A phishing email, in case you didn’t know, is an email that is sent by a fraudster attempting to steal vital information from you by deception. The fraudster will send the email as though it has come from your bank, from eBay, from PayPal or from some lottery agency proclaiming that you’ve won several million Ugandan dollars. You get the idea.

When you click on the link within the email, or reply to it, you will be providing your information to the fraudster. Some of these fraudulent emails are very clever, and look very convincing, and often come with websites that are perfect replicas of the actual websites in question (such as a copy of Lloyds TSB’s website, which the email I received had).

You’re supposed to be fooled into thinking that the website is genuine, and attempt to log in as prompted. In doing so, rather than logging in, your details are being stored by the fraudster so that they can log in to your bank account and do what they wish with it (clear it out usually).

It’s all very straightforward, and all highly illegal. Of course, the success of these phishing emails depends on their authenticity – which is where copywriting services come in. Luckily, most fraudsters who use this form of phishing email don’t use English as a first language, and their grasp of the English language is very poor. They also don’t know the difference between UK English, and US English (note the reference in this email to ATM machines).

Have a read of what I received, and see if it would have fooled you:

FROM: Lloyds TSB [onlinebanking@lloydstsb.co.uk]
Subject: Lloyds TSB Alerts : Irregular Check Card Activity

Dear Customer ,

We have informed that you have received unauthorized access to your Lloyds TSB ATM Card by date of April 08 2009 ,
We already put your account on third party until the verification is finish
We ask you now to Log-In to your internet banking and check your statment .
We asking you to Log in immidiatly to your Internet Banking and and follow this steps

1. Log-In to your internet banking by clicking here
2. Check your recent statment

Please make sure to let us know if there is any authorized withdraw from your Lloyds ATM Card

Lebel Operation :
4670659

Your account is on the third party and is will be untill you finish the steps
Lloyds TSB , United Kingdom
************************************************************************************
This message and any attachments are confidential and intended for the named addressee(s) only. If you have received this message in error, please notify immediately the sender, then delete the message. Any unauthorized modification, edition, use or dissemination is prohibited. The sender does not be liable for this message if it has been modified, altered, falsified, infected by a virus or even edited or disseminated without authorization.
************************************************************************************

While the content of this email is clearly very poorly written, and unlikely to fool anyone, it is indicative of the poor quality content that does exist online. This type of content could even exist on your own website if you do not use the correct content provider, or simply leave your website’s content up to the intern.

Would this reflect well on your company’s image?

However, a recent spam email that was received by one of our clients was a little more tailored, seemingly featuring specific details about their website’s rankings within Google, and the level of its indexing. The keyword here of course is ‘seemingly’, as the email, from a Malcolm Wright of ‘SEO Doctors’, was actually spam and had been auto generated.

A quick search online usually helps to detect emails such as this, and this particular UK based SEO company has already received some exposure for its use of email marketing.

So, what did this particular SEO expert claim?

From: “Malcolm Wright” <malcolm.wright@seo-doctors.co.uk>

My name is Malcolm Wright. A senior search consultant at SEO Doctors, which is part of an SEO Group that has been established for over 10 years.

The website for SEO Doctors doesn’t work, neither does the website of the registered owner of the domain, The Web Clinic Limited. This isn’t looking good so far, anyhow, on with what Malcolm has to say for himself:

Excuse the unusual approach, however I am writing to inform you that I recently visited your website, ***********.co.uk, during a routine survey of web sites which may be capable of higher search engine performance, resulting in an increase in online sales or leads. I hope this information may be of use to you, if not then I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

No apology needed Malcolm, it’s not an unusual approach – just a spam one.

From my initial observations, your website is probably underperforming in the major search engines such as – Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN Livesearch). When searching on a topic, you probably are aware that most people don’t look past the first page of search results. I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages of Google, meaning that you could be losing out on a significant amount of business. As such I did a bit more digging.

Interesting, Malcolm hasn’t said what he’s actually searched on in order to ‘struggle to find’ our client, nor he has explained how he found them in the first place, if they do not rank on the ‘first couple of pages of Google’.

After checking the search engines, I ran a back-link check on your site. Back-links are the number of times your site is linked through another website. Your website has 5 back-links, meaning it’s not very popular.

Back-links also help build your site’s Google Pagerank score which show’s how trustworthy your site is. Right now your site has a Google Pagerank score of 0/10, which is probably one of the main reasons why your site isn’t showing up in the first page of the search results.

OK – we have to intervene here. As this email is obviously an auto generated email (as you will see if you read some of the other blog posts about Malcolm’s spam) you’d think they’d have fixed the grammatical error on “show’s how trustworthy” – why the apostrophe? Secondly, our client has a PageRank of 2 – so Malcolm’s research isn’t exactly spot on.

The final check I applied on your site was page indexing. The more pages your site has indexed with good content and unique keywords, the higher you will rank. Right now, your site has only 298 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low. This can be down to many reasons which we can help resolve.

Wrong again Malcolm, Google shows the website has having 368 indexed pages. Despite getting the facts wrong, and his own website not working, Malcolm then launches into the hard sell…

SEO is not rocket science as many would suspect. It takes a lot of man hours in hard work and research, something a lot of companies out there, just aren’t prepared to do without charging thousands per month. We are different, because we tackle every single issue with your website that effects how the search engines perceive you, through a combination of expert consultancy and direct work. Thereafter. putting you on the first page of search results in major search engines by working on your site month on month for a minimum period of 12 months. It’s a no-nonsense approach that cuts through marketing fluff to the core of what it takes to get a site to the top. We know what that is. We know how to do it.

This all sounds too good to be true Malcolm, how much are you charging for this service? It must be thousands of pounds per month, surely?

With pricing starting from as little as £35 per month to promote a profitable search phrase per month, your website is too important to let it go to waste, especially when UK online sales were up by 30% to £59.8 Billion compared to last year. Don’t forget we back our work with a money back guarantee.

Wow, where can we go for this deal?

If you are genuinely serious about improving your online revenues and want professional SEO as it should be done for a flat monthly fee, please visit our service website at www.seo-doctors.co.uk which provides more details about our excellent service and a call back form. See a selection of our excellent testomonials and example results achieved recently on behalf of our esteemed clients.

Thanks for that Malcolm. We did try and have a look at your ‘testomonials’, but your website was down so we couldn’t. Otherwise we’d have taken you up on your service straight away.

Whenever you receive an unsolicited email touting SEO services such as this, you should use Google to find out if the services are genuine, and if the company can be trusted. Google the name of the person that email is supposed to have come from, Google the name of the company, visit their website (if it is mentioned in the email, and if it works) and finally, Google a section of the email to see if anyone has posted it online.

When these emails are sent via contact forms, or using Whois details, they don’t come from the actual company offering the services; they come from an email address created specifically to spam you, from a made up name. It could be a hotmail address, Yahoo or even Google’s Gmail, but if you replied to it you would receive a reply from the real company’s website and email address.

Of course, using spam tactics such as this are illegal and against the CAN-SPAM Act – this is why they use made up email addresses in the first place. Any company that does this is already demonstrating that they do not use ethical methods to attract business, so what would they do should they get their hands on your website? They could employ all manner of dodgy, black hat SEO techniques that could see your site banned, and could even use your website for link building to their clients – which does happen!

Just in case you haven’t received this email, here is the message in full. Watch out for it and delete it if you ever receive it.

We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.

What do we mean by this?

If you give your website some content, either written by yourself or from a content supplier or SEO copywriter, your website will not only benefit from it in the short term, it will keep benefiting from it for as long as it exists. Content isn’t just a ‘give once’ and forget gift, the right piece of content on your website can attract traffic, new customers and sales for your website years after it has been written.

The same couldn’t be said for other forms of Internet marketing. For example:

Email marketing
This really is a one shot deal. You write the email, send it, receive positive responses or negative ones, and then it is done. You won’t receive any comeback from email marketing weeks, months and years later.

Link buying
This is one of those presents that has a short shelf life. It’ll be a novelty at first, but soon its impact will wear off. You’ll find that to keep it fresh you’ll have to spend more money renewing it and updating it as it proves a constant drain on your finances.

SEO
Ah now, surely we’re not going to knock SEO? Yes, we are. For SEO is great, wonderful, all powerful – yet it too needs constant love; like a puppy. Without care, attention and maintenance, your SEO can quickly become sick, and outdated. As algorithms change, your SEO needs to adapt with it – therefore you cannot simply do your SEO once and leave it to fend for itself.

With content however, once it’s there on your website it will be there forever. It will always attract visitors, links and generate sales for your business. Content truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Despite this, many companies shy away from email marketing, largely because of the negative connotations it has surrounding it. Email marketing is tainted due to the spam emails that are constantly sent flying around the Internet. Indeed, the majority of emails sent are spam, so any emails that offer products and services are invariably deleted without even being read, even though they are genuine.

This is one such spam email that we received this week, claiming we had won the ‘British Lottery’. As usual, it was asking for our full details, details that would be used to create ID fraud and probably lead to applications for credit cards and the like.

The email read:

The Lottery Company
PO Box 200
Harrogate
HG1 2YR

YOU HAVE WON 710,000 POUNDS STERLING

Our Dear Winner,

You have won the sum of Ј710,000 (SEVEN HUNDRED AND TEN THOUSAND, POUNDS STERLING) from BRITISH LOTTO on our 2009 End of the Year charity bonanza.

The winning ticket was selected from a Data Base of Internet Email Users, from which your Address came out as the winning coupon.

We hereby urge you to claim the winning amount quickly as this is a monthly lottery. Failure to claim your win will result into the reversion of the fund to our following month.

You are therefore requested to immediately contact out Claims Department below quoting winning number: CODE NUMBER-05 29 76 722.

Contact: MR GARRY MURPHY
EMAIL: garrymurphy@1ottery.co.cc

Provide the following information needed to process your winning claim.
(a) Your full Name and Address.
(b) Your Telephone and fax numbers
(c) You tax I.D.Number (if any).
(d) Your country of origin
(e) Your Age
(f) Your Occupation

Congratulations once again.

Please don’t forget to quote your winning number when you contact the claims Dept.

Regards,

DEBBI KING
Claims Department.
BRITISH LOTTERY

What is particularly telling about this email (despite the fact that we don’t play the lottery) is that the email address we are asked to send our full details to, including TAX ID number, is garrymurphy@1ottery.co.cc. Why a .cc? A .cc TLD is for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

Surely the British Lottery (whatever that is supposed to be) would have a .co.uk. If the spam merchants are going to the trouble of sending these emails, they could at least use a convincing email address.

Emails like this really do give email marketing a bad name.

Spam software has helped to cut down on the number of junk emails being sent, but some anti-spam software is too aggressive, and genuine emails are often filtered out when use them.

Spam email is bad. It’s annoying, it’s about stuff you’re not interested in and wastes time during your day.

Despite this, some email marketing services are decent and offer you the chance to reach people who are genuinely interested in your products. Using double opt in mailing lists means that your recipients have not only selected to receive emails of interest to them, they’ve confirmed that they are interested with a confirmation email.

This is important so that you do not foul of spam laws, which would be very bad for your company.

That said, one email we received recently for a US based retailer didn’t follow any spam laws. Not only that, but it spoofed itself as being from a friend. These types of emails serve no other purpose than to highlight how the company involved has used unethical marketing tactics online.

Here is the email received, which incidentally was formatted in purple text with a scrawled font.

Heya,how are you recently ? I would like to introduce you a very good company which i know.Their website is www.ae-shoppingmall.com . They can offer you all kinds of electronical products which you need like laptops ,gps ,TV LCD,cell phones,ps3,MP3/4,motorcycles etc……..Please take some time to have a check ,there must be somethings you ‘d like to purchase .
Their contact email: aeshoppingmall@188.com .
Hope you have a good mood in shopping from their company !
Regards z

Where do we start with that?

Firstly, it spoofed the email address of someone we know, so it was probably sent by a Trojan, or worm, that infected their email account. This doesn’t exactly make you want to shop with AE Shopping Mall.

Secondly, it looks like it was written by an imbecile: “Hope you have a good mood in shopping from their company”… That’s drivel of the highest order. When you write email marketing copy you want your text to be concise, interesting and enticing; not looking like it was written by someone with only a rudimentary grasp of the language.

Whoever ae-shoppingmall.com have hired to handle their email marketing, they’re not getting their money’s worth.

Make sure when you embark on an email marketing campaign that you use a professional Internet marketing company with experience in the field. It’s your reputation on the line.