www.reco-mend.co.uk SCAM???

harrymonkfish · Mar 6, 2010

Hi All,

Received an sms text last night from reco-mend.co.uk offering unlimited work leads for £16 a month or your monthly fee back.

Had a look at the site today. They want £29.99 annual fee plus £16 +vat to sign up.

Had a look at the HTML for the site: no keywords or site description. That means that any prospective customers looking for a tradesman could not find this site through a search engine.

Either the website builder is not very good at his job or this is a SCAM.

I have sent an email to the site questioning this and reported it to trading standards.

Spread the word. This site is targeting all tradesmen. And it is hosted on a virtual sever.

Thanks

valantino-rossi · Mar 6, 2010

Thank you for your post. Welcome to mend, (Registered company registration 7061821) is a new service that genuinely returns the £16 monthly fee if no leads are found in any month. All Terms and Conditions are clearly displayed on the recomend.co.uk website as follows: Contractors are asked to pay £29.99 (non returnable) to sign up, and charged £16 per month. Should no leads be found in that month, then the full £16 is returned. Payments are made via Paypal and customers are protected by their policy, and direct debits are through I-direct debit which is approved by the BACS bureau. To attract customers reco-mend do not use the old method of HTML word embedding, but have signed up to google ad words - a very effective way of getting our site listed in a search engine. With regards to virtual hosting, we have been assured by our award winning web builders this is the most common option by companies these days.

We believe this is good value for money compared to the cost of some other advertising vehicles. We are sorry you feel this is a scam, but we have lots of new customers who are happy. We must stress we have met all our terms and conditions with all our contractors and have not received one complaint about our service. Perhaps you could send an email asap to [email protected] with your contact details where your concerns can be addressed by a member of the team.

Thank you for highlighting the issues of such scams, this exactly why we set up in the first place! We offer a genuine service, fulfil our terms and conditions - minimising the financial risk of all year round advertising with no return.

harrymonkfish · Mar 6, 2010

Great reply. It still doesn't explain why this site is not listed on any search engine. Google, Yahoo, Bing. How are your customers supposed to find this 'service'?

Mark_Burgess · Mar 6, 2010

I'd rather be with check a trade, at least that way customer gets to look at a list of "electricians" take a pick and call someone then, rather than wait for a call or email and also gets to see feedback from other customers.

valantino-rossi · Mar 7, 2010

We are currently looking into why the phrase "Reco-mend" does not display in search engines, as you rightly say, it should. This should be rectified in the next few days. Entering " reco-mend.co.uk" in google does bring our service top of the list. We have run a report on yesterdays website traffic and are happy that this problem did not affect the flow of work requests onto our site - our stats show that most people found our site by entering a more generic phrase such as "electrician in Croydon" for example. Hopefully as we become more established more people will become familiar with the name reco-mend and use it more in search engines. Thank you again for highlighting this problem.