http://www.smartcompany.com.au/legal/20091016-accc-warns-about-business-directory-scams.html

I suspect that ethical people don’t realize the high percentage of dishonest companies and people in the world. Whether something “looks” ethical isn’t even much of a concern to them. The current melt-down should be evidence enough of this. There is an excellent video of Enron employees bragging about being able to manipulate the stock prices by intentionally causing blackouts. Obviously they didn’t realize how unethical THAT was.

Back when the IBM CEO and Executives decided they deserved their employee’s pensions more than the employees did, they were also actively selling off the most valuable assets of the company and eliminating their most experienced employees. What they were doing was obviously going to seriously damage the long-term success of the company.

I finally realized they didn’t care because they didn’t plan to be around that long. Their plan was obviously to “take the money and run”. What happens to CEOs and Boards that behave like this? They move on to the next Corporation they can raid just in time to let the next CEO get the blame. They write books about them and make them heroes and role models. They even had the accounting firm that showed them how to steal our pension funds on video saying we wouldn’t realize what they’d done to us until it was too late.

What they didn’t realize is IBM had brilliant employees and many of them had advanced degrees that were not related to their IBM careers. One Software salesman was an actuary and he spent his own money to rent a hotel conference room and explain to anyone who showed up what had happened. Another engineer had a law degree and he was involved in suing. The employees won because cash pensions were clearly illegal – and over 200 corporations used them to steal their employees retirements anyway! They will likely never see a dime.

They also didn’t realize that by then most IBM employees had private Internet accounts, cell phones and knew how to contact each other quickly. We quickly had the largest Yahoo! message board ever and collaborated with employees of other Corporations. We also hoped to work with our International counterparts to keep Corporations from pressuring employees in one country by threatening to move plants somewhere else.

I knew then I would either have to be the next Norma Rae in a company where we had all been taught to be extremely anti-Union or leave. Only employees with Union contracts have any recourse when their companies take away what had been promised them in writing. I resigned and walked away because once you can not trust someone it makes no sense to continue working with them.

Why be surprised when AIG passes out millions in bonuses or CEOs who bankrupt a company float down on their golden parachutes? They are following the plan they had all along. If anyone truly believes the S&L scandal, stock market crashes, and the current housing market bubble were surprises there is probably someone waiting to sell them a bridge in Arizona as I type this.

More importantly, it can be the inadvertent actions that appear to be deceitful or at the very least poorly thought out, that can do so much damage to a business owner’s reputation. Perception is reality – especially in such a fast-paced digital world.

Great post!

That is good news for us – and from experience I will tell you it won’t stop this type of deceit because dishonest people will always continue to be dishonest even when caught.

When I had many clients I asked them not to spend ANY money online until they ran the idea past me first. I did this after one famous black hat SEO company conned a Mennonite family business I was working with into buying their services. They linked them into porn and gambling sites!

Thankfully I spoke with them just after they had agreed to buy the services. When I saw what had been done I was able to remove the links and restore their Web site from a backup copy I had. Then I advised them to immediately reverse the credit card charges.

That company was famous among SEOs, had dozens of unresolved BBB complaints and had moved to another state to start a new file. They were so bad Google actually banned all their sites and those of all their customers and published their name(s) online. (Many names to stay ahead of their reputation!)

There is one simple thing to remember: the best companies and consultants are far too busy to be cold calling or sending SPAM emails or phony bills. If you want to buy ads or consulting work ask for recommendations, read company reviews online, search for the company name and product offerings online and at least skim EVERYTHING you find. (PR companies know how to push complaints way down in the search engines because most people don’t go more than a page or two into the results!

Check with the online version of the BBB. Also do searches using +”company name” +complaints and +”company name” and +scam to find complaints. There are numerous sites that post complaints against companies you can visit too.

This particular SCAM is hoping that the person who pays the bills in a company is not the same person that orders the advertising. I bet that works in medium to large companies which is probably why large companies use P.O. numbers to track bills from outside vendors.

There are many totally free online Local Listing Directories now. Every business should be listed in as many free, legitimate directories as possible. The link I’ve used in this comment will tell you more about them, how they benefit both the public and businesses.

That post provides links to a form to make it easy to gather all the information you’ll need for your listings, tips on how to create the most effective ads, and links to all the free directories we recommend. For those who don’t want to do it themselves we might even be talked into doing it for you even though it can be very time-consuming to do it really well.