Beware of Thieves offering Gifts

Published: 1 Feb 2008 In: General

Every once in a while, we stumble on those less desirable people that lurk on the Internet looking for new ways to take advantage of the system. Today, we would like to offer a warning to our users about one such dishonest group of people that call themselves, www.webdesignvalidation.com.

They offer you to submit you contact details and your web site information for a chance to win a new design for your site. We entered one of our sites into their contest at the beginning of the year with the chance to win a newly designed web site using Web 2.0 technologies. We thought, “Hey that’s a good idea. Let’s see how good they are so we can recommend this to our readers”.

So we complied with their rules. We put up a badge on our web site that let’s people click through to their site and vote for our site. Pretty simple … or so we thought.

They sent us a notice that on the 19th, our submitted site had been approved for submission as a “Non-Web 2.0 site”. Good news! On the 20th, they notified us that they were offering more rewards for their users. And a small note that said “a 3-plan membership was added in order to create a profile”. We weren’t sure what that meant. Nothing ever stated in the rules about a membership but we had already joined and been approved so we mistakenly assumed we were already members. But nothing was said about changes to the rules since we had joined.

On the 21st, another email about 3 new rewards. They were the same rewards as mentioned the day before. There was another mention of membership but again it was not obvious. “We have updated our awards for your category and added 3 membership options”. Ok, so what. Are we supposed to do something? No call to action in the email … no reference to rules changes for those already entered in January’s contest. We’re good to go.

But, out of caution, we decided to logon to the site and see how our submitted site was fairing in the ratings. Good news again, our submitted site was in first place with plenty of margin over the second place person. No worries then.

On January 31, we heard from one of our loyal fans that the badge on the homepage of our site was taking them to an error page (Error 404, page not found). We thought that was odd so we checked it out. Sure enough, no voting page. So we went to the home page at WDV and there was a notice that their system was down for scheduled maintenance and would be back online on February 1. Ok, we can wait.

On Feb 1 we received this little gem in our email exactly as quoted:

Wait a minute … we already have a user account. And to prove it they have addressed us as “Dear Member”. Now they are telling us that they have upgraded the site and we have to create an account again. What happened to our old account? What happened to our first place rating?

So we checked …. no account, no first place rating, all of the old pages resulted in “Page not found” errors. We sent an email asking what was going on. The following email was received the same day (copied exactly with spelling errors included):

Obviously, we did not hesitate to contact them.

It is amazing the methods that some people will use in order to build a contact list. While we did not loose any money on this, we do apologize as we did ask some of you to cast your vote for the site we submitted to understand how this was going to work. But we were most put out by the fact that they promised something to the web community, and then changed the rules to seemingly avoid delivering on the promise.

If this is how they treat their members, I am certainly not going to give them money as a registered member to be treated this badly. Obviously not a lot of gray matter exists in the heads of the people over at WDV.

We want to offer our sincere appreciation for your effort and we apologize for this inconvenience. Now we know that the people at WDV are not desirable business partners. We warn our customers not to use their service.

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