Let's be careful out there

I used to love the TV show, "Hill Street Blues." DeDe and I watched it for the first time when we were young and stationed in Germany. We settled in every Thursday night with a cold drink to follow "life on the Hill."

The watch Sergeant, Phil Esterhaus used to implore his charges after each roll call with this tag line:



Good advice then, and good advice now, even if you're not working on the mean streets.

I've been getting a lot of cold calls lately at work. "Mr. Sorensen, this is (insert name here) of (insert company here.) We are a company that..."

Recently, some of these calls will come in, and either shortly before, or shortly after, with an email.

One of my business responsibilities in the past was to manage business end of the marketing email process of the company I work for, so I'm quite familiar with the Can Spam act that covers emailing permissions.

Now it's one thing to get a call, and another to get an email. But it is quite another to get both. Based on the services the caller / emailers were offering, I gained a bit of a notion who could be selling my name, number and email. But I needed more.

And so I began emailing back (I'm much better at writing it than saying it, oddly enough.) "Thank you for contacting me, but first I'd like to know where you procured my email address and my phone number and my name from."

Mostly, I do not hear back from them. Oddly enough. One fellow did write me back "Our marketing department provides leads from lists of people who they have contacted via email and have shown an interest."

"Rest assured," wrote I, "while I have received emails from you" (I had to do some research to find this fact, as the preliminary emails had come from a different domain and company name) "I have never shown an interest in your company. Please provide me with a contact within your marketing department."

Oddly enough, I have not heard back from him. I have not heard back from any of them, but for the last three weeks, these "coordinated cold contacts" have stopped.

In this day and age of social networks, and the means to marry information based on shreds of connections, it is getting harder and harder to separate the tares from the wheat. Sadly, there are a lot of tares out there, and they seem to be growing more prolific by the hour.

Spammers and scammers abound. Even intelligent people are getting hoodwinked. I have seen cases within my company where some "reputable" companies have tried, and sometimes succeeded, in bilking some very savvy folks.

I read an article this week that addressed one phase of this modern dynamic. Anecdotal proof of the above assertion.

I know many writers and artists out there are small business proprietors, and as I said, really, no one is immune. As such, I share this article from CNN/Money magazine with those who are interested.

It's not my hope to make people paranoid, but to inform. The art of the con is not a new thing, but new vehicles for its conveyance are being exploited.

So, when you're out doing business in internetland, I beseech you,

"Let's be careful out there."