SEO Voice Mail Spam?

[Elvie]

Has anyone else been plagued with calls from a company called Internet Advancement? They have "spammed" my voice mail box for the third time. The man has a very angry tone that I haven't returned his call because he needs to fix the meta-tags on one of my sites because no search engine will ever find it. (so how did he find it?)

A Google search shows some interesting information about them, including the ruling for them to return customer's money after not delivering on top rankings.

Maybe this is the push I needed to start hiding my WHOIS information.

[Emancipator]

lol i love idiots like that.. Gimme their phone number I would love to spam them on your behalf. "Hi This is Emancipator, you didnt call me but I just wanted you to see what it slike to get harassing phone calls without invite".

[Chris]

I get these calls, I usually try to educate the caller, ask they some SEO theory questions.

[KLB]

I get these types of calls all the time. The really funny thing is the same person will call me one day on the phoneline for business A and then the next day for business B. I usually read them the riot act. I figure if I make their life unpleasant enough they will remember not to call me again or at least the rest of their day will be really miserable. I figure if enough people do that they'll start to really hate their job.

---Off topic---
I was suddenly interested in how the expression "read them the riot act" came from, here's the answer: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rea1.htm

[Erin]

I got a call like that a few weeks ago. It went something like this:

- Did you know you're not ranking well in the search engines?
Me: Oh, really? [I know where I rank.] So how did you find me?
- [pause] Um, from a search.
Me: What search terms did you use to find my site? And what search engine did you use?
- Um, the terms?
Me: Yeah, what terms? I know what my ranking is. According to you, what's my ranking?
- We can help you rank higher.
Me: So what search engine are you using?
- Search engine?
Me: Yeah, Google? Yahoo? MSN? Ask? Which one?
- Uh...
Me: Please remove this number from your calling list; we are listed with donotcall.gov.

[Masetek]

Hahaha that's funny as!