Focus On: Scams

If you receive a message from IH Mississippi Valley Credit Union, offering $80 to participate in a survey, delete it.

Has Osama Bin Laden been captured? Not yet. But you will be, if you're dumb enough to click on the link in the message. Ted Richardson shares his experience tracking down the culprit... with a little help from Alex Eckelberry, Paul Laudanski, Chris Gunn and Patrick Jordan. Gee. Sometimes it really does take a village.

Disgruntled Yahoo! advertisers who were hoping for just compensation from the Pay-Per-Click fraud settlement may as well get over it. Here's the short version: Yahoo! names an insider to watch ad traffic, invites 3 advertisers a year to chat, promises to make an effort to come up with industry-wide standards, extends its fraud claim period, and gives you an advertising credit... if you can prove you were harmed. I almost forgot the best part. Your class action attorneys walk away with nearly five million bucks. D'oh!

When eBay's CEO Meg Whitman sends you a personal letter, it's only polite to respond... especially when it's about one of her pet crusades: Net Neutrality. Unfortunately, I discovered that her mail server could send mail, but appeared to be incapable of accepting replies. "Must be a DNS goof-up," thought I. So I posted my personal reply right here. Please don't read it if you are not Meg Whitman. It's personal.

The marketers often tell us that, thanks to concentrated expertise, training and buying power, national franchises are more trustworthy, and put out better quality products than locally owned operators. But after an encounter with the local outposts of national franchisor, Cartridge World, we felt both integrity and quality missing. As for training... the bit we experienced was precisely the wrong kind.