Is ‘European Business Guide’ or ‘Europe Business Guide’ a scam? You, the great Googling public will decide.
The comments on this post should help you.
(Updated January 2014 – as there is currently a surge of European Business Guide victims visiting the site at present).
‘European Business Guide’ sends out a pdf offering you ‘free updating’ of your entry in their online directory of European Businesses. The idea is to make you think that entry in their ‘directory’ is free, whereas the small print on the form states that entry actually costs 990 euros a year (min 3 years and automatically extended year on year) while ‘updating’ (once you’ve been entered) is – amusingly – ‘free’.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This is an old but surprisingly successful trick that’s based on a simple principle: people are careless about what they sign. They don’t look at the small print. They want to believe they’re getting something for free.
Once hooked, all Euro Business Guide has to do is to bully you from afar and a certain percentage (about 4% I’m told from a scam insider) of people will pay you out of fear. Fear of being taken to an imaginary court or fear of their bosses finding out the mistake they’ve made.
Simple – but very powerful.
Anyway. Enough from me. Suffice to say there are many versions of this nasty little game out there at the moment – all costing people between €1,000 and €3,5000 each. The technique is identical and only the names change: Expo Guide, Word Business Directory, World Company Directory, World Business Register, European City Guide, Fairguide and many many more.
If you’ve started receiving demands because you filled in the form without reading the small print, then add your experience here by commenting. Start by reading all the comments here (below) from other victims of the European Business Guide. Then take the time to read – and enjoy – the several hundred comments that follow this post about ‘Expo Guide’.
What you’ll see in both cases are the following facts:
• Nobody has ever been taken to a court by these scammers
• The best weapon you have against them is to refuse to communicate with them
• They will still try to draw you back into their grasp; the best policy is to continue to ignore them
Don’t take my word for it, read the words of hundreds of others like you – a tiny fraction of those snared by these scams.
