oppinions please re this romanian company

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Jan 2007 Posts: 3

hello there, i am trying to find out if a proposition sent to the company i work for by a romanian outfit is a scam, or if there is any way of verifying it.

I work in the finance / loan industry in the UK and we get most of our business by purchasing leads from telemarketing companies.

I recevied an unsolicited email on friday from http://probusinessmedia.com/ on friday stating that they could supply us with leads at a fairly decent rate.

I noted that there was no address on the contact page but that the phone number was local to me (0161 manchester) and passed it on to a manager to see if he was interested.

At the end of the day i overheard that a transfer of money was going to be made to these people but their bank was in romania, which lead me to ask why the heck are a local outfit banking in romania.

It turns out that the person who my office spoke to over the phone had a romanian accent and was most likely in romania so the local number was diverted. Their parent company seems to be http://skymarkglobal.com/

The main concerns to me are:

* Location - i think a lot of scams come from this part of the world
* size of company - skymark appear to be a big company boasting many staff but when you phone the number on either site the same bloke just answers "hello" (no company greeting)
* Staff - the "sales manager" Alex who answers the calls also seems to the the owner of both sites on the who is searches which again suggests a small opperation
* Internet Prescence - i cant find any decent info using google on either company only nonsense self generated blogg and link entries.

I appologise in advance to the owners of these sites if they are genuine.

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 1:21 am

As a rule of thumb if something appears too good to be true, or you feel something is wrong with this companies transparency, then trust your instincts.

If you are dealing with any 'company', I would be 100% certain of them before conducting any business. If they fail to produce and evidence you need to verify themselves then look elsewhere for your goods, or services.

You'll always find a more reputable buyer/organisation somewhere else.

Not quite a Newb Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 41

@ascu- it may be that your boss is simply going to pay a huge amount of money for a list of name and phone numbers harvested off the internet.
It is hard to determine what type of scam it is, if it is one, off the information that you posted.

If it won't get you into trouble at work can you post a sanitized version of the email so that we can look at it?
You could also PM one of the Mods and we could give you feedback off the forums.

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 8:26 am

This will become even more common now that Romania has joined the EU. Don't forget that just because a company seems to be based in a country that has a lot of scammers it doesn't follow that the company are scammers.

There is a basic responsibility in all situations to RESEARCH the company and to protect yourself before you hand over cash for anything. The company could be based in Britain and be a bunch of scammers.

You have taken a step in that researching this company, just remember to do it at all times.

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Both companies have two-year DNS registrations that expire in 2007, so they have been around a fair length of time. The probusinessmedia registration has been changed on the 3rd of this month. The contact email addresses are all the same and that is a Yahoo address that does not agree with the name of the registrant. The registrant name and address for skymarkglobal is different, but the email address and telephone number are the same. Both websites are very small for the services they are offering and the skymarkglobal website does not mention probusinessmedia.

On the 4th of this month, someone giving a probusinessmedia.com address spammed the Debian Developers forum offering them an affiliate program worth upto 42% of gross sales (sounds very high to me), including future orders by the same customer, for natural herbal products. Link. The telephone number they quoted is provided by a New York, USA company that sells VOIP services.

I don't think they are advance fee scammers, but they are not as big as they claim and they spam. There is a definite link between the two companies.

Skymark Global have a good web presence, but I could only find adverts and dodgy reviews (all gave 5 stars, no contact addresses, and the amazon.com one only ever wrote that one review.) You could try contacting this guy, who says he worked there.

I would be worried if the services they offered you involved an email marketing campaign, because you could find your company being involved in spam. I wouldn't want to give them a large amount of money, or indeed any if possible, until they proved their ability and professionalism.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Jan 2007 Posts: 3

thanks for taking the time to reply, all of your advice has been helpful - i have requested contact details of uk based companies that can provide testamonials - i can then check the credentials of these companies with the uk authorities.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 14 Jan 2007 Posts: 3

just to update the kind people who offered advice - this appears to be a rip off, the testamonial company details supplied were fake, they used an innocent patys FSA number and company name.

Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 11:29 am

Hi,
I just spotted this message.
I worked in Romania a few years back - and even very small companies have receptionists - almost always women.
They deal with business much like very polite companies from 1950 - VERY concerned with protocol and so forth. I would be dubious of them myself, as I see you are.
Just my comments!

Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 11:52 am

Scam

Then again maybe a really legit company has decided to use scam techniques to attract new clients.

Think twice and ask yourself one simple question.

Would you trust them ?

Edit

If theres any chance of lot of free money let me know

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