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I’ve just been alerted to another “brand new” directory with barely any content, hardly indexed by Google (check this out – not promising). Funny how it is brand new but they are selling “renewals”.

uasknow.com logoUAskNow sports a lovely parrot which made one of their cold call recipients wonder if they are the same crowd as the non-starter U Ask Polly owned by Sonia Klair [more on UAskPolly].

I took a look through the site and they give no hint of the people behind their directory. Their phone numbers don’t appear to be linked to any other business:

The domain registration information is hidden and I would be wary of any company that doesn’t want you to know where they are physically located. Their “information pack” and “listing form” both omit a physical or postal address.

I was curious about how they had managed to get advertising for such a new site and cheekily started this twitter conversation

Its not hard to get accepted for Adsense advertising, or Adbrite or any of the others. So why have they got “fake” advertising on the site?

Read Motella’s post: A New Dodgy Business Guide?

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This is a really serious problem reported in the NZ Herald this week and isn’t that far off the HP staff scam.

Aggressive foreign scammers are again targeting New Zealanders, this time by urging them to change settings on their computers in an attempt to obtain personal information.

Within the past two days, hundreds of people have received telephone calls from people claiming to be Microsoft employees or from IT companies in Dubai and NZ warning that their computers could be infected with a virus.

The caller – a man or a woman with a foreign accent on a poor line – asks for passwords, which they claim they need to get rid of the virus.

In some cases the caller has become aggressive and defensive when challenged by those who don’t believe the story.

Police say anyone who receives such a call should hang up.

Read the full article: Ring, ring: It’s your con artist speaking