktop program for Windows and Mac OS X.  No Brute Force is a security tool designed to change the name of your WordPress login page from wp-login.php to whatever you want it to be.  It handles all the changes required to make this change work and makes a couple of other changes to protect your site from the brute force hacking which is going on across the world at the moment.  Learn more at http://facebook.com/NoBruteForce.

I know wrote both of these programs and I have been helping with testing so I can tell you that they both work very well.  At the very least download and use the freebies OK?

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