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How did I earn...
Jobs You DON’T want: The latest kind of spam
May 31, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
After the relative ’success’ of the Nigerian 401 schemes that promise you a large amount of money in return for ‘helping’ the authors of the email to secure large sums of money from secret bank accounts after the untimely death of the account owner, there have been even more ‘creative’ emails going around the Internet. Recently, though the net for such spam emails has gotten wider, as they have evolved past this scheme to include lotteries that you won but don’t remember entering, contracts, and now job arrangements, and even business partnerships.
Almost all of these spams look something like the one above. They usually are very toned down in their approach and have better English than the Nigerian scams; however, they are never addressed to individuals, and always promise big bucks, big orders, big jobs, or whatever. They are all the same, however; they are unsolicited, unwelcome and may cause you serious problems if you respond to any of them.
Most likely, these emails are soliciting your personal information under the guise of a job application form; but providing this information may just give you one big headache. Or, as in this case, they’ll be looking for you to provide a source of ‘transaction fees’ in order to receive payments (these payments will never come, but you will need to pony up more and more ‘processing fees’).
In the above case, a quick look at the spelling and mistakes will raise your concern; a little thinking will establish the flaw - a company should already be able to get funds from its customers (otherwise, how would it survive?); and the lack of official contact information should be the flashing red light - no phone number, no email address with their domain name (Yahoo address!) and no physical address!
The danger in these emails is that they look fairly plausible at first reading, so some individuals may be duped into making contact in the first place! Do not reply to these emails! You will only cause yourself more problems!
Kiva Loan #2: update - Loan Disbursement
May 31, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
As many of you know, I’ve been supporting Kiva for quite a while, though my total sponsored is still not great! Anyway, my second borrower has been fortunate enough to find that his request for a loan has been disbursed! I just received notification today. So I would like to congratulate him, and hope that one day his business is such a success!
Here’s a little about the micro-borrower Efrain Montuffar Olguin from Kiva.org: “Efraín has been running his business for a year and a half. My business is a money-exchange shop near the border. People need to convert their money into U.S. dollars to go shopping in Texas, and that is how I provide a service to my community. I would like to invest more money into my business to increase my earnings, but I have not been able to. I’m asking for $1,200 to invest in my business.”
The official note stated:
Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Efrain Montuffar Olguin by Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva in Mexico. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 12 - 18 months, Fundación para la Vivienda Progresiva will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.
It’s exciting to watch others build their business much as we did 7 years ago! So all our best wishes are with Efrain Montuffar Olguin.
For those of you who would like to support my efforts in this area, perhaps you would care to take part in my Kiva competition, or donate directly to Kiva.org.
Thanks.
My Blog Stats - May 2007
May 31, 2007 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Be the first to leave a comment
I thought I’d give a brief overview of the stats for this blog since April. I will include some stats from Google Analytics as well. I’m not bothering with stats from other places, mostly not worth it!
Overall, PR is still down; and won’t likely change in the short term! I’m still considering what to do about that, my linkbait programs are going slowly, and not generating much interest! I’m tweaking the second competition!
Comments are up! And delightfully so. I’ve now got over 230 comments and 570 postings! I’m also trying to get my pages out of Supplements Hell where about 50% of my pages are currently hiding! This is likely killing my PR ranking and my search engine traffic from Google!
PR Rank: 3
Alexa Rank: 3 month 95,345 (1 week: 85K est.)
Technorati Rank: 101,257* ( a decent jump!)
Overall Tack Rating:- top quality postings
Since last month, the Alexa rank has improved a great deal, and Technorati Ranking has also improved. I have maintained my Tack Rating, but increased the number of positive reviews’ feedback to 15. Advertisers on PPP are enjoying my postings clearly. And privately, I’m getting positive feedback from a number of other advertisers who requested links/posts.
Actual traffic is improving, too. Google has shown a big jump in traffic, and some individual websites are coming along nicely. John Chow’s blog has been sending quite a bit of daily traffic since I appeared in the commentators top ten list.
Page Views are at about 1700; Visits are 940; and Unique Visitors are about 730 per month. Views of Google and Alexa show rising traffic, but still the base is growing slowly. Subscribers to the feed are approaching 50!
All stats on this blog are current as of May 30th, 2007, and are rounded for ease!
* I’m still using this rank, but Technorati has introduced another system called ‘Authority’ without much explanation.
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