To Whom It May Concern:
Recently Google has stepped up and started cracking down and filing lawsuits against scams that are using the name and logo to promote garbage products, they are taking steps to not only protect the trademark but attempting to clean it up. You however are not doing anything to protect your trademark or consumers from the abuses of your logo and trademarks in the perpetration of scams and fraud on the internet.
On every scam site I investigate I will find one of your logos and your brand used to make a customer feel safe and bring the offer into the “big time” because it was seen on Fox News, or CNN, and MSNBC. Hey McAfee your not safe from this, on each of these sites it will show your seals improperly linked claiming to be “Hacker Safe” (which I have a huge offense with anyways) or “McAfee Secure” and VeriSign Secured. Of course most of these idiots running these sites do not use VeriSign certificates but they use the cheaper variety.
Now I understand you guys are busy and really only care about the bottom dollar for your respective companies and thats cool however could you do consumers a favor and crack down on these happenings as it will do many things for you. Here is how you can benefit from cracking down on these scams and frauds that use your “good” names.
- You will gain more press and exposure and get to hang out with the big boys at lunch.
- You will gain trust with your brands because you are actively attempting to help consumers.
- If you go after these clowns and win you can get money which we all know that is what you are after.
- You might can sell more products because people might have some trust.
By seeing all these logos and trademarks being used victims are comfortable with the site and enter the credit card information like asked (I will not go into the other facts that research should be done and other things that the consumers can do themselves) and when they get ripped off they feel jaded by not only the company that ripped them off but the companies that allowed the scam to continue.
Now, I understand that you may not want to go after these companies because the amounts of money they spend on advertising on your respective websites, and if that is the case can you come out and say that? Because we (consumers) feel that your inaction is a direct support of what is going on. So if we can come to an agreement here that would be great. Do you honestly support these scams and maybe your teeth are whiter (not because of the product but because you can afford to go to a cosmetic dentist) from the money you are raking in from the advertisements.
Some of these sites even try to portray your layout and general feel so that consumers think that your reporters actually wrote this drivel and you sit back and do nothing. So since you do nothing to protect your brand unless it suits you we have a couple options.
- Come out and protect consumers and your brands
- Come out and say you do support these groups and are raking in money from them
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Well said – these corporate big guns should team up and destroy the scammers in the courts. The scams are even using the trusted name of BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation England) to con people!
http://strangelyperfect.tv/6818/my-first-british-google-business-kit/
Also – AOL, CNN, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook etc etc should also all STOP allowing the scammers to advertise on their websites!
VeriSign uses a Web crawler each month and reports all suspected cases of misuse of the VeriSign Secured Seal. A team reviews each instance and winds up discarding 98 percent of the matches. Those that are using the seal improperly are first asked to remove it and may later be subject to legal action.
Seal abuse is taken very seriously at VeriSign.
Well these people are just using the graphic and not linking and I doubt that the crawler is effective against it. For example:
https://www.internetrichesguru.com/v/0800/default.aspx?s1=35697&s2=10067&s3=Qgk9ycgKIfkpUSt2X96A64cRIk8SS2R8&clickid=12_79116758_6df809cb-ba01-4b88-ad98-60efaad63f1f
Would your crawler find that I doubt it because you are probably crawling people who are linking or using the logos from your server not someone who went out and embedded it into another graphic
Trustmarks, company logos, and other graphics are just computer files that can be easily copied, edited and republished. This is a huge problem for companies who are trying to maintain a trust relationship with consumers. Companies that provide trustmarks need to do a better job of educating consumers how to spot fakes.
This scam is not unique to the internet. Fake business cards, company letterhead, and envelopes have been used by scammers for years. Who hasn’t used a fake company name to get a free magazine here and there?
Umm..me?