Do you really want to scrimp on tech services? Here’s why you shouldn’t.

I hate receiving spam, but I especially hate receiving spam via the contact forms on my websites. It’s bad enough to receive spam, but to have spam sent to you using your own bandwidth, even if it’s only a tiny stream of data down the pipe, is just plain stupid marketing. Most of the time the spammers do the equivalent of the child’s game of knocking on a door and running away — and, hopefully, you’ll never see them again. Then, there are the spammers who are either too clueless or simply desperate for business that they continue to spam you, despite promising to stop if you ask them to stop spamming you.

Witness this third world spammer, using the name of famous Indian cricket player, Pankaj Singh. Mr. “Singh” initially sent two spam emails consecutively via the contact form on my web development site. I replied, asking him to remove my email address from his contact list. I reckon that he’s fallen into the “desperate” category by sending a THIRD spam email via my contact form, although the “clueless” category can’t be far behind. So, I sent him this reply:

You ARE a f**king spammer. I just sent this to you yesterday:

First of all, I DO NOT outsource SEO or any other service outside of the U.S. I have an SEO expert here in San Diego, California who has an EXCELLENT reputation in SEO, employing only WHITE HAT methods. Secondly, PLEASE remove my email from your contact list. You not only used my web hosting bandwidth to spam me, but you spammed me TWICE. Obviously, you are not detail oriented or organized.

I’m going to list this email, and your email address and URL, on my anti-spam/scam blog, scammersuncovered.com. This is now the THIRD time that you’ve spammed me using the email form on my website. Anyone who would be STUPID and CHEAP enough to use your questionable “services” deserves to have their website banned from every search engine, beginning with Google. I’m sure you do link exchanges with link farms and practice every black hat SEO tactic extant since 1995. I sincerely hope that I make a HUGE negative impact on your business.

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 22:49:53 -0700, <EMAIL ADDRESS REDACTED> wrote:

> email: info@semmiami.com
> realname: Pankaj Singh
> URL: http://www.semmiami.com
> dayphone: 921-146-9086
> service: website_edits
> specify:
> Description: HI Sir/Madam Can you outsource some SEO business to us? We
> will work according to you and your clients and for a long term
> relationship we can start our SEO services in only $99 per month per
> website. Looking forward for your positive reply Thanks & regards Pankaj
> Singh skype id-ranksindia PS:Humble request we are not spammers. We take
> hours to research on sites and keywords to contact webmasters. If by
> sending this email we have made an offense to you or to your
> organization then we extremely apologize for the same. In order to stop
> receiving such emails from us in future please reply with “Remove or
> Not Interested” as subject line. Many thanks for having your kind look
> to our email.
>
> ==================================
>
> REMOTE_HOST=
> REMOTE_ADDR=180.151.87.2
> HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML,
> like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.125 Safari/537.36
> REMOTE_USER=

So, let’s analyze what we’re dealing with here. A visit to  semmiami.com takes us to site proffering various web services and claiming to be based in Miami, Florida. Uh, yeah, suuuuure. The address listed on the website is 786 Jefferson Avenue, Miami FL 33139 (they actually listed “Miami Beach” redundantly). A trip to Google Map’s satellite view reveals only an intersection. Perhaps they’re working in an invisible kiosk in the middle of that intersection. You think?

semmiami-headquarters

Nope, there’s no invisible kiosk. In fact, these bozos aren’t even in Miami, or Florida, or in the U.S.A.  WHOIS lookup reveals that they’re actually based in Noida, India, which is south of New Delhi. No big surprise, there. Here are the details:

Registrar
NET 4 INDIA LIMITED
Registrar Status ok
Dates Created on 2009-10-26 – Expires on 2015-10-26 – Updated on 2014-10-27

Name Server(s)
NS1.NET4INDIA.COM (has 81,320 domains)
NS2.NET4INDIA.COM (has 81,320 domains)

IP Address
118.67.248.135 – 326 other sites hosted on this server

IP Location

Andhra Pradesh – Madanapalle – Chennai/infra/netops
ASN

AS17447 NET4-IN Net4India Ltd (registered Nov 02, 2000)
Domain Status
Registered And Active Website
Whois History
118 records have been archived since 2009-10-26

IP History
6 changes on 5 unique IP addresses over 6 years

Registrar History
1 registrar

Hosting History
1 change on 2 unique name servers over 6 years

Whois Server
whois.net4domains.com
Website
Website Title SEO Miami, SEO Services Miami, Responsive Web Design Miami, SEO West Palm Beach, SEO Services Florida

Server Type
Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Response Code 200
SEO Score 84%

Terms
464 (Unique: 212, Linked: 453)
Images
26 (Alt tags missing: 21)
Links
53   (Internal: 25, Outbound: 12)
Whois Record ( last updated on 2015-08-01 )
Domain Name: semmiami.com
Registry Domain ID: 1573512362_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.net4domains.com
Registrar URL: http://www.net4.in/
Updated Date: 2014-10-27T08:11:57Z
Creation Date: 2009-10-26T07:34:37Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2015-10-26T07:34:37Z
Registrar: Net 4 India Limited
Registrar IANA ID: 1007
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +91.1204323500
Domain Status: ok http://www.icann.org/epp#OK
Registrant Organization: Sem Miami
Registrant Street: G 20 Sector 63 Noida
Registrant City: Noida
Registrant State/Province: UP
Registrant Country: IN
Registrant Postal Code: 201301
Registrant Phone: +91.1204542449
Registrant Name: Pinky Sharma
Registry Admin ID:
Admin Name: Pinky Sharma
Admin Organization: Sem Miami
Admin Street: G 20 Sector 63 Noida
Admin City: Noida
Admin State/Province: florida
Admin Postal Code: 201301
Admin Country: IN
Admin Phone: +91.1204542449
Registry Tech ID:
Tech Name: Pinky Sharma
Tech Organization: Sem Miami
Tech Street: G 20 Sector 63 Noida
Tech City: Noida
Tech State/Province: florida
Tech Postal Code: 201301
Tech Country: IN
Tech Phone: +91.1204542449
Name Server: NS1.NET4INDIA.COM
Name Server: NS2.NET4INDIA.COM

So, here’s where Semmiami.com takes “hours to research on sites and keywords to contact webmasters” in order to spam them mercilessly:

semmiami-headquarters-REALWhat kind of quality can you expect from these third world posers? First of all, they’re deceiving you into believing they are not offshore, and that they’re based in the United States. Heck, I could say that I’m based in London, England if I wanted to. How many potential customers are going to do a WHOIS lookup on these spammers? They are offering search engine optimizing services for $99 per month. Do you really think that you’re going to get exemplary and ethical keyword mapping? Do you think that these bargain-basement SEO hucksters are expert at “white hat” link building? Sorry, but that paltry $99 per month will cost you hundreds (maybe thousands) more in bad backlinks to link farms and other sites of questionable integrity. If your site ends up banned from Google, you’ll have to do major cleanup and then submit a request to Google, begging them to take you back, that you’ll be a good webmaster and never associate with sketchy SEO people ever again. The unfortunate thing is that you most likely will not be completely successful with your clean up, mainly because link farms are under no legal obligation to remove your URL from their sites since many of them are offshore anyway. You may end up spending a pile of cash pursuing legal means to have those links removed.

The moral of this story: “The cheap comes out expensive.” Remember, in the SEO world, any competent and successful SEO firm doesn’t have to send out spam emails for potential clients. Clients come to them instead. And definitely avoid the offshore “firms,” unless you happen to live in that part of the globe, of course. Even then, be careful.

 

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6 Comments

  1. James November 2, 2015 at 12:38 pm - Reply

    The worst part about these guys is because I have clients sites listed on my site, they went to each and every client on my site and contacted them several times via their forms. I try not to lose too much sleep over it though, most of my clients prefer to speak with me and even meet locally. Tough to do from India, and those are usually the clients worth keeping!

    Hi,
    Sir/Madam
    Can you outsource some SEO business to us? We will work according to you and
    your clients and for a long term relationship we can start our SEO services in
    only $99 per month per website.
    Looking forward for your positive reply

    Thanks & regards
    Pankaj
    Phone no. – 9211469086

    PS:Humble request we are not spammers. We take hours to research on sites and
    keywords to contact webmasters. If by sending this email we have made an offense
    to you or to your organization then we extremely apologize for the same. In
    order to stop receiving such emails from us in future please reply with “Remove
    or Not Interested” as subject line. Many thanks for having your kind look to our
    email.

    • Anne Hutchins November 12, 2015 at 10:05 am - Reply

      I think that may have been how these scumbags found me, by spamming the clients listed in my portfolio. Nice, huh?

  2. CJ November 26, 2015 at 8:19 am - Reply

    Me and several colleagues have reported them to every agency under the sun and done a lot of research.

    This is just a very well thought out scam because the person behind it is a PR “professional”. On the SEMMiami website contact page you see the info for SEMMIAMI marketing Division -Email: sally.semmiami@gmail.com – Cell: (786) 708-2171 – this is just a cover for who the real Sally is – Sally Dee from Playbook Public Relations, LLC in…wait for it…MIAMI!!! Payback for Playback I guess is to just continually spam them (her) with phone calls and emails! You can reach Sally Dee at Playbook Public Relations, LLC and tell her how you feel about her illegal activities at http://playbookpublicrelations.com/ – (813) 789-7122 – sdee@playbookpublicrelations.com.

    • Anne Hutchins December 6, 2015 at 2:32 pm - Reply

      Nice research. When you peel back the layers you usually find a scammer squatting there.

      • Anne Hutchins January 24, 2016 at 4:29 pm - Reply

        Just received this via my contact form. Not sure if it’s really Sally Dee, but it’s definitely a WTF:

        To:
        Webmaster

        Name:
        Sally Dee

        Email:
        sdee@playbookpublicrelations.com

        Subject:
        FEEDBACK

        Message:
        Wow, you are pathetic. This website sucks and so does your marketing.
        I partner with criminals in India but am based in Miami. Call me (813)
        789-7122 or email sally.semmiami@gmail.com

        Sent from (ip address): 96.10.57.170 (rrcs-96-10-57-170.se.biz.rr.com)
        Date/Time: January 23, 2016 5:57 am
        Coming from (referer): http://www.scammersuncovered.com/contact_us/
        Using (user agent): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64)
        AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111
        Safari/537.36

  3. Anne Hutchins April 20, 2016 at 8:18 am - Reply

    Just received the EXACT spam message, but with a different URL: http:\\www.ranks.co.in. Here’s the text of the email:

    email: info@ranks.co.in
    realname: Monika Johnson
    URL: http:\\www.ranks.co.in
    dayphone: 9211469086
    service: 600_website
    specify:
    Description: Hi, Sir/Madam Can you outsource some SEO business to us? We will work according to you and your clients and for a long term relationship we can start our SEO services in only $99 per month per website. Looking forward for your positive reply Thanks & Regards Monika PS: Humble request we are not spammers. We take hours to research on sites and keywords to contact webmasters. If by sending this email we have made an offence to you or to your organization then we extremely apologize for the same. In order to stop receiving such emails from us in future please reply with “Remove or Not Interested” as subject line. Many thanks for having your kind look to our email.

    “Monika Johnson” — yeah, I’ll bet that’s her real name.

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