Tom Petty will be at my party!

[kenny]

I am still working on some video to get online, I will probably get it done this weekend. Free time has been null with odd hours at work... so I guess all I can do now is bitch at Kristen. Just admit it Kristen, your company harvested my fucking e-mail... that's all I want. Oh and P.S. You are pretty.

******
Hi~

I work for an advertising company (Gr-Ads.com) and I'm interested in
advertising on your site. Our campaign is a bit different than most
advertising companies in that we only place small paragraphs of text on
selected pages (5-25 pages) of your site to reference other companies. There
wouldn't be any banners or graphics, just a few sentences with links to the
sites. My budget is quite limited ($10 - $50/page one time fee) but we can
always negotiate. I can send payments threw paypal or by check.

Thanks for your time =]

Kristen Romero
Kristen@Gr-Ads.com

******
From: kenny on behalf of Kenny
Sent: Thu 1/17/2008 11:42 AM
To: Kristen Romero
Subject: Re: Interested in advertising on hektik.org

Please remove us from your mailing/spam list.

Thank you.

******
Hi Kenny,

You're not on any list.
I simply emailed you in regards to advertising on your site.
nothing is automated...
My apologies for any disturbances I may have caused you and I promise it
won't happen again...

Kristen

******
From: kenny on behalf of Kenny
Sent: Thu 1/17/2008 12:05 PM
To: Kristen Romero
Subject: Re: Interested in advertising on hektik.org

Where did your organization obtain our e-mail? It wasn't from our site's
contact page. The only place we use the nospam e-mail is in public records,
so that we can track spammers and people using automated tools to gather
e-mail addresses.

******
From: Kristen Romero [mailto:Kristen@gr-ads.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 10:11 AM
To: Kenny
Subject: RE: Interested in advertising on hektik.org

This email address is the contact information for the registrar of your domain...

I wanted to see if we could do business...
This has nothing to do with spam in your email.

Anyway..

Have a nice day =]

Kristen

[kenny]

****

...Thanks Larry.

[Kreep]

"I can send payments threw paypal or by check"... threw? and their website looks like shit, and is designed by a retired retard. Most of the chicks there are bangable though...

and OMG, that image rulz.

[Teep]

Originally Posted by Kreep

"I can send payments threw paypal or by check"... threw?

Yes, and this girl went to university.

Originally Posted by Kreep

Most of the chicks there are bangable though...

Let me see, their website contains next to no information. In fact, the largest part is taken in by the employee profiles. And somehow, of the 12 employees, 8 are young females that are all reasonably pretty, even though the majority of their work apparently involves contacting people threw email. My guess is that this entire website, this so-called company, is a front and they ripped the images of the girls from random contact ads on 2nd rate porn sites.

[Kreep]

True enough Teep.

Hey kenny... Linda sent me an IM... she thinks you need to be a model for this company... http://www.uglyny.com/... because you're "a good looking guy with a twist"... hehe...

[kenny]

Thanks for wording that in an attempt to not hurt my fragile feelings... but I only have one reply to that... I AM GOING TO BE AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL!

[Teep]

aha! so that is the new secret project you're working on!

[kenny]

It's def. one of my secret projects. I have a photographer lined up... - really.

[gardino]

Hi kenny,


I see your site, and there is a thread about gr-ads.com. I also
received their email and proceed with their business. They have sent
me the money (150 US$) trough paypal for placing some link on my post.
It was way to easy.

Since I was new on this blog and website thing, in your opinion is
there any chance their business was a lie or a scam or something like
that? I need your advice right away, because I already received their
money in my account. And if there any chance that I'm going to loose a
bigger money than what they are sending, than I prefer to close my
paypal acount.

What do you think? thanx..

Rgds

[kenny]

Originally Posted by gardino

Hi kenny,

I see your site, and there is a thread about gr-ads.com. I also
received their email and proceed with their business. They have sent
me the money (150 US$) trough paypal for placing some link on my post.
It was way to easy.

Since I was new on this blog and website thing, in your opinion is
there any chance their business was a lie or a scam or something like
that? I need your advice right away, because I already received their
money in my account. And if there any chance that I'm going to loose a
bigger money than what they are sending, than I prefer to close my
paypal acount.

What do you think? thanx..

Rgds

Well I don't know if gr-ads.com is a scam for sure but I would watch you’re PayPal account and see if there are any shady transactions. I looked around on Google as I am sure you did too since we seem to be the number one hit for their website name. And nothing really turned up there, we did but not even their own site. So I looked at archive.org which shows you previous versions of sites and it had nothing. Are you familiar with robots.txt? If not it is a text file which a website owner can place on their site, you can tell search engines to ignore and to not categorized certain directories. Well if you go to this websites robot.txt it looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

So it is basically telling everyone to go away, so this makes one wonder. If you have a business or even a website for that matter, do you really want to keep your presence on the web secret? So that to me is red flag #1.

# - Under their advertising plans it states "October News - GrassRoots Advertising has filled our schedule until the middle of 2008 so we can not take additional clients. Thank you." Hmm, what business turns down clients? One with a bunch of fake employee's so they are just booked out since its only three people. Either that or they are making so much money they don't have to work that much nor take on new clientele.

#3 - The profiles on this website are odd. They are almost like myspace profiles and they have a lot of pretty women working for them. So I would almost question if these are just made up profiles.

#4 - They are spammers. They go through registrar information for their contacts. I know this because every e-mail address that we use around here, aside from personal communication is special so that we can track the people that use them and how they got them. When I confronted them about this they lied.

#5 - Their grammar and bad spelling. They all graduated from college (supposedly) well didn't they take an English class, and even if not the first thing you learn about working in a business environment is spell check. You don't want to come across as a dolt.

So there are a lot of questions here. Our first target in research will be Robert Davidson the CEO. I will make a request for his Harvard transcripts. This can only be done via mail or in person so it will take some time. Let's start there and see just how full of shit this company is. Until then you are on your own, we can only do so much so fast. If you do keep your PayPal account, let us know how things turn out. Maybe they aren't scammers, maybe they are just liars trying to get their foot in the door.

[kenny]

I was discussing this with one of our team. And just at a quick glance this is what Muti had to say:

yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a scam the EXIF info of the images points to those images being stock images for their employee profiles

all their "employee profile" images were taken w/ different cameras
Orientation of image: 1
File change date and time: 2005:10:30 04:34:18
Image description: A sideways glancing smile

heh, yeah, they're all stock photos, that gardino guy is from indonesia

[gardino]

Sorry to bother you again on this guys...so after what you are explain to me...what should I do next?
and by the way, they sent the money using name: Find Your Dreams, Inc.