Yesterday, she was cold-called by an SEO startup in an attempt to sell her a revamped website and SEO services. He said they had already designed a placeholder website, and that he would personalize it for them if the clinic would purchase their services. She politely refused.
Out of curiosity, her colleague, J, called the phone number on this fictional web site. J pretended to be a potential client and asked to schedule a consultation. The other party said "The doctor is currently busy; I'll check with him and call you back." J asked which physician she would be seeing. He gave her the name of Dr. C (the physician at J's clinic!) along with his background and credentials (gleaned from the bio on Dr. C's website). When pressed for the clinic's location, they gave J a (fake) address in Chinatown.
My wife then called the SEO company to complain that they seemed to be impersonating a legitimate clinic in order to sell SEO services (she did not mention J's call). The person she spoke to (listed as one of co-founders) became very rude. He denied that they were doing anything wrong and huffed that "If you don't want to grow your Web presence then we don't want your business!"
I believe that this is an attempted "growth hack" and not an outright scam, but they are taking it too far. Using a real physician's identity, even in a placeholder website, can damage his reputation, not to mention displacing him as #1 in Google search results for our city.
HN, do you have any thoughts on what action my wife can take to stop this behavior?
Update 1: Interestingly, the fake clinic domain name is VERY similar (one letter difference) to another, legitimate clinic in the city.
Update 2: Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons is in contact with wife's clinic. Preparing to unleash the hounds, no doubt.
You may be right that the SEO company is trying to do a growth hack, but that doesn't alleviate them of the responsibility to not break the law. In the US you can get into some decent trouble doing that crap. You might get away with it once or twice claiming ignorance to the standards on registered professionals in a state but I doubt you get away with it long once someone reports you.
Also, I personally wouldn't name anyone publicly here, it just doesn't seem like a good idea. However, sending an email to the SEO company seems reasonable.
<rant> My experience with SEO companies has been horrible.
I worked for one for a month, have worked with them in the past at agencies I have worked at, and was given a list of "optimizations" from one a the startup I currently work for.
My experience while working for one is, by far, the worst. The owner/CEO asked me to lie to a customer and tell them I did work that he had actually outsourced to India. "In the future, try to funnel these things through you. Instead of saying, 'I will pass that on to the developer', say, 'I will take care of that'".
I feel like their skills are hard to quantify, and because of this a lot of people get sucked in on questionable sales pitches. This market then seems to draw the "Snake Oil" type salesmen who find they can get easy money.
Although there are good people offering quality SEO services, I have had 100% bad experiences with them. </rant>
There are of course shady people in the SEO world, but most of the "one cool trick to help you rank better" tactics are long gone as Google has done a pretty good job squashing those through algo updates.
Saying "SEO is still a service to break search engines" is incredibly misguided - Organic search is a ridiculously powerful growth opportunity for brands as ranking #1 for proper keywords can be a multimillion dollar marketing value add. To sell that short is incredibly foolish, and every brand worth their weight should truly believe they deserve to rank #1 for relevant terms, why not work to achieve this?
It was in no way scummy, nor intended to break search engines.
Our approach to SEO was, in a nutshell: "write quality blog articles relevant to related search terms, include a CTA at the end."
We posted lots and lots of articles. We started ranking very well for long-tail keywords, which we should have--we had the best content available for them.
Nothing scummy about that.
Also, good/real SEO usually requires content writers. Which is an ongoing process, and is probably not worth the cost to most small businesses.
I've seen many instances where Google failed to place the best site at the top and there was no evidence the top site used any SEO.
1. I perform work for customer, they're satisfied. They would show improvement and start getting more traffic.
2. Some scam company company calls them and appeals to their sense of greed.
3. They tell me they're going with the new company who erases everything I did.
4. Six months or so later they call me back because things are worse and want me to fix it.
5. I refuse because now they're deep in black hat territory, and either deranked by Google or well on their way. Or they'd have some strange legal issues popping up from the crap the other company did.
So yeah, after a while I jumped out of the business. I know that isn't exactly relevant to your problem, but these companies are just complete scumbags in every sense of the word, and anything you can do to damage them, you should.
Call a lawyer, and protect your good name. Take a chunk out of the bad guys.
Little do they realize it could be a lot worse.
Here's some of the crazy I see far too often:
- SEO guys that run paid traffic through their client's affiliate programs, to generate commission on top of the regular fees they charge.
- SEO guys that offer a short-term contract initially to reel clients in, use the initial fees to actually purchase products from said client's website, and then use perceived increase in performance and revenue to get a long-term contract paid up front, and then disappear.
- SEO guys that charge for plagiarized blog content.
- SEO guys that convince clients to pay thousands of dollars to add "meta keywords" tags.
- SEO guys that rewrite click farm traffic to make it look organic.
- SEO guys that install "backdoors" on their client's hosting accounts to continue monetizing the website via backlinks long after they've been "fired".
- SEO guys that hold businesses hostage with duplicate websites (similar to this story).
- SEO guys with english-as-a-second-language, that charge for "Content Marketing"
- SEO guys that charge their clients thousands of dollars to setup and maintain Facebook, Twitter, a Blog, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, then do nothing on them for years and hold their clients hostage for additional fees when said clients realize they're not getting their money's worth and want account access.
- SEO guys that register the domain name and hosting on the "clients behalf"
The Twitter account is just repeating a Wordpress site's RSS feed. On that site, there's a link to <his-name>.info, which according to a whois lookup was registered by someone at the "International Association of Healthcare Professionals" in New York. Google searches for that association reveal doubts of legitimacy[0] and scam warnings[1][2].
I haven't spoken to my friend or her father about it directly (I just noticed a tweet the other day) so I don't know if he was contacted about establishing a web presence or anything.
[0] http://www.quackwatch.com/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html
[1] http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/The-International-Association-...
It looks like it might be covered under identity fraud: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/westcoastnews/story....
May want to reach out to your local prosecutor and avoid those legal fees :)
Section 403 CCC: 403. (1) Everyone commits an offence who fraudulently personates another person, living or dead,
(a) with intent to gain advantage for themselves or another person;
(b) with intent to obtain any property or an interest in any property;
(c) with intent to cause disadvantage to the person being personated or another person; or
(d) with intent to avoid arrest or prosecution or to obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice.
Clarification
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), personating a person includes pretending to be the person or using the person’s identity information — whether by itself or in combination with identity information pertaining to any person — as if it pertains to the person using it.
Punishment
(3) Everyone who commits an offence under subsection (1)
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years; or
(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
My wife is in contact with the College of Physicians and Surgeons to keep them abreast of the situation. We'll see if she can engage their lawyers. She's also documenting everything as it has happened.
I did a little bit of snooping through WHOIS records. I think the SEO company is based in Montreal so we might be able to do something domestically about it.
All their shady SEO tactics will get them de-ranked in a few weeks regardless of what you do so it's only a short term problem.
- Local listings - make sure that the Google local listing, and other local directories are showing the correct information, and that they didn't try to change this
- Social media accounts - What the scammy company would sell as "reputation management." Verify that they are not creating accounts on all of the big social media sites.
2: Physicians' professional board may have advice.
3: Document the crap out of everything. When these scumbags hang, I want to read about it in the Globe and Mail.
1. It wasn't an SEO company, it was a Scam Artist impersonating an SEO company... let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
2. It wasn't an attempted growth hack. It is a racket and should be called that. In fact, every growth hacker out there will insist that "putting users first" and "creating a sticky product" is growth hacking...not scamming people.
I just hope the SEO company isn't hiding in another country.
The restaurant owner is a friend of my co-worker and asked her to help with their website and local marketing to drive more business in addition to the lead gen company. When she dug into it, turns out the lead gen business conned the hostess into turning over the google maps account via the phone verification and everyone that looked up the restaurant in google to order went through the lead gen service, where they should have gone directly to the restaurant, saving the restaurant the lead gen commission.
While one might argue that this is legitimate, the owner of the restaurant had no idea and felt cheated.
Is there an equivalent of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in Canada? Contacting the BBB and filing a claim is definitely a way to get some momentum, lots of businesses in the USA at least depend on having a good, clean BBB rating.
Did the company in question ever say that they were an SEO firm in their sales pitch or just an online marketing agency?
Personally, I would contact the medical board, see a lawyer about what the doctor's rights are, and file a UDRP domain dispute to get ahold of that domain name.
There is a big difference between a company that's a web advertising company and an SEO company or SEO firm. Lots of agencies do SEO and web advertising, but to put a blanket statement out there that this was an SEO firm (meaning Search Engine Optimization firm interested in getting organic/natural traffic to a site) is wrong.
This shady company is a web advertising company, who put up a false/misleading website on a misleading domain name. It doesn't sound like their intention was to do SEO. They make money by charging the doctor or clinic for the website and they "maybe" get some local listing, perhaps do PPC. But typically a company like this doesn't have the expertise or knowledge (or care) to do real SEO (which requires real content and link earning).
Don't get me wrong, what the company did here was false, misleading, and punishable. But to put a blanket statement out there and assume that this was an "SEO firm" or "SEO startup" is just flat out wrong.
This original post should say that the doctor was contacted by an "agency" and not an "SEO startup".
This might be a matter for the police, especially if the SEO company is in Canada.
Contact the organization administering the top level domain and file a typo squatting dispute.
Also, most likely these SEO people will stop impersonating the doctor's office when it's clear they won't win the account (edit: they'll start impersonating a different doctor). Their mistake was picking up the phone call. It's common practice and arguably ethical to set up and optimize a placeholder site. Any pre-launch website with a link to sign up is doing exactly this.
Google DMCA Information: https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420?rd=2
This startup company has ton of bad consumer reports, I'm glad that I ended up not working on their website. I would've had trouble sleeping had I seen what their website was actually doing, ripping off small businesses with fake leads.
'Decent' is not a word that fits with 'deceptive practices', 'impersonation', or 'extortion'.
If you want to be a dirtbag, you might as well build one of those "stress tester" sites or something. Sounds easier.
"'deceptive practices', 'impersonation', or 'extortion'" - this, however, is your interpretation and it is taking it pretty far.
'deceptive practices' - that I can agree with. No matter how you do it, it is deceptive. Then again, a lot of businesses were built with (oh, say Airbnb or Youtube) / use (every cheap airline website) shady practices.
'impersonation' - does not have to be. What if they clearly list that this is not an official X site? If your data is public and crawlable, is it illegal for people to use that information?
'extortion' - does not have to be. Isn't this an equivalent of going to the same business and saying, I did a bit of research on you, then I told 3 people about you and they would love to buy your services. I'll refer them to you if you give me $5. Is this illegal?
