Complaint Review:
US Data Corporation
I have entered into a contract with U.S. Data Corp. for a email marketing campaign to send (3) three separate 100,000 emails to sent to business owners email addresses. These email addresses were to include only the actual owners of retail stores, restaurant, and Hispanic owned businesses in Arizona, Colorado, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Nevada. The email list and marketing material were provided by U.S. Data Corp. The sales representative who worked with me was Hassan A. Igram, who had left the company shortly after signing me up for the services. I paid $2500.00 in an electronic check authorization from my bank. The campaign went out for the first 100,000 emails on September 8, 2010. The flier designed by US Data Co had a link embedded in the advertisement for the owners to go to my website. My website has a tracking tool that lets me know by what state the traffic to my site is coming from and was only used for this campaign. Initially, the first traffic was coming from Foregin locations up to 75 hits on my website. The next two days traffic was mostly from California. The flier produced by US Data and my website both have a Toll Free number for owners to call for more information about the offer and my services. I immediately called US Data during the first day of the campaign to address my concerns about the Non US based activity on my site and status on the campaign to make sure all the emails were sent. It was then that I found out the Hassan left the company. I then began to feel that something wrong and when I asked about the reason why Hassan was gone the person I spoke to Regina Lage who stated he left under unfavorable terms, because he was known for
Over promised services. I knew then that I was taken advantage of and my hard earned money was at stake. Immediately I emailed and voiced my concerns with Regina Lage and her supervisor Angi Bradley. I corresponded with both of them for the next several days via email and phone. They keep telling me to give it some time for people to respond and maybe the next two email campaigns will be better. I told them that I did not want to continue with this service and lose any more money. I did ask them to send me something that proved to me that they did indeed sent out all of the emails and to even give me just 50 or 100 of the business owner's email and/or phone numbers to verify if they were the owners of these businesses US Data said they sent to. Both Regina and her boss declined to give me these things to prove that their list was creditable. They just kept insisting that it was something wrong with my website or the offer. I offered up to a $500 Visa gift card for businesses to work with my company. My company offers credit card processing. The reason why I know that email marketing was a good marketing tool is, because I had my teenage son make the same type flier and searched business owners email addresses (just under 900 of them) and he mailed each of them out from my personal email account and we received hits on my site and many phone calls and those businesses sign up with my services. If I received that kind of response from just under 1000 names what greater would a response of 100,000 be? At least some activity, but I didn't get a single call from it. After researching other complaints about US Data Corp they seemed to have the same problems.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Robert
Irvine,California,
U.S.A.
SPAM..
#2Consumer Comment
Thu, November 18, 2010
Your description of your e-mail "campaign" described about 1/2 of the scams through e-mail. Credit Card Processing and offers of high value($500) Gift cards are generally tell-tale signs of scams. Hopefully yours is not, but just having those in your e-mail probably set off several "red-flags".
If you get 1 or 2 hits out of 100,000 of these SPAM e-mail campains you are lucky, if you get 1 or 2 calls out of 1,000,000 you are very lucky. Why? Because just about every major ISP has several tools that automatically flter out and block e-mails they determine to be SPAM. Then even if it gets through the ISP's filters, just about every mail client has SPAM filters that would block out the rest.
Now, if your son had better luck perhaps you should pay him the $2,500. But before you do you need to read your ISP's Terms of Service(ToS). You may be surprised to find out that if you send even ONE unsolicted e-mail your account could be subject to termination. So all it takes is 1 of those 900 people to complain to your ISP and you may no longer have an Internet Connection. If no one complained, consider yourself very lucky.
The reason that it probably went though your "personal" e-mail is because you "passed" the most basic of filters, the "Blacklist test". This is one of many real-time databases that ISP's and mail providers can check. If an e-mail comes from an IP address that is on one of these lists they automatically reject it, SPAM or not. So if you continue to SPAM people you can expect that you may end up on one of these lists. Then you may only not be able to send these SPAM's but any e-mail from your personal account. That is of course if your ISP doesn't cut you off first.