New York SBDC Research Network

From the Federal Trade Commission : Your phone rings. You recognize the number, but when you pick up, it’s someone else. What’s the deal? Scammers are using fake caller ID information to trick you into thinking they are someone local, someone you trust – like a government agency or police department, or a company you do business with – like your bank or cable provider. The practice is called caller ID spoofing, and scammers don’t care whose phone number they use. One scammer recently used the phone number of an FTC employee. Don’t rely on caller ID to verify who’s calling. It can be nearly impossible to tell whether the caller ID information is real. Here are a few tips for handling these calls: If you get a strange call from the government, hang up. If you want to check it out, visit the official (.gov) website for contact information. Government employees won’t call out of the blue to demand money or account information. Don’t give out — or confirm — your personal or financial inf...

From the outside, we know spam when we see it: links in comments that have nothing to do with conversations, emails that we didn’t ask for and aren’t interested in, and constant, high pressure attempts to sell, sell, sell. But from the inside, it can be harder to tell if the marketing we’re doing is spammy or responsible. Oh, sure, there are some easy clues. If you’re copying and pasting the same comment on a dozen websites, you definitely need to take a long look at the integrity of your tactics. Just to have a profile or post random things on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn is not marketing. But if you’re truly not sure, how do you determine whether or not you’re spamming? Read more at Bplans

It may not sound exciting, but it is important, especially if you’re taking your business’s marketing into your own hands. It’s also important to note that there are differences in terms of what laws apply between sending out a physical mailer to a mailbox, and sending an email. Most of the requirements of U.K. and U.S. anti-spam legislation will be met if you follow these two guidelines: Don’t mislead your customers, and make sure that you are collecting your customers’ private information legally. But, there are a few more things you need to keep in mind, so let’s begin. In the U.S., general advertising laws apply, but there is no specific legislation for the content of direct or mail marketing. Read more at Bplans

Back in August 2007, I suggested using TinyURL as a means of shorten a URL, particularly when e-mailing a long URL that might hit a line break. Unfortunately, some folks apparently enjoy hiding embarrassing and inappropriate web content, such as spam and porn, behind a TinyURL and similar services. Some users won't open them because of bad experiences. Here are two suggestions: 1) Avoid blind TinyURL clickthroughs by utilizing TinyURL's preview page and enable previews. 2) Use a service such as unshorten.com to get the original URL. This usually works not only with TinyURL.com, but also SnipURL.com , NotLong.com , Metamark.net , and zURL.ws .

(Or so the song goes.) Last week's issue of The New Yorker features an article called "Damn Spam" - an unnerving piece that traces the recent history of this email plague. For example: * "In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent." * "The onslaught apparently began on April 12, 1994, when two lawyers . . . bombarded the Internet with e-mail offering their services to immigrants . . . The two later claimed that they made a hundred thousand dollars from the e-mail campaign - a compelling demonstration of the peculiar economics of the Internet." * "The more spam that is blocked, the greater the volume spammers will need to send in order to make money. If you used to have to send fifty thousand pieces of spam to get a response, now you have to send a million. Spammers just shrug it off and send a million." * "Spammers today almost never use t...

Every so often, McAfee (the company that provides popular security software for home and business computers) evaluates the safety of the links generated by the most popular search engines. In early June, they released " The State of Search Engines " as a 2007 follow-up to similar reports written in 2006. If you've ever run a site analysis using McAfee, you'll know that they use a color-coded system to flag sites that feature security risks such as spyware loaders, high-volume spam generators, hyper pop-up ad creation, etc. This particular study theorizes that people rely on search engines to get what they want. So, the company reviews just how frequently search engines expose you to sites that they consider dangerous to your computer's security. Here are their key findings: Overall, 4.0% of search results link to risky Web sites, which marks an improvement from 5.0% in May 2006. Dangerous sites are found in search results of all 5 of the top US search engines ...