I receive emails on a weekly basis regarding the Matchmaker Marketing scam (aka Apex Media, Storm Media, Zenith Marketing). I received the couple of emails below recently and thought I would publish them in full as Laura has described precisely how easily it is to be tricked by them.
Another update on Matchmaker Marketing and their aliases.
Last week I had an email from a friend, Finnella Naughton at Barter It and Babymoments, letting me know she’d heard from a company in the UK who could get her on the first page of Google. Was it a scam? Is it ever!! Finnella forwarded on their email – they are using the Google Ireland logo as though they have some sort of affiliation with Google – they don’t. It is so easy to see how people fall for their spiel and then the email looking like it’s Google too.
Back in May 2009 it came to our attention at Whatswhat.ie that a UK company is calling companies on our directory. We have over 66,000 companies listed and believe they have contacted 1,000’s to date. This company is called Matchmaker Marketing. There are others but Matchmaker has a vigorous campaign going on at the moment targeting Irish companies. They also use other names like Zenith Marketing, Storm Media and Sphere Marketing…to name a few. I will post more when I hear about them.
It is bad enough they are calling our customers and sometimes being detrimental about our service, however it is difficult for us to stop this as being an online business directory we are in the public domain and companies listed with us show their details in order to be seen.
The problem is that this company infers they are Google from the start of the conversation and are tricking Irish businesses into thinking they are being called by Google so the call must therefore be bona fide.
Those that know a bit better realise that Google wouldn’t be calling them direct so they ask who they actually are and they admit to being Matchmaker Marketing. However they then claim to be affiliated with Google or a Google reseller or Google’s largest reseller in the UK. “As in Carphone Warehouse is to Vodafone” (their words)