Misleading Faxes and Emails – Don’t fall victim!

Watch your emails, faxes and snail mail…read them closely. They look legit, until you read the very fine print. The most current scheme that has been brought to our attention is from a company outside of the US trying to make us think they are the Real Yellow Pages.

Real Story…

One of our clients called us a few months back asking us to look over a letter he was faxed from a company that portrayed themselves as YellowPage-Florida. This letter looked legit and even had all of our client’s information on it that would be needed for a true yellow page ad listing. This fax was asking him for keywords and phrases for them to use in his yellow page ad with them. The instructions stated to look over the form and make whatever changes needed to be made and fax it back to them. At first glance, there was nothing in this fax that appeared suspicious. The only thing that caught our eye was very fine print at the bottom, where it stated that there would be an $89.00 per month charge for 2 years – just to submit his information to Google. Nothing else, just submit it.  After reviewing the letter, I had advised him not to take action.

About a month later, he was expecting a fax from the Yellow Page company that he has been advertising with for years. He did get a fax…but it wasn’t from who he was expecting – it was from YellowPage-Florida again. This time the faxed letter caught him off guard because he was expecting a fax from the real Yellow Pages. He looked over what he was faxed and signed it. He faxed it back thinking that he had o.k.’d the letter that the “real Yellow Pages” company had sent him.

To his surprise, just yesterday, he received an invoice for over $1000.00! This invoice said to please forward a check to the address that was stated on the invoice. He called us asking if we could again check out the invoice from this company because he said he didn’t authorize anything that should have cost him that much.

After reviewing the invoice he sent us, we did a little research and found that they are deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking that they are the real yellow pages, when in-fact, they are not affiliated with them at all. They even go as far as using the yellow pages logo – turned upside down.

Here are just the 1^st few links we’ve found regarding this:

The above one is directly from the BBB

Bottom Line: If you receive any type of a letter that you have to ok and send back, please read all the fine print. There are so many people trying to deceive all of us. Their only motive is to take our hard earned money. If you don’t understand what they are saying, ask questions or have someone else read it over for you.

Protect yourself…read and understand before signing.