Why You Should NEVER 'ContactThem'

Or why the 'ContactThem' emails are a tempting scam...

If, like me, you have an internet presence then you've probably seen one of a rash of eMails going round that read something like this:

Subject: I’ve visited your website http://www.celtnet.org.uk

Hi,

We’ve seen your website at http://www.celtnet.org.uk and we love it!

We see that your traffic rank is 349,775

and your link popularity is 356.

Also, you have been online since 4/15/2004.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.

If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: http://www.contactthem.ws/hit.php?s=10&p=2&w=103047

Sincerely,

Tony Gagliardi

The ContactThem Network

I've been receiving two or three (at least) of these messages each and every day. Each one refers to a different page or sub-section of my site and and they all come from different senders (but each one is in the "The ContactThem Network") and they all have different referral links. It was becoming a nuisance, and the offers also looked too tempting to be real.

I'm always on the look out for new web scams and the latest of these all go up on my Internet Scams Pages. I simply just had to look into this...

When you click on one of the referral links you're taken to a very snazzy website and an audio track starts and begins to read the content of the web page to you. It all looks very professional and it's done very well as a squeeze page. You're very tempted to click on the affiliate link or to join the program. After all who couldn't resist a passive income of “up to $4,800/month” just to display some links and banners on your website or blog. After all, it just sounds like an offer for text link or banner advertising. What's actually happening is that they're trying to recruit you into a multi-tier affiliate program.

When I began to dig further it didn't take me long to find out that the person behind ContactThem network is Stephan Ducharme, the man behind the famous (or should I say, infamous), 'Free Google Ads'. Yes, this is Stephan Ducharme, “The FreeAdGuru”.

What Ducharme is trying to do here is to get you to buy the ContactThem software product which extracts user and website details from a number of databases and allows you to use this personalized information to send out a mass mailing. Indeed, if you've ever recieved an email like the one described above then you're a 'victim' of Ducharmes ContactThem software product. One of the product's affiliates extracted YOUR details out of a database and spammed you with their ContactThem affiliate link…

You're being spammed here and the offer is only for you to join the band of spammers. I believe the product costs $50 per month (or thereabouts) and only by recruiting more into the spam brigade can you begin to make any money. It's a hybrid between affiliate marketing and MLM in that you need to recruit more people into the system to make money. Only with the twist that you're using the product not to sell anything or offer a service but to spam others.

I have to give it to Stephan Ducharme in that he writes excellent copy and is a dab hand at getting a viral campaign up and running in record time. He's obviously raking it in from this launch... But he's also notorious for atrocious customer service, not honouring refunds and massivlely under-delivering on his product promises.

This is a scam and a home for spammers, If you get any email like this just hit the delete button or add it to your spam filters...