Excessive Credit Card Interest Charges

Excessive credit card interest charges are nothing new, but being with us for a long time does not make them okay.

Let's consider the average credit card APR of 24%. How does this compare with other investments for Capital? The average return on investment for property in London is about 6%. That's what landlords are making out of their tenants. So the credit card companies are making four times that.

This also explains why so many banks are willing to pay over the odds to buy a piece of the credit card action. I had two credit card accounts with the Bank of Scotland, one through the Federation of Small Businesses and the other through FHM (a magazine for young gentlemen); then they were bought out by American bank MBNA, and suddenly I was receiving strange looking statements and of course all the rules had changed. I had no control over this.

Make no mistake: the legislation is so lax that the banks have found a way to assume their old colours of userers and shysters, simply by setting up credit card divisions. Watch this space to see how you can reduce your interest to 0%. People never put up with tyranny for long.

Incidentally, have a look at credit card transfers for a great resource to remind you when to transfer your balances to another card (UK version). The US (international) version of the credit card balance transfer alert service is here.

Adverts on the BBC

I thought the BBC was a public service broadcaster. By definition, public service broadcasters do not carry advertising. The BBC is funded by the licence fee. I pay over £100 a year now (for this very good service) but I do not want the quality of this service diluted by adverts for ... the BBC.

By all means tell us what gems are forthcoming. Give us the nuggets of information that we need. But don't pad the spaces between programmes with endless previews that we have all seen each a dozen times before.

Behaviour like that makes people click their remotes or go out and make cups of tea.

Silent Phone Calls

Sales calls are annoying at the best of times, but technology has developed to make them even more irritating.

First there was "predictive dialling" or "random digit dialling" (RDD), which has a computer automatically dial numbers into a call system. This eliminates the safety of having your telephone number not listed, as they'll get you anyway. My time in the market research industry gave me a comprehensive experience of this - as head of MORI's telephone research centre and with 350 people to look after, I had to be fairly clued up - but it was never intended for sales or telemarketing (market research interviewers are allowed access where telesales people aren't, theoretically).

The next stage was to have the numbers dialled irresepective of whether there was anyone available to actually make the call. The result was that the phone would ring, you'd pick it up, and there would be nobody there. Terrifying for the elderly over a period of time.

In my view the executives of businesses that do this should have their own phone numbers called at all times of the day and night, and subject to random silences and odd sounds and numbers. This should happen to them at least a dozen times each 24 hour cycle, and over a period of at least three months.

Invoices from Nominet UK

Nominet UK is the Registry for all domain names ending in .uk. As a webmaster I register my domains with 123-Reg. It is my registration agent of choice. If, for whatever reason, a project of mine does not come up to expectations (i.e. fails) I will no longer need that particular domain name, so I allow it to run out.

But Nominet saves the day! It sends me an invoice telling me that I can restore my domain at a cost of £80 plus VAT. How splendid of them! But I wonder what they are thinking of. For about a tenth of that I can resume registration with 123-Reg.

I know! Nominet thinks that I want to stop registering my unwanted domain with 123-Reg, and instead pay ten times more to register with Nominet! What flawless logic they have!

They always send me an email asking me if I want to become enhanced of their service and I always send a polite note back.

Phishing Scams

Most people who have an online account or email account of some sort know about phishing scams. These are where idiots send out millions of unsolicited emails pretending to be someone else (usually a bank or online trading company) and try to solicit you to log into a bogus site and render your account details.

The existence of such scams has led to more people distrusting online trading, where no distrust should really exist. Common sense should prevail, but fear erodes logic. These scams will continue until something is done internationally to close the scams down. The people responsible for these phishing projects are alienating the ordinary consumer from using the Internet to shop and trade; and those lofty institutions who stand to lose most from the phishing scams are not doing much about it - or so it seems.

Paypal is taking a robust stance, at least. There are lots of emails doing the rounds at the moment from people masquerading as Paypal (they do it very badly, by the way, so it's quite easy to tell the difference), but Paypal's policy is quite firm: they will not send you an email asking for your account details or password, nor should you divulge this to anyone who pretends to be Paypal. Ebay is also taking a proactive stance against phishing along similar lines.

But other financial institutions are very slow to react. This is to the jeopardy of themselves and the trading community as a whole, worldwide.

As consumers all we want is honesty. It's in the interest of anyone who has a credit card, a Paypal account or an Internet connection to ensure that scum like the phisherfolk are put behind bars. Governments take note.

Excess Bandwidth Charges

Excess bandwidth charges. Don't you just hate it when your ISP does that? It charges what appears a reasonable fee for hosting your website but then suddenly it slams you with a bill you didn't expect because the bandwidth usage has exceeded the agreed amount. Worse still, it turns out that a lot of rogue bandwidth is caused by bots or search engine spiders, or "scraper software" that steals your website content, while leaving you to foot the bill.

The worst case of bandwidth bandity I've seen is at http://www.keytlaw.com/FTC/Actions/ftc010403.htm and that's an extreme case. But there are other examples closer to home.

Paid Web Site Traffic

Paid web site traffic is sometimes a last resort for Internet marketers. Having failed at generating traffic with proper on-page optimization and other online and offline procedures they are lured to the adverts that promise 10,000 visitors for £30 or $50 or whatever, only to look at their visitor stats to find that either there are no visitors at all or the "visitors" are automated bot clicks.

It's quite esy to tell the difference between real human visitors to your site and bot clicks. The real humans will behave in certain ways which are diverse. They may visit different pages and spend different amounts of time on each page. Real people click on the more prominent links and not click on the less prominent links. Real people will sign up for special offers and subscribe to email lists. If you have Google Adsense ads on your sites real visitors will click on those ads which will in turn show up on your Google stats, clicking on those ads at a set percentage (the CTR) as measured over time. This is what real people will do.

Bot clicks only show up as bot clicks with no other activity whatsoever. While the paid website traffic company just pockets your money.

This is the importance of having detailed logfiles. You can tell if your visitors are real people or bot clicks.

So if you want to check out a paid website traffic service, make sure to direct that traffic to a specific web page so that you can observe the behaviour of your paid visitors. For example, instead of sending traffic to www.yoursite.com/homepage send them to www.yoursite.com/specialpage . Then compare the behaviour of "visitors" to that page to the behaviour of visitors to your site overall. The difference becomes incredibly easy to spot.

If you see NO behaviour ... then they are bots.

Ask the paid web site traffic company for a refund. If they don't pay then sue. And tell your friends.

The Equalizer

Welcome to the first post of the Equalizer. Also known as Gordon's Rant, it has but one purpose - to put the world to rights.

Anything that bugs you, feel free to post it here. My particular interests at the moment are spam emails (especially phishing), "silent phone calls" using predictive dialling software, automated telephone "helpdesk" menus, expensive credit cards, advertising on the BBC, ripoff ISPs and scams of all sorts. All right, I'm a grumpy old man.

The Rules of The Equalizer:
Matters will be exposed to the world in generic terms only, with sufficient detail to describe the injustice, absurdity or pointlessness of something, but not enough to identify who the culprit is (we know there's two sides to every story, right?).
Then we contact the culprit and alert them that they've been rumbled. We give them sufficient time to clean up their act, and only when they don't do we name and shame.

Idiots of the world, you have been warned!

That said, now let's begin, and put the world to rights....