'I Was Scammed in a List Deal,' Claims Marketer

A marketer has come forward claiming to have been ripped off in a business-to-business e-mail list deal with Coral Springs, FL-based data vendor Target Point Media.

According to Barry Sokol, vice president of Farmington Hills, MI-based PL Marketing, the promotional products marketing firm in February paid Target Point $2,500 for a 50,000-record list of marketing executives and their contact information. The list was intended for an e-mail campaign.

Target Point’s media kit claims the company has a “100% permission based database of more than 95 million U.S. and 25 million international records.” The kit also claims Target Point is “the only company to append double confirmed opt ins.”

Before Sokol paid for his list, he said, Target Point supplied him with a sample set of 19 records. The sample file—which he forwarded to this newsletter—contained, for each record, executive names and titles, company names, physical postal addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, SIC codes, industry types, revenue, and numbers of employees.

But according to Sokol, when he bought the full list of 50,000 records, the records in the list he received were nothing like the sample file he had viewed earlier.

He said he could tell immediately it was garbage and that he refused to mail it.

“I said: ‘Come on guys, this is a joke,’” Sokol said. “And then they said: ‘Oh, oh, we didn’t do this or we didn’t do that,’ and then they sent me another list, but all they did was take out the dupes [duplicate addresses]. It was still the same crap.

“They sent the same list to me four times,” Sokol said.

The file he said he received from Target Point Media—a copy of which he also supplied to Magilla Marketing—contained no executive names, titles, phone numbers, fax numbers, SIC codes, industry types, revenue or numbers of employees for any of the records.

The file that Sokol supplied this newsletter contained only company names, street addresses, e-mail addresses and URLs.

What is more, a significant number of the e-mail addresses didn’t look to be those of individuals.

For example, 788 of the addresses contained some combination or abbreviation of the words “customer service,” or “customer care.”

Also, 193 of the addresses were “accounting@,” 455 of the addresses were “admin@,” 84 of the addresses were “administration@” or “administrator@,” 223 of the addresses were “careers@,” 108 of the addresses were “comment@” or “comments@,” 297 of the addresses were “contact@,” 160 of the addresses were “service@,” 1,448 of the addresses were “sales@,” and a whopping 7,684 addresses were “info@.”

“I wanted marketing people and I kept seeing info@ and accounting@,” Sokol said. “So I said: ‘Those aren’t marketing people,’ and they said: ‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’ Out of 50,000 names there may have been a handful that were marketers.”

Also, the list contained the same e-mail address, c21provacy@realogy.co, for 20 different records.

The list also contained the address elections@co.napa.ca.us for 11 records.

Http://www.co.napa.ca.us/ is Napa County’s government Web site. The e-mail address above is the generic contact address for its elections division.

Even worse, two of the addresses on the list were spamtrap@colegroup.com and spamtrap@intelitouch.com, addresses likely set up to catch people harvesting addresses off the Internet.

Also, the Web site addresses given in the final list did not match the companies in the records they were supplied with.

For example, Pittsburg, CA-based Data Shaping Solutions’ supposed Web address was BestNorthCarolinaValue.com. San Diego, CA-based Bocks Awards’ supposed Web address was also BestNorthCarolinaValue.com, according to the list Sokol supplied this newsletter.

The Chelsea Hotel in Miami Beach, FL, also has the Web address BestNorthCarolinaValue.com, according to the list Sokol said he bought from Target Point Media.

Other records had similar seemingly non-individual-corporation Web addresses, such as BestCaliforniaValue.com, BestNorthDakotaValue.com, and BestMontanaValue.com.

According to Sokol, executives at Target Point have refused to make good on the contract or refund his money. He said he has not had any contact with Target Point since February. He added that he has tried to get the charge for the Target Point list taken off his VISA card, but the VISA representative refused.

“He refused to go over it with me,” said Sokol. “He said: ‘We’re not in the list business,’ and that my information was incomplete. I am appalled and shocked that VISA is not protecting me on this.”

The VISA representative Sokol dealt with confirmed Sokol’s complaint to Magilla Marketing, but declined comment for this story.

When asked if he was going to take legal action against Target Point, Sokol said probably not. “It’s $2,500. They’re in Florida. I’m in Michigan,” he said.

When contacted by this newsletter by telephone on June 19, Target Point’s chief executive Tom Rogers said such a garbage list could not possibly have come from his firm and that he’d look into Sokol’s complaint.

After 10 days, I e-mailed Rogers for an update. He requested a copy of the file. I forwarded the file Sokol had supplied.

As of yesterday, I had not received a response from Rogers to e-mails I sent him July 9, July 10 and yesterday morning.

This morning, however, an e-mail arrived from Rogers with the subject line “a refund is being issued.”

However, he did not respond to two follow-up e-mails, one asking when the refund would be issued and another asking how such a low-quality file had been sold in the first place.

A phone message left for Rogers in Target Point’s general company voice mail box yesterday was not returned. Rogers also did not immediately respond to a message left with his receptionist earlier today.

Meanwhile, the Southeast, FL Better Business Bureau has given Target Point Media a rating of “F,” which, according to copy on its Web site means: “We strongly question the company’s reliability for reasons such as that they have failed to respond to complaints, their advertising is grossly misleading, they are not in compliance with the law’s licensing or registration requirements, their complaints contain especially serious allegations, or the company’s industry is known for its fraudulent business practices.”

Editor’s note: If Rogers makes good on his promised refund, it will be reported here.