European Company Network – SCAM Alert

BEWARE of emails from the ‘European Company Network’ arriving in your mailbox inviting you to ‘update your company details for free’. You could unwittingly be signing up to 3 years of paying 995.00 Euros a year for a worthless directory listing!

One such email managed to get through our Spam Filter this morning…

There is an attached PDF document into which you can indeed ‘update’ your company information.

It’s a cheap trick, because in the small print on the PDF is this…

THE SIGNING OF THIS DOCUMENT REPRESENTS THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS AND THE CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEB PAGE WWW.EUROPEANCOMPANYNETWORK.COM. THE SIGNING IS LEGALLY BINDING AND GIVES YOU THE RIGHT OF AN INSERTION IN THE ONLINE DATA BASE OF THE EUROPEAN COMPANY NETWORK WHICH CAN BE ACCESSED VIA THE INTERNET, AND A CD ROM WITH WORLD BUSINESSES IS GRANTED, ALL IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONTRACT CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEB PAGE WWW.EUROPEAN COMPANY NETWORK.COM. THE VALIDATION TIME OF THE CONTRACT IS THREE YEARS AND STARTS ON THE EIGHTH DAY AFTER SIGNING THE CONTRACT. THE INSERTION IS GRANTED AFTER SIGNING AND RECEIVING THIS DOCUMENT BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER. I HEREBY ORDER A  SUBSCRIPTION WITH SERVICE PROVIDER EU BUSINESS SERVICES LTD “EUROPEAN COMPANY NETWORK”. I WILL HAVE AN INSERTION INTO ITS DATABASE FOR THREE YEARS. THE PRICE PER YEAR IS EURO 995. THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY EXTENDED EVERY YEAR FOR ANOTHER YEAR, UNLESS SPECIFIC WRITTEN NOTICE IS RECEIVED BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER OR THE SUBSCRIBER TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EXPIRATION OF THE SUBSCRIPTION. YOUR DATA WILL BE RECORDED. THE PLACE OF JURISDICTION IN ANY DISPUTE ARISING IS THE SERVICE PROVIDER’S ADDRESS. THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE SERVICE PROVIDER AND THE SUBSCRIBER IS GOVERNED BY THE CONDITIONS STATED IN” THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEB PAGE  WWW.EUROPEANCOMPANYNETWORK.COM

Instantly smelling a rather large rat, we decided to investigate this organisation.

The internet ‘Who Is’ record states that a ‘C. Boot’ in the Netherlands is the registered owner of the domain, with the email address of bootcornelis@gmail.com. Probably false. The website itself is a rather cheap looking affair with lots of faults and is hosted on a low quality server. The domain is not ‘https’, this is always the case with scam websites.

Further internet searches show that this company has quite a long list of complaints from businesses across the world. The FBI have even issued warnings about them.