Been scrapping with UniClear.Com about fraud and spam.

Okay, so there’s this company that spammed me ( UniClear.Com ), and they’re a little PayPal wannabe Canadian start-up from Victoria, BC, Canada, which gave me a soft spot … so I fwd’d the spam to ‘em, along with this note…

_______________________________

> Elaine Miller wrote:
> MIsspelled spam coming in under your name? This will ruin your business before you ever manage to get off the ground…. FYI.
> -Elaine

>
> ——- Forwarded message follows ——-
> Return-path:
>
> To: website@elainemiller.com
> Subject: Better Than Pay Pal

_______________________________

and the reply came back:
_______________________________

On 4 Nov 2003 at 15:10, info wrote:

>
> Thanks for the comment Elaine. As for the spam allegation. We subscribed to a mailing list of opt in email addresses. If you never subscribed we apologize. Please simply unsubscribe.
>
> Ken

_______________________________

So I wrote again, because I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about spammers.

_______________________________

Damn, your poor thing.

If you subscribed to that supposedly “opt-in” list, you were snookered, and you’re building a huge wave of bad feeling in the online community even as we speak.

The address the original came to was an old one, listed on a webpage on my site — I’ve never used it for any other purpose, and I spam-filter it now, since it got picked up by spambots and disseminated over the known universe.

Sorry to hear about the bad start-up.

-Elaine
_______________________________

But wait, there’s more! (laughing)
Seconds after I sent the first note about the spam, and before I got Ken’s reply, I noticed that the links in the email all said uniclear.com but pointed to a different scrambled-letter domain. I thought it was another company fucking with them, and I thought I’d give ‘em the heads up (because of the afore-mentioned soft spot for Canadian start-ups) — so I resent the spam copy with a cryptic note…

__________________

> Elaine Miller wrote:

> had another look… active fraud attempt
>
> -Elaine
>
___________________________________

And Ken, probably the janitor-in-residence when all the polite people went home, wrote back:

___________________________________

On 4 Nov 2003 at 15:14, info wrote:

>
> Hardly. You should be careful when you make such allegations Elaine. Do
> your homework carefully before jumping to such foolish notions.
>
> Ken
>

___________________________________

And so I retorted:

___________________________________

No, Ken, actually, I was taking it for an attempt on the part of another site to hijack your images and front page, and sucker users into signing up, with all their financial info, with the rival company. (It happens to PayPal all the time…)

I was warning you that someone was trying to defraud *you*. You know, in that friendly Netizen kinda way that’s going out of style.

That…. because I couldn’t imagine a company that would depend so much upon consumer trust and name recognition making such a foolish move as to spam potential clients.

However, now that I know that your company (1) rents spam lists for marketing purposes and (2) won’t respond in a polite and businesslike tone to correspondence, I’ll be sure to refrain from using your services, and advise my clients and friends of the same.

A good day’s work for you today, hmm?

-Elaine

___________________________________

and now I’m afraid that search engines will pick up this blog page when “uniclear” and “fraud” and “spam” are typed in the same search box.

Hmm.

Fancy that.

If anything else comes in, I’ll keep y’all posted…

As an extra funny, this appears on their uniclear.com website:

Important Notice
At no time will UniClear send you any email other than to inform you that you have new messages waiting in your iMail inbox (in your account). Should you receive any email saying anything else that appears to be from UniClear, delete it immediately because it is fraudulent. The only exception is a response from info@uniclear.com to a message you have sent us first.

-E

—————————–
Update September 15, 2005

Okay, something extra-extra funny: I got hatemail about this long-forgotten posting. It came in through my webform. I see that Uniclear has one loyal customer — or employee?

Here’s what I got:

You are a stupid bitch! You know nothing of Uniclear as they are a reputable company. I deal with them on a daily basis.

Take a dirt nap bitch.