Trade Fair Guide scam directory alert

I thought I’d write a post about Trade Fair Guide to get it into Google.

Why? Because a source has informed me that ‘Trade Fair Guide’ is the next planned name in a long line of business directory scams fromt the Cypriot stable that brought you Expo Guide among others. If that’s so, we need to get this post into the Google indexes early.

In the scammer’s naming system, ‘Trade Fair Guide’ is the holy grail of names for their scam directory because it’s the easiest one to piggy-back onto a genuine trade show or fair that a small business might be attending. The scammers hope that people assume the form for ‘insertion’ into their useless database is connected with the show they’re paying to attend or exhibit at. An earlier version of this scam, ‘Fair Guide’, did exactly that for those reasons.

So why use the name ‘Trade Fair Guide’ when it’s so close to ‘Fair Guide’? I suspect there are a couple of reasons. Firstly, for the reasons above – because the scammers can pass it off as connected to credible trade and business events. Secondly, because Google is already well-populated with documents with the keywords ‘trade fair guide’ because a trade fair guide is a document that most, if not all, credible trade and business events will produce for the benefit of attendees and exhibitors. The hope, from the scammers’ point of view is that these credible documents will act as a buffer, clogging up the first few pages of Google’s search results when someone like you tries to do some due diligence on this ‘guide’. The intention, of course, is to try to keep posts like mine – that cost the scammers money – out of sight.

Watch this space.