Life as I find it

In a world where online services abound and flourish under the comparitive anonymity the net offers, fraudulent service providers have a whole new market to themselves. Being too trusting is a bad idea.

I had been meaning to submit my site to online directories for a long time, as many people said its good to be listed, and links and all that.

Some surfing brought me to Submit Edge, which offers submissions to 750 high PR directories for 60$. The site really looks like these guys know what they are doing, and have an understanding of Search Engine Optimization, Link Building, etc. Kush Infosys Pvt.Ltd. which runs the site and service are based in Mumbai, so I thought that I’d be giving business to someone from our town. Sounded good, so I paid them, filled in their form with the link I wanted submitted and careful descriptions.

Done, right? Wrong!

Once I received acknowledgement of my payment, there was complete silence on their end.

As you see, the submissions should have been done in two weeks. As the duration came to a close, I started wondering what happened of the services I had booked, and wrote them an email. I got a response saying that it will happen soon.

Finally, about 3-4 days after their stated time was up, I got my “submission report”. Imagine my horror to see:

1. The main page of the first site I was submitted to (PR7) had links to adult sites!!! Checking a couple of days later, the entire directory was gone and replaced by some video site in some language I don’t understand.
2. The second site in the list doesn’t have a category for where they claimed they submitted by link to.
3. The third site has a domain name with random letters, and is listed as a PR6 site, when in reality it has no PR at all.
4. In fact, many of the sites had random letter domain names.
5. Their High PR list has exactly 21 directories that state a PR of 5 and above. Please note that these also aren’t really all actually High PR, as the third point shows.
6. From there on, it is PR4 and PR3 till 41 and goes downhill from there.
7. Not a single incoming link from these sites points to the link that was submitted (which I guess is a good thing, though it defeats the entire purpose of the exercise)

Aghast at what I had paid for, what I was getting, and what it could potentially mean to my site, I emailed them with my findings to receive no response at all. I tried calling them, but kept getting through to an automated mailbox.

I filed a dispute under PayPal, upon which I got a response within hours from them offering to replace links with problems or provide new links.

Not desiring new links of this kind, I asked for a refund, and escalated my claim out of an unnecessarily overdeveloped sense of responsibility so that PayPal could see what their services were being used for, and other buyers could be protected. Turns out, PayPal wasn’t particularly interested if their sellers use their services to cheat people, as long as there are no goods involved. What is more, they did no investigation of any kind, but automatically shut down my claim because:

As stated in our User
Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It
does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods
received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a
refund.

This is mentioned in the PayPal policy as intangibles not being eligible for consumer protection.

However, the payment in my account allowed me to create a dispute, even though there was no shipping address provided, and I clearly mentioned “services” as the transaction type and the dispute was successfully created about something PayPal had no intention of looking into, or resolving. It allowed me to escalate the dispute into a claim, upon which it was automatically closed.

This is clearly a strange and problematic service from PayPal that unscrupulous providers can exploit to their advantage, because it gives the illusion that the dispute will be investigated, when in reality what happens is that it gets discarded and finalized as closed. No investigation happens, and while justice is implied, it actually removes all options a claimant has in the system. Thus, even when the seller might have initiated some kind of compensation, he is actually released and essentially set scot-free to lather, rinse, repeat with some other gullible consumer.

Additionally, the fake service provider actually gets the credibility of having disputes against them dismissed by the “authority”.

So, to summarize:

• Don’t pay anyone for any service online, unless you trust them.
• DON’T trust PayPal’s dispute system unless you are dealing with tangible goods, regardless of what their dispute form says.
• Don’t know about other submission services, but SubmitEdge is clearly a fraud.

For whoever is interested, this is a sample report of submissions made, and if you want something like this associated with your site, go ahead:

The Horror Submissions Report from Submit Edge

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 3:14 am and is filed under Frauds and scams, Money, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.