Scam Alert - Star Position Search
I have been getting a number of emails from Kathleen Daigle who claims the following:
I represent a company called Star Position Search & Navigation Solutions,
a company that does what’s known as advanced search engine placement.
We reach a Network of over 33 million people who are predominantly US
based. Our Network is entirely opt-in, and the users on our Network allow
us to present them with a preferred choice whenever they are looking for
anything on the top sixteen search engines. (GOOGLE, YAHOO, MSN
and thirteen others.)I seek one source to send the users on our Network, from the major search
engines, for home based businesses.Please contact me at your earliest convenience. I am in the office
daily from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM Pacific time.
Before giving her a call, I decided to do a little research and found that this service is a scam. Website owners receive an email from either Kathleen Daigle or Robert Sexton. After calling the number provided, the person on the other end convinces the website owner that he can get their site to pop up in an iframe at the top of any search. You pay a flat fee for one search term and supposedly every time someone searches on the term, your site will pop up. Unfortunately, unless the searcher has special software installed on their computer, it is just no going to happen.
There have been some who have fallen for this scam and have requested their money back to no avail. Stay away from Kathleen Daigle, Robert Sexton and Star Position Search & Navigation Systems!
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Thanks for this posting: it was exactly what I was looking for after receiving the same email.
Indeed, its a scam. They’ll try to sell you netgaurd toolbar, myspace guardian or amber alert. They dont own them, nor is there anything for you to gain.
complete scam by robert sexton. I think he answers all the emails himself, even the lady names.
Hi Agree thanks for the helpful post to stay away. My phishing text is as below
Hello,
I represent a company called Star Position, a company that does what’s known as advanced search engine placement. We reach a Network of over
35 million people who are predominantly US based. Our Network is entirely opt-in, and the users on our Network allow us to present them with a preferred choice whenever they are looking for anything on the top sixteen search engines. (GOOGLE, YAHOO, MSN and thirteen others.)
I seek one source to send the users on our Network, from the major search engines, for ****** rides in various markets.
Please contact me at your earliest convenience. I am in the office daily from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM Pacific time.
Best regards,
Liz Monteroso
Business Segment Analyst, Star Position
Phone: 800.481.2979, ext 2002
Also the name can be Liz Monteroso.
In addition, name such as:
Liz Monteroso
Business Segment Analyst, Star Position
Phone: 800.481.2979, ext 2002
I had and have been recieving emails like what you have recieved and I dont know where they get my email address. Lets be very cautious on people offering good opportunities and “laid back money back guarantee” specially at times such as now.It is better to stick to what we have and know. Nothing is free and everything and everyone has a trick or two. Like me I had to do some research and ‘walah” this came about that this is purely a scam… Thanks to all your posting.
Be sure to complain to the L.A. Better Business Bureau if you have been taken in by this scam. The owner of Star Position likes to go to the BBB website and post bogus reviews there, pretending to be various happy customers, in order to increase his company’s consumer rating.
http://www.la.bbb.org/
He is making a lot of money from this scam and when threatened he becomes very nasty, agressive and litigious, in my humble opinion. People who rightly complain about being ripped off by Star Position and Robert Sexton really get under his skin, it seems, and then he shows his true colors. Really ugly…
I received the same email from Liz Monteroso. Fortunately I decided to do some research and found your comments.
I got the same e-mail and it is a scam, I thank you for the info, I will post this warning add to my web site to warn other people . Thanks, Jessica Boyd
I received the same e-mail from Robert Sexton on two of my sites. I googled Star Position out of curiosity and found this “Scam Alert”. Thank you for your post and time in researching the matter. I was not interested in calling him as I felt he was trying to sell something I did not need. Thanks for the tip, I will post it in our forum.
I too received a similar email, with the “Liz Monteroso” with an email address of lizmonteroso@socal.rr.com
Thanks for the heads-up on this scam.
I had also called the Rob Sexton and he had an outragous pay up front amount,,,,so I told him I had others that take care of my placement for alot less with out being locked in and no thanks it sounded to bad it must be true I called my Google guy and sent the email to him and he alerted me about this Thank goodness Chelle Cecil
Thank you
They contacted my client directly. I’m glad I can send him to a resource like this to explain why it is not a good idea!
Thanks for posting this. All website owners should contribute along this line of public service.
Even if government had the will to disable scammers like these, would they ever have the resources? Seems like it’s up to us to at least help make people aware.
Your site showed up 3rd while Googling “star position search”.
Got the same one from “Liz Monteroso”. Smelled like a scam, so I googled it and found your site at #3. Should be at #1. Thanks!
Amusing. I just got the same email…this time it was Robert Sexton. I have more things to worry about than if this guy wants money. Get in line lol.
They actually have a good BBB rating and they have 5 references you can call. I’d be a little more circumspect before making unsubstantiated claims like y’all are doing here. I just spent an hour on the phone with one of their reps. I told them I had my credit card out and would pay them 10K if they’d guarantee me a set amount of hits or traffic. They were honest and said no company can do that. They were also very upfront about how they do their placement.
And no I didn’t buy because I don’t have the money.
How would y’all like it if someone did this to you and it was as unfounded as what y’all are saying here?
A gentleman who just spoke to us for about an hour on the phone was nice enough to inform me of your website. While I suspect that, as most blogs go, they don’t allow opposing views, allow me to actually present some facts.
First off, I own Star Position.
Secondly, we’ve been in business over five years. If we were scamming people somehow, we wouldn’t be here. Unlike most of our competitors (most of whom have to use sockpuppets to bash the competition) we dont have to change our names every 3 or 4 months.
We’ve signed up nearly 3,000 clients over 5 years, and we’ve had maybe 30 or so unhappy ones. Granted, we’d like the unhappy ones to be zero, but that’s a statistical impossibility with any business.
Unlike what a lot of our competition does, we don’t make false claims about what people can expect. We even state on our website that no reputable company will guarantee a set number of clients, clickthroughs or searches. We absolutely refuse to play the ‘pay per click’ game that so many of our competitors do, because as we charge a flat fee for what we do, we don’t have a reason to do that. We even state clearly how we do what we do, and we have five testimonials one can call. Oh, and we give three money back guarantees, too. We guarantee no fake traffic, we guarantee we don’t sell the same search phrase to more than one client, and we also guarantee, barring network maintenance requirements, that a client’s service remains up and running 24 / 7. We drop the ball on any of those, and the client gets a full refund.
We also keep happy clients by not selling 300 different variants of the same search phrase. We’re perfectly content to stay generic.
Now, given all of that, if someone wants to continue to pay for fake traffic from another country doing pay per click they’re welcome to do so.
Oh, and we go through google checkout or paypal to do credit card payments, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of merchant accounts (which process credit cards) knows that once you go above about a half a percent of your customers wanting their money back and you get shut off.
Having said all of this, we will now return you to your regularly scheduled programming
Bob
Jim - The claims are not unfounded, since there have been many complaints about the company. There are been people that have been unsatisfied with their services. Since you didn’t buy the services, you can not verify their claims to bring your site traffic.
I am very willing to post comments from those who have tried the service and are happy with it.
Bob - I certainly welcome opposing views and I have posted your comment in full.
I just encourage everyone to do their research before paying money for any service.
And we don’t try and claim that 100% of our clients are happy, but we do do a better job than most. We even provide server logs for the 35M downloads to any clients who wish to see those as a requirement before signing up.
And, again, while it’s the goal to have 100% of the people being happy, it’s a statistical impossibility for any company. If we don’t deliver on what we promise, the customer gets a refund, no questions asked. But what we DON’T do is claim the I frame appears on 100% of the computers out there, unlike other companies that have went out of business for making false claims. Even when we quote search numbers to a potential client for any search phrase, we also make it clear that any numbers quoted can go up or down depending on what people feel like searching for, and that ANYONE who promises a set amount of searches, clients, clickthroughs is basically taking their money. And, we also advise potential clients to NOT buy misspelled search phrases, or search phrases that are in reverse order. (That one in particular inflames my competitors, because here’s a dirty little secret - most people don’t type in the misspelled crap, or phrases in reverse order.) And, for the record, I have terminated people before for misrepresentation, whether it’s by accident or intent on the rep’s part. Get it wrong, and the rep is gone. Plain and simple.
Now, as for customers being UNHAPPY - we make it clear to a given client what we do (it’s at no less than 10 or 11 places on our site as to what we do and how we do it) and what a customer can expect from our services, and we don’t ask a customer to make payment unless they’ve seen our invoice which actually says what our terms and conditions are, including rules regarding refunds. They actually have to read it, sign it, and fax it to us before we even process payment. It’s up to the individual customer at that point to follow up with potential clients based on the the traffic we provide them. If you’re seeking a company that does search engine positioning which gives a ’satisfaction guaranteed or your money back’ policy, that’s an impossible guarantee for any company to seriously make, because such a guarantee actually relies on the customer actually following through with people who contact them in a timely manner. And, in my five years owning this company, and two years in this business prior to owning this company, I’ve seen enough instances of that, albeit rare, to know you will have the occasional client who expects the impossible. One potential client in particular actually wanted us to guarantee he’d get 50 sales of game voice servers over a given year, and the poor rep in question was nice enough to work with him over a holiday weekend (Easter). Things progressed to the point where he’d called and emailed not less than 60 times over a 2 day period, and that was BEFORE he bought. When it got to the point where he started harassing the rep (a woman), I emailed him and told him we didn’t want his business. Again, if we were interested in the slightest in scamming people somehow, we’d have simply taken his money and said have a nice day. The fact we did not speaks volumes.
Lastly, as for people who complain about being contacted via email, it’s our policy to always remove someone from future marketing endeavors once they actually tell us such. The operative words being ‘once they actually tell us such’
Within 24 hours or so. We go through a third party that indicates to us that people opt in to be contacted, and while people usually do remember such, we do get the occasional one who doesn’t, and we simply remove them if asked to do so, either by the email address or the whole domain.
If anyone has any questions, they’re welcome to call us.
And, for the record, I have no problem with someone voicing opinions about my company, good or bad. But, when you yell out from the rooftops ‘SCAM!’ before knowing the facts, it really doesn’t cast things in an accurate light. I don’t even have a problem with this posting. I would say a more accurate headline would be ‘Star Position: good or bad?’ as opposed to the ’scam alert’ one you have, because people simply look at the search listings usually and don’t read things in depth. And, unfortunately, when you do such a headline, you play right into the hands of the charlatans selling pay per click, who make completely bogus promises that sound good.
And we invite ANYONE who calls us or contacts us to do their homework in depth before buying, whether it’s from us or anyone else.
This post was based on research into what others were saying about the company (mostly negative). Again, do you own research and make your own conclusions. BTW - here is an interesting thread to read through with questions answered by Robert Sexton.
What the so called SEO professionals on that page do is largely bash others because they’re perfectly aware they sell in a lot of cases a bum product. Perfectly understandable, as it’s in their best interest to do so. If you google ‘earn money by clicking on websites’ you’ll see hundreds of thousands of entries about companies that pay people to click on your site. That’s why PPC is a REALLY bad idea in a lot of cases unless you have a full time person verifying your pay per click traffic. What they don’t do is really answer the following questions with facts:
1. If what we do didn’t work then why do we have references you can call - 2 of them lawyers? (I know .. they ask if the references are real, and my answer is this: Call them if you like. Also, we have invoices for our references going back to day one for their search phrases.
2. If what we do didn’t work, why do we have a good BBB rating?
3. If what we do didn’t work, why do we take payment by credit card? Last I checked it’s a pretty straightforward process if someone doesn’t deliver on what they promise to get your money back.
Everything else is complete misdirection on their part, and that’s a fact.
As for what my so called peers say, this is an additional reply .. when they have references you can call, 2 of them being lawyers .. and when they’ve done this for five years, and when they actually have a good BBB rating, I will be delighted to listen to any input they have. Until then they’re welcome to have a pleasant day
Again, no system is perfect, and we don’t claim that our system will work for everyone. It does work better than most.
Attn: Robert Sexton.
The definition of Lying is when your lips are moving and your not ’saying’ anything. In your case you choose this forum to type a short story as to why your product is so good… essentially your fingers were moving - but you still didn’t ’say’ anything.
Here’s some free advice.
* STOP BROADCAST EMAIL SPAMMING 20+ EMAILS A DAY - just plain dumb
* If your product was a 10th of how good you say it is people would be beating down your doors to sign up.
* If you “never change your business name” why am I now getting emails from “SPN Solutions” instead of Star Position from you?!
* Never once do you mention HOW someone down loads your tool bar… spy ware is not a legitimate means of driving targeted traffic.
So when you fix all the above - feel free to re-post on here… for now - go away.
Thanks for your time.
I got the email from “liz” and in fact all 10 email addresses on my website got spammed illegally with the same email. They are using a program to comb websites for email addresses and sending the same message to all addresses. I have forwarded all to the government spam submission website and reported the situation to the BBB website as well.
I received the same e-mail from Bob and it is called SPN Solutions. I was quite disturbed by his reference to child modeling. What is that about?? nefarious or just a “come on.”
He has no website. If you search for SPN Solutions, you get -securepathnetworks.com, which seems to be a legitimate website. Are they aware of this scam? Can anyone find out what the child modeling is about without paying?
And, as his friend, Jim Forbes, would say - What do y’all think about the following:
Hello,
I represent a company called SPN Solutions, a company that does….
…………………………………………………………
I seek one source to send the users on our Network, from the major search engines, for child modeling agencies in various markets.
Please contact me at your earliest convenience. I am in the office
daily from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Pacific time.
Best regards,
Robert Sexton
Dir/Business Development, SPN Solutions
Phone: 800.481.2979, ext 2001
Um, we’ve had people actually think our company name ‘Star Position’ is about astronomy. Hence the test campaign to rebrabd as ‘SPN Solutions’. Our site still says Star Position, our BBB report still says Star Position. So, no, our company name hasn’t changed.
And actually we do mention to anyone who asks how someone downloads the toolbar. NetGuard runs ads on CNN.COM, FOXNEWS.COM and other venues that say ‘NetGuard Surf Smart Surf Safe’ .. people go to NetGuard’s site and download the toolbar if they wish.
It’s the only toolbar that’s been certified as adware, malware and spyware free by the way. Funny, ‘Mark’, how you don’t mention that?
As for email campaigns, we go through a third party that does that on our behalf. If someone wants to be removed, all they have to do is ask. Apart from that .. if you expect some kind of an apology for an email campaign, well, I will make you a deal .. when I start seeing the pay per click scammers (some of which I KNOW post under false names, by the way) apologize for burning people with a bunch of fake clicks, I will give it due consideration. I somehow think that won’t happen. Y’all are too busy buying fake traffic from India and then zapping the unsuspecting with a bunch of fake traffic. Must be a real beeotch to have to spend your days blogging about the competition.
As for our product being good, well, we have six references you can call - one of which just did their fifth order in three months last week.
Lastly, if what we do did not work, we wouldn’t have two merchant accounts. For those who don’t know what a merchant account is, it allows a legitimate business to take payments by credit card, over the phone or over the web. Go over 1% or so in chargebacks (refunds), and you kiss your merchant account goodbye, and you’re put on a blacklist for ever having one again. That’s an absolute, undisputable fact. We have TWO accounts, not just one.
If you have any other uninformed commentary, ‘Mark’, do us all a favor and actually address what I am saying. Counter the absolute facts I just mentioned. Counter them with logic. The sad thing is people like you always try and change the subject when confronted with facts. You must be a real hit on DailyKos or DemUnderground.
Oh, and my apologies for my momentary snarkiness. I just love how some people sit back and lob poo, somewhat reminiscient of a monkey at a zoo, but do not offer up what they do to show their expertise and to show why they do things better. That’s actually a fairly common tactic used by some of my competitors.
Now, ‘Mark’, since I somehow think you won’t bother to actually address any of the facts I mentioned (6 references you can call, a good BBB rating, a money back guarantee which goes on every order we do, taking payments by credit card, et cetera), then allow me to ask you this:
What is the name of your company?
How long have you been in business?
How many references do you have?
Can those references be actually called?
Can you document they are actually your clients?
Do you take payment by credit card?
Do you offer a money back guarantee?
We ace all seven of those.
Now, granted, what we do does have one drawback - it reaches 35 million plus people instead of the whole web. But we also make it clear on our site how we do our placement. Would I like it to be 350 million? A billion? Absolutely. But, that’s a marketing issue for NetGuard to worry about.
Let me know, ‘Markie’, when you have actual answers.
Oh, and the child modeling agencies thing is a keyword / search phrase someone can buy. Google ‘child modeling’. Someone will be first. Trust me on that.
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