I felt special for about 30 seconds
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Tags: “It is my pleasure to inform you that on September 30th, 2009 your information was reviewed and accepted for inclusion in the 2009/2010 edition of our registry.
Strathmore's Whos Who each year, recognizes and selects key executives, professionals and organizations in all disciplines and industries for outstanding business and professional achievements.”
It sounds almost too good to be true! Well, as it turns out it is way too good to be true. I filed this in my ‘must read that later’ folder in my email, and just got back to it today.
About 30 seconds with Google and I discover than Strathmore’s Whos Who is not exactly almanac of all great achievers they would have you believe.
It is in fact yet another scam to separate the gullible from their money by stroking their fragile egos.
Not that I haven’t got a fragile ego myself. I diligently saved the email, and went to their website.
The alarm bells rang for me when I saw how much information they wanted for me to be listed. If I was truly selected for this amazing honour you’d think they’d have at least Googled me, as I was about to do to them.
I’ve had an online footprint for way too long now to be even able to hide from the lethargic spiders living over at Microsoft, and Google has a way of finding all sorts of history even I’d forgotten.
Even more alarm bells ring when you find out they want you to part with up to $700 in hard earned moola to be listed.
So there go my hopes of being one of the 'Who' again this year. Oh well, back to the grindstone.
So, if you’ve found up reading this blog posting because you too had your ego stroked by Strahmore’s Who’s Who invitation, I suggest some of the following reading:
http://community.ere.net/blogs/the-in-house....
http://pm.typepad.com/professional_market...
http://www.lotusgeek.com/LotusGeek/LotusG...
As an interesting aside, the invitation came to an email address that I’ve only had for a short while compared to my main personal ones which have been published in plain text on the web for about 12 years now.
So why did the spam bots find this address and not my two published ones? I suspect that was because the new one is on a .com domain. It was published on company blog posting about two months ago.
Be careful out there.
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Reply #2 on : Sun December 13, 2009, 15:18:15
Reply #1 on : Wed October 28, 2009, 17:40:20
Reply #3 on : Sun December 13, 2009, 15:20:35