Kelloggs

I called Paul Drake of Vehicle Contracts three times today, to tell him about three separate emails he'd sent me. He's dealing with it. He's a nice guy, I think he's been ripped off by one of the email list vendors. He asked me whereabouts I was located, I told him near London and he sounded quite surprised - maybe he thought he'd bought access to a list of businesses in his area, which is up North? And not a generic list of email addresses scraped from the whois database.

It's people like him that I feel most sorry for; small businesses are being charged for a spamming service that isn't ging to bring them any business. Because it's sent to email addresses that either no longer exist, or are irrelevant to the product being offered, or are filtered out by spam filters, or are deleted unread by the recipient.

I also called Vehicle Leasing, and Glynn there said he'd get me taken off their email lists. He also gave me the name "Data Lists Global" which has cropped up before, and which I didn't follow up because their phone number wasn't obvious.

So I tracked down Data Lists Global, I think; they seem to be involved in a few spam campaigns. A whois gave me an address, Gemini Business Centre, 136-140, Old Shoreham Road. One of the firms there is debtmanagementguide.co.uk which is owned by SCB Media Limited, and Paul Careless is a director of SCB. A number there is 01273 224004, and we'll see what results I can get there - maybe they have nothing to do with Data Lists Global, but since they're at the same office area, maybe they can help me with a phone number. Paul seems to be the CEO of a number of enterprises at the same offices in 136-140 Shoreham road, and offering various financial services and other things. And some of them don't make it easy to find out their phone number (but by no means impossible, if you google around a bit).

I also gave Kelloggs a follow-up call, and at last, they came up with something I can follow up. Sharon there told me that the campaign I was complaining about, was done by "Carat", but she wasn't allowed to give out any more information. So I googled for "carat email data" and found www.carat.co.uk, and on their web site they do indeed boast that Kellogs is one of their clients. So I phoned them up, and got the switchboard. I asked for "complaints department"; nothing. "Customer service"; nothing. Then the switchboard lady said she could only put me through to someone by name, so a quick bit of googling revealed that their CEO is Tracy de Groose, so I asked for her. That got me to her PA, who took details, and promised a call back. Which hasn't happened yet, maybe tomorrow?

I haven't heard back from Nancy A. Christenson, nac@buckley-law.com, about "Lunch On A Lawyer", so I've emailed her a reminder. I mean, she offered me lunch, and I've expressed an interest, we just need to fix up when and where. And she replied, saying that the lunch is at their offices, so I've asked her where their offices are.
She replied back Lake Oswego, OR. So I've asked her if OR means Oregon, USA. She said that it is. So I told her "Oh. I'm in England. Do you have an office in England? That's a long way for me to go for a lunch!" And she said that she's sorry that it isn't going to work out.


The snow seems to have gone at last, so I'm planning to go out caching tomorrow, in Reading. Good news for the spammers!