The psychology behind them is very simple – I’ll try to sum it up from the scammer’s point of view.

1) By default you treat people as though they’re like you, not crooks like me. You’re a decent, law-abiding citizen trying to make an honest living and you live in a moral society. Because of that, I can count on you treating me as if I also operate from that place (which of course, I don’t). In short, even while I’m ripping you off, I can depend on you to be polite, tolerant, honest and trusting.

Not only that, you’ll be so scared of being taken to court (now who put that idea in your head??) that you’ll bend over backwards to avoid saying anything that could offend ME, the scammer, or be construed as legal advice to any of my victims. How deliciously convenient: self-policing victims.

2) Shame is a powerful tool. I know you’ll blame yourself for not noticing the small print (in fact, in many of my threatening letters, I’ll be unable to restrain myself from referring to your stupidity and your responsibility for the mess you’re in). Of course you should have seen it! It’s YOUR fault! It’s there in black and white. If you weren’t cautious enough, that’s your look out.

It really helps that you feel stupid and ashamed. That will make sure you don’t share your mistake with anyone. I need you isolated and feeling alone.

3) Now I can frighten you. Yes. I’ll bombard you with emails, letters and calls. Because you haven’t shifted to seeing me as a criminal, you still hold a belief that maybe…just maybe I could take you to court somewhere. You fantasise about the huge cost; the shame; the disruption. Oh, it would be too terrible.

4) I read what you’re REALLY communicating (not what you think you are). The minute you communicate with me, the message I get is that you’re scared. Even when you think you’re being angry, I know you’re being scared. Good. Any reaction tells a) you’re at the address I think you are. Good. b) Mentally, you REALLY don’t think I’m a criminal. Very good. c) You’re scared and/or ashamed and you take me seriously. Even better.

5) You’ll be happy to ‘settle’. At some point, I will have caused you so much stress and worry that you’ll think paying €1,000 to get rid of me – sorry, to ‘settle’ with my client – sounds like a fair exchange.

And that’s all it takes.

Every time I see someone write ‘I’m going to counter-sue’ or ‘Let’s get together and beat them in court’ or ‘I’m going to write them…’ I see why this scam works. As long as you believe, in the back of your mind, that they are somehow legal and that they, somehow, could take you to a court then they’ve got you.
You might SAY you know they’re scammers, but so long as you do the above things, you’re telling me that you don’t really trust yourself. And the saddest thing is to know that they designed it to manipulate you in exactly this way.

Folks. These people are crooks. There IS no debt collector; there IS no court. It never does and never WILL happen.

Please try to understand that it’s THIS mental shift that is the key, here. Not any action or statement you can make.

As always, you – the Great Googling General public – will decide.

If you’ve received an invitation from European Trade Register to ‘update your details for free’ in any so-called business directory (particularly if it has a 3 part name in the following format:

[Europe / European / World / Global] [Company / Trade / Business] [Directory / Register]

then just bin it.

It will undoubtedly be one of a growing number of scams which all follow the same formula: make you think you’re getting a free listing then hit you with a demand for payment (usually for 3 years at €980 a year). The pressure then increases to threats of ‘court action’ from people passing themselves off as debt collectors – with the aim of scaring people so much that they’ll settle for paying ‘just’ a single year to get these people off their backs.

That’s €980 for doing nothing but mass mailing a form, sending threatening letters and making some bullying phone calls. Easy money for European Trade Register, no?

If you HAVE fallen for it, don’t give in to the pressure. You’ll start getting demands from people pretending to be ‘debt collectors’ (in this case under the fake name ‘Walberg & Hirsch’) trying to (lols) ‘mediate’ on behalf of their client. Make no mistake – these are the same people as ‘European Trade Register’.

For immediate reassurance, please read all the comments on the following threads on my site:

• EU Business Guide 

• Expo Guide

• World Business Directory 

(…and any number of other sites dealing with every possible variant of these names. Use Google to learn more).

If you’re here because you’ve been hit by the European Trade Register scam, then please consider adding your experience using the comments link below to help to reassure others in future who will arrive here worrying about threats of legal action.

Remember, the power lies with YOU and the truth.

PS – if we’ve saved you €980 or helped end your worries, please support our work by clicking through to our sponsor sites (under our picture on the right there –>). Thank you!

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been scammed by ‘Euro Business Guide’. Don’t pay them – report them to Interpol instead.

And then read this post and the 180+ reassuring comments following it from people just like you who have fallen foul of these scammers.

Euro Business Guide is just one of many ‘misleading contract’ scams that have been going around the globe – and making millions of £ / $ / € – for over 10 years. These scams all follow the same basic format:

• You receive a form (hardcopy or emailed pdf) offering you what appears to be a free entry in some online business directory
• You print the form, enter your company details and sign / stamp it and send it back
• Some weeks later, you received demands for payment of 3 years ‘subscription’ at around €980 a year
• The scammers bully you via any means – fax, phone, email, letter
• If you don’t pay, you get letters & calls from people claiming to be a debt collection agency demanding payment and threatening you with court action

You need to know the following:

1) Euro Business Guide is a scam and has no legal rights or power over anyone

2) Waldberg & Hirsch is not a real debt collection company – it is just the people behind Euro Business Guide trying to frighten you into paying

These scams work on fear, nothing else. If they think you’re vulnerable and unsure, they will bully you to increase your fear levels to the point where you will agree to their ‘offer’ to settle at 1 year (that’s €980).

Don’t pay them and if you’d like to talk to loads of other people who won’t pay them either, join the Facebook group today.

…meanwhile, here’s some information to help you.

Confidence inspiring. NOT.

‘European Business Guide’ sends out a pdf offering you ‘free updating’ of your entry in their online directory of European Businesses. The idea is to make you think that entry in their ‘directory’ is free, whereas the small print on the form states that entry actually costs 990 euros a year (min 3 years and automatically extended year on year) while ‘updating’ (once you’ve been entered) is – amusingly – ‘free’.

This is an old but surprisingly successful scam that’s based on a simple principle: people are needy and careless. They want something for nothing. They’ll sign the form without seeing the small print, believing that they’re getting something for free.  Then, if you bully people hard enough, a percentage of those people will pay you out of fear and/or shame.

Simples.

Anyway. Enough from me. Suffice to say there are many versions out there at the moment. Expo Guide, Word Business Directory, World Company Directory, World Business Register, European City Guide, Fairguide and many many more.

If you’ve started receiving demands because you filled in the form without reading the small print, then add your experience here by commenting. Search for my posts on ‘Expo Guide’ and read all the hundreds of comments there. Hopefully, they’re enough to reassure you not to pay.

PS – if we’ve saved you €980 or helped end your worries, please support our work by clicking through to our sponsor sites (under our picture on the right there –>). Thank you!

If so, you might like to read this thread first.

Don’t forget to read the 400+ comments too.  Hopefully you’ll be reassured that you’re the victim of a global scam. This means they can’t take you to court in any country because THEY are the ones who would be sent to prison

Find out more about these scams from Richard Corbett MEP.

It also means that the ‘ICAA Ltd Cyprus’ acting on Expo Guide’s behalf to try to bully money out of you doesn’t actually exist.  Nor does ‘Fobble International’ or ‘Waldberg and Hirsch’ or any of the other names they pretend are debt collection agencies.]

Their ‘websites’ are simply fronts to make you think they are a real business and out to get you.  Don’t be fooled.

If so, you might like to read this thread first.

Don’t forget to read the 400+ comments too.  Hopefully you’ll be reassured that you’re the victim of a global scam. This means they can’t take you to court in any country because THEY are the ones who would be sent to prison

It also means that the ‘ICAA Ltd Cyprus’ acting on Expo Guide’s behalf to try to bully money out of you doesn’t actually exist.  Nor does ‘Fobble International’ or any of the other names they pretend are debt collection agencies.

Their ‘website’ is simply a front to make you think they are a real business and out to get you.  Don’t be fooled.

So to beat them at their own game, I wrote this post to beat them to the top of Google for their own (fake) name. Lols.  See the results below.  Now, anyone receiving threats from them will go to Google, type in ‘ICAA Cyprus Ltd’ and find this post BEFORE they find their dummy website.

That, by the way, is how you use Google to get the truth in front of the lies.

Hi Sam,

Thank you so much for your phone call on Saturday, for your words of reassurance and for sending me the info on all those people who have been affected by this scam.  I shall certainly take your advice and ignore any follow up from them.

I have had this big black cloud hanging over me since receiving the demand from Expo-Guide on Wednesday.

My dinner party went well thanks to you and the removal of that cloud.

When you experience the worst that human kind can throw out it is good to know there are souls like yourself about who can redress the balance.

Kind Regards,
E

This is just one of many emails and kind comments people have written to thank me for posting on this subject and bringing together 200+ comments from victims of this scam – all highly visible on P1 of Google for a search on ‘Expo Guide’.  Their emails and comments reveal just how much stress and worry this nasty, global business directory scam continues to cause for decent, hard-working people.

I happen to agree with that view. So did the highly respected James Randi (who demonstrated Popoff’s wife feeding him ‘divine information’ via radio link in his live ‘ministries’) and so do most of the people writing about Peter Popoff online.

I came across Popoff last night, flipping channels after England’s depressing performance in their World Cup opener. Clare and I watched Popoff and his charming wife Liz promising ‘supernatural debt cancellation’ in return for nothing more than writing in to request their miracle water gift.

A gift which, of course, then turns into floods of direct mail with ever-increasing demands for money – ‘seed gifts’ – to help God to get started sorting out your debt problems.  According to Popoff, you can’t expect God to supernaturally cancel your debt unless you stump up something yourself first. It’s the religious version of the Nigerian funds transfer fee.

Despite having declared himself bankrupt following Randi’s high-profile debunking on American TV (easily available on YouTube) Peter Popoff today pulls in millions of dollars a year through his latest direct mail operation – and pays himself and all the members of his family millions in salaries too. First time round the target was believers with health problems.  Now, in the shadow of the credit crunch, it’s believers with debt problems.

For someone with a really bad online reputation, he’s doing far better than he should – and raises a question about how important online reputation is to a business.  The answer, of course (and Popoff will know this all too well) lies in the likelihood of his intended victims – sorry, ‘market’ – using Google to critically evaluate the things they’re presented with.

Judging by the audience profile at his ministry events shown on TV last night, I’d say that this likelihood was low, to say the least, reminding us that online reputation is only a meaningful concept to those who are already critical and use the web to do some form of due diligence before making decisions.

That greedy, insecure, grubby little people exploit other greedy, vulnerable and grubby people is absolutely no surprise to me. It’s everywhere – scratch the surface of everything British these days and you’ll find this sleaze. What does surprise me is that Peter Popoff can be still pushing this scam on TV and there’s not a watchdog or body that can – or will – stop it.

MacIntyre and Dodd Marketing, Peter Popoff.  Just two – but there are tens of thousands more and our culture gives them carte blanche to operate. Disgusting.

Each time I find a new ‘fraud helpline’ I’m disgusted to find there’s never any mention of any of the business directory scams that has cost these people so much in time and money.

What is it about our Government and police that makes them incapable of taking a stand against a crime that many of us online have been reporting for years – and which is still going strong? These people are still bullying hard cash out of people all over the world – cash happily banked by upstanding establishments like Barclays.

This evening, I found ‘Action Fraud‘  which calls itself the ‘UK’s national fraud reporting centre’. Now, I treat ALL such sites as inherently suspicious.  Why? Because there are plenty of scamming sites out there pretending to help – but just waiting to rip you off again with premium rate ‘help lines’.  Given that environement, Action Fraud doesn’t exactly reassure me on first impression.

I first had to Google ’0300′ call rates to make sure this site wasn’t also a scam. How many of you reading this know that ’0300′ isn’t some kind of premium rate?  Action Fraud could make this clear – it would go some way to reassuring people.  Then I tried to report the Expo Guide business directory scam using the online ‘Report a fraud’ tool.

I have to say, it was a complete waste of time.  By the second click, I got a ‘call the police now message’.  So I went back and avoided the answer that prompted that, in the hope of being able to report Expo Guide and the fact that I get people every day posting on this site about being ripped off.

Sorry to have to say this, Action Fraud, but it was a pointless exercise. You should try reporting Expo Guide, World Business Directory, European City Guide or any one of the numerous versions of this scam yourself using the ‘tool’.  Then you’ll see why those scammers are laughing their heads off, out there in sunny Cyprus (or wherever).

I guess that leaves the ’0300′ number.  I’ll let you know what I find out.

I’ve just watched the Newsnight report exposing the ADE651 ‘bomb detector’ which has earned a British man £50m  in sales to the Iraqi Government. Experts took apart the device and revealed it as a ludicrous scam; an empty case with nothing in it that could possibly detect anything – let alone explosives.

It is unbelievable that this device has been sold in some 20 countries - making the ‘inventor’ something like £80 million.

Scams are everywhere and they seem to be on the increase.  But it almost beggars belief that the ADE651 could be developed, marketed, sold and exported without someone pointing out the bleedin’ obvious: that it’s nothing more than a toy gun that wouldn’t look out of place on a Scientology table in your local market.

Unbe-f****g-lievable.