ScamVictimHelp.com, Poacher turned Gamekeeper?

Introduction

Poacher turned Gamekeeper

Poacher or Gamekeeper?

I’ve been rss following a little thread where a job-seeking homeworker has been diddled out of thousands – see Saundrak’s Blog. It seems to have close ties to Pacific Webworks et al, maybe not directly, but the Golf Course, techniques, or something.

Read this curious comment from someone called mlwood79 that just doesn’t look right to me, following my experiences with the scammers double-bluff etc in the old Google Treasure Chest scam.

Tracing mlwood79?

It’s not hard and doesn’t take long. Despite not leaving any open invitation, Matt Wood leaves his email and phone number here, http://mlwood79.blogspot.com/, a single post on the free blogger web.

A similar search on the 877-725-8882 phone number pulls out something interesting. For instance, there are these postings on various consumer/scam forums:

www.scamvictimhelp.com

Very quickly we end up at scamvictimhelp.com from these few links above. They provide a fair bit of information.

Another Scam or Two?

scamvictimhelp.com is a very plush and professional looking site, with an opening video that put the colley-wobbles up me after my Robert G Allen experiences and the various Robert Millar video offerings. (see here for instance).

But the wordage is re-assuring enough, textually and on the video. They seem to be White Knights, offering help to people who’ve been scammed by the recent splurge of Google/Tree/Credit stuff.

(On the subject of White Knights, Paul at WorkAtHomeTruth has had a separate rant that hints at the scammer’s double-bluffing we’ve previously observed. Their new twists around old habits know no bounds! Either that or piss-poor altruism.) Who was it who said ‘eternal vigilance’?

Q. So Who are ScamVictimHelp.com?

A. Now there’s the rub! USA folks will know the 877 phone number is non-geographic and a free-phone (see phone info). The contact on the website is (like this one), a simple contact form. So I don’t know where they are, from that! Hmm?

Q. So WHOIS ScamvictimHelp.com?

A. And there’s another rub! Their name is ‘protected’ just like the scammers’, by Domains by Proxy, Inc. So I don’t know where they are from that! This facility is ‘supposed’ to be used to “protect individuals from spam”, but the reality for me is that,

…if someone, offering a service, wants to hide their identity, then they’re up to no good!!!

Other Inconsistencies

So we see they want to hide themselves. But from examining their website and some other forum postings (a weird way to advertise, is it not?), I’ve got three email contacts for the company:

Matt Wood – mlwood79@gmail.com
via spam reported here – info@scamvictimhelp.com
same email address is on http://www.scamvictimhelp.com/ homepage
Tyler Jackson – tjackson@scamvictimhelp.com

This means that they’re hiding their detail not because they don’t want to be spammed, but for another reason…

By the way, I use email obfuscation on this website provided by Mike Greenberg ‘s phpEnkoder, which makes it almost impossible for content scraping robots to harvest email addresses for spam purposes. Many sites use a similar technique…. but looking at their page source code, scamvictimhelp just use the simple mailto: html directive, which means that their email addresses can be harvested, but since the main one arrived in someone’s spam anyway, they don’t care about that, obviously.

You’ve got to really question their motives now…

Q. But What About ScamVictimHelp.com?

A. Well the best thing is to quote their stuff straight from their ‘About’ page (my emphasis below)…

We at ScamVictimHelp.com have a combined work experience of 25 years in the work-from-home/home based business industry. We have owned and operated back end telesales call centers for the majority of those years. Selling products, services, and personal coaching, designed to teach people how to make money from home through the internet, vending, stock market investing, real estate, and everything else in between. In which, we generated over 30 million dollars in sales revenue.

So they are a sales force organisation! And I still don’t know where they are from that! Like I said at the beginning, poacher turned gamekeeper? hmm…? (Ironically, my original hook into this, Saundrak, was because she was conned by a ‘personal coaching service’!!)

The best bit is in their very short Terms page. Basically, they’ve stripped out all the reams of disclaimers and obfuscated money arrangements from the usual scammer T&Cs, and said that if you do happen to take up an offer from the website, all the results are from your work, and they can’t be blamed for anything… the key scammer phrase of ‘opportunity seeker’ also pops up, like a bent penny. Look! ….here’s what they say, so make up your own mind:

Any business opportunity related programs approved or recommended by Scam Victim Help.com, LLC on this site still require a sincere effort and patience on the part of the opportunity seeker. Since your results depend on the effort you apply to your business; individual results may vary

And I still don’t know where they are from that! Is this still poacher turned gamekeeper? hmmm…?

Conclusion

If you’ve read some of the links listed above, you’ll have gathered that there’s a lot of uncertainty about this company. Currently, from my limited research, no-one seems prepared to say right out that they’re up to no good.

But for my money, unless I start seeing some very positive reports and a lot more openness, I’d need a very large bargepole before I’d approach them. Now where do you get barge-poles…? Ha Ha.

Update 3 Nov 2009

Send in the Clones

The Vowells mentioned in the comments below have a host of businesses and put a lot into their local community. Apart from the permanently dead car sales place previously at http://www.stgeorgechamber.com/New%20Members/executive.car.sales.htm, they have oil wells in Texas and a never-ending supply of internet-based ideas, like we’ve found. Their former business www.oilinvestorsonline.com seems to be no more, at least in the internet world.

Whois Capital Energy Corp

Capital Energy Corp is still going though, and, unusually, unlike the St George Runners Baseball team who’ve cloaked their identity behind DomainsByProxy, are still visible to a WHOIS query!

Whois Intelligent Marketing

Curiously, since I checked a month or two back on the Baseball website, a lot of contact details have disappeared from the website. I can understand the Vowell’s reasons….

But hey-ho. There’s another Todd Vowell at a company called www.intelligentmarketing.com, in Cally-Forny-I-A! But y’know, it may not be the same guy (Paul at WorkAtHomeTruth always treats such info with circumspection as he says in the comments below), but it’s quite a co-incidence, especially since my OpenDNS blocked the website right off because it’s classified as “Adware”!

Same as this link here about a business disagreement…