I’ve had three calls now from a company who introduce themselves as the Business Directory.  They start of the conversation reminding me of my application to be in their directory which I made approximately a year ago.  They then tend to go on to give me statistics of how many key words I have and how those key words are clearly working because they have driven x amount of impressions to my website.

The operator sounds very convincing up to this point but then tells me that I signed up for a two year directory listing and that I decided to pay half of the £199 fee in year one and now it is time to pay the other half.  Naturally they are ready to take payment over the phone via credit card. 

The thing is, I would never pay that amount of money for a directory listing.  These people even tell me when I supposedly paid them the first instalment (which I didn’t) so they are very convincing. 

I’ve tried to get as much information out of them as possible but they always call via a withheld number and when I start asking too many questions they tell me that they will have to get back to me.  This is clearly fraud so please watch out for these calls.