Had a fax today from Adrian Sykes who informs me....
YES!!!! We have already taken the liberty of putting your property on our site. We hope you dont mind but we are confident we can offer a better advertising solution FOR YOU
He also states
YOU HAVE RECEIVED TWO BOOKING ENQUIRIES FOR YOUR HOLIDAY PROPERTY FROM OUR SITE ALREADY.
One from Carl Todd at carltodd67@yahoo.com and
One from Sandra Smith at samdrasmith78@yahoo.com
Please send us an email so you can receive your ENQUIRIES to sales@adchor.com
We have checked their website
holidayhomeseuro.com
and the ad is lifted, photos and all, straight off an existing very well known site we already pay for.
Seems a bit of a cheek and the email addresses look dodgy (yahoo.com)
PS also the rental they are quoting starts from a price 50% higher than the rent we quote
Last edited by PeeJay on Wed Apr 20, 2005 5:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
Yes, they look as if they´ve lifted every single ad from that well known site. Mine are there too.
Interestingly, you received notification by fax. That´s because they don´t have email addresses. In fact if you click on "Contact Owner", you are just directed to the phone no/fax no. which they´ve taken off the site. So it´s impossible for anyone to have given them their email address in an enquiry which proves these 2 are false enquiries. What they are after is your email address which they can then link to the "Contact Owner" button to complete their ad.
Very clever!
Doing a bit of research, I see they have done the same thing in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Well, not that brilliant. If I was running this scam I wouldn't use two email addresses that are so stupidly similar.
My guess is that they are trying to get hold of owners' email addresses without abusing holiday-rentals's terms of service. There are no spam laws for faxes, and once you email them back you have arguably formed a client relationship with them which allows them to continue emailing you. Either that or they really are just stupid/desperate.
Anyway, I have told holiday-rentals about them. It will be interesting to see how quickly they can get them shut down.
Thank you for letting us know about this. Several of our advertisers pointed it out to us yesterday, and I have already sent a “cease and desist� e-mail to Mr Sykes. We, and our advertisers, take a very serious view of theft of our content. We are instructing lawyers this morning and will take further action against this latest pirate.
Perhaps you could post this on Lay My Hat for us, and do call if you would like to discuss it further.
Many thanks.
Best wishes,
Marcelle Speller
Chief Operating Officer
Holiday-Rentals.com
Is this "theft" of information by Holiday Homes confined to the holiday-rentals database or are other holiday rental sites being attacked in a similar fashion?
Paolo, you recently questioned the usefulness of website copying tools. This could be an example of how such things can be grossly abused by the undesirable inhabitants of the Internet.
It reinforces the basic advice. If it looks like Spam then treat it as Spam. Don't respond at all, ignore it completely. The one thing that Spammers and Spivs can't survive on is - silence.
Hey, wow, I found my property too -- and I feel the sudden urge to utter an expletive. Alan is completely right -- these &%!@$ have abused a website copying tool. Though I suppose it's possible that's what website copying software was made for in the first place.
Funny thing is, they didn't change my prices at all. And they haven't tried to contact us -- probably because we don't have a fax number up.
Honestly, some people probably don't notice the spelling errors:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch sudty at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
