Plausible pitch but ‘exclusive rewards’ give the game away

HAVE they annoyed you yet? The lowlifes who operate from a bolthole in New York. They are polluting email inboxes with junk mail which, if it wasn’t so ludicrous, would be worrying.

I thought I was on top of such weirdos, having decided that endless, illwritten pleas for money to help with a sister’s lifesaving operation in a Manila hospital were perhaps not totally sincere.

But lately a swag of emails has arrived opening with, ‘‘You have been selected to get an exclusive reward! Simply complete our 30second marketing survey.’’

Attached was the logo of a respected New Zealand chocolate company. Not Cadbury’s, of course, which is a Chicago company dedicated to selling Australian chocolate to New Zealanders.

For an Otago chocolate lover, these are trying times. I can’t touch Cadbury’s any more and it may be some time before the Otago Chocolate Company is in full production, so a survey for a chocolate company hinting at ‘‘an exclusive reward’’ was irresistible.

I opened the email and answered the questions. The clowns in New York would learn that I was an older male who felt relaxed after eating dark chocolate. I’d pay extra for a

Fair Trade product and am attracted by free samples.

So far, not the kind of information likely to excite the New York branch of the FBI. Then came the bit that set alarm bells ringing. The list of ‘‘exclusive rewards’’.

On offer were half a dozen products ranging from wrinkle cream to male enhancement products and a testosterone booster (a female formula was available, too). This looked dodgy and seemed to sit uneasily with a respected New Zealand chocolate factory.

Sensing I was being targeted as an elderly male with vanity problems, I did the survey again but assumed the identity of a 25yearold female who liked nutty chocolate but wouldn’t pay more for Fair Trade stuff. Oddly, the ‘‘exclusive rewards’’ on offer to this young woman were exactly the same, including a cure for erectile dysfunction worth $249 but hers ‘‘for free’’.

I didn’t complete the survey, being pretty sure this was scam territory, but what the scam hoped to achieve only the devious plotters in New York would know. I got in touch with the respected New Zealand chocolate company, which was horrified by the story of deception and theft of its trusted brand. It promised to get its lawyers on to the case right away.

What New Zealand lawyers can do to rid the world of the indecent manipulators of New York I don’t know, but good luck to them. I checked the websites and found that the New York marketing company was the subject of numerous complaints from other companies and people who had not been paid for work they had done for the company.

The company’s own website boasted about their methods of research and what could be achieved by using the lists they supplied. Do their customers know that the research involves interfering with other companies who wouldn’t touch the New York company with a barge pole?

Heavens, if I’d finished that survey, who knows how many international chocolatemaking companies would now be crowing over their exclusive knowledge that an old bloke in Patearoa likes dark chocolate and is mug enough to take part in shonky email surveys?

I had a look at my deleted unopened emails. Half a dozen were from the New York shysters hiding behind the respected logos of others.

They all offered ‘‘exclusive rewards’’ for doing a survey and featured companies who scored publicity recently as being in the Top Ten Most Trusted Brands in New Zealand. Had the New York mafia latched on to this list and tailored their rubbishy scam on the information it contained? Cunning, eh? My biggest concern was that maybe my email company has sold its customer list to the Yanks. Pretty shoddy, I’d say.

Still, it’s only emails, not the real world, and it made a change from the tales of woe from attorneys acting for families of six wiped out in car crashes, leaving $10 million in a bank account and would I like half of it?

Best of all was the email from the New York gang that implies it has a list of all New Zealanders who wear hearing aids.

This ‘‘exclusive offer’’ was a secret remedy that Indians had been using for centuries to cure deafness and that had successfully treated 23,291 people. Using such an exact number is an old ploy beloved of con artists. ‘‘There has never been a recorded case of a deaf Indian’’ was their preposterous comeon line.

I didn’t bother to watch the video of Sitting Bull sticking stuff in his ears, as by now I’d had enough of these clowns from New York and so too, might I suggest, has the rest of the world.

❛ Sensing I was being targeted as an elderly male with vanity problems, I did the survey again but assumed the identity of a 25yearold

female who liked nutty chocolate but wouldn’t pay

more for Fair Trade stuff.

A