OnlineYellowPages.com (Yellow Pages Directories) Scam

by on December 22, 2009 at 10:37 am

I hate crap like this. The term “Yellow Pages” is a generic, untrademarkable term as is the familiar image of fingers walking (see: wikipedia entry). So of course, it is used by tons of companies to dupe consumers (small businesses).

We regularly receive a calls from scam directories asking to ‘verify our information’. We also commonly receive letters like the one shown below. I found this one particularly annoying:
CCI12082009_00000sm

So, if you mistakenly fill out their form and mail it back, you get stuck with a $600 annual bill. If you fill out the sections marked “free”, you get charged an additional $170 a year (after the first year). The terms you are subscribing to are on the back:

CCI12082009_00001sm

And of course, after getting tricked into signing up for a paid listing on OnlineYellowPages.com, businesses certainly can’t expect value from the service. Compete shows monthly traffic of only 3K to 5K users per month. That equates to an Alexa ranking of roughly 800,000. Even better, over 50% of the traffic is from India:

Of course, the BBB shows an A+ rating. (but we know how worthless those ratings are).

For future searchers, the return address and fax are:
Yellow Pages Directories
PO Box 111580
Carrollton, TX 75011-9895
Fax: 800 466 0607

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. | Dave Naffziger's BlogDave & Iva Naffziger