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Email received on 17 September, 2021 from Andy Redman, ABL Business Ltd. The individual or company is not known to me, I have never had any dealings with them, have never communicated with them or connected with them on Social Media.
The email says:
Michael ,
Please forgive my random out of the blue email. I am Andy Redman from ABL Business Finance based over in our Cleckheaton office in West Yorkshire.
I would like to get my contact details and a brief understanding of what we do here over to your board of Directors there at Taiko West. We are then on hand if and when you/they might need our services.
At ABL we have numerous finance products to support businesses who need to access finance for whatever reason. We want to offer you our services in the following areas.
1) Finance for Assets. (Vehicles, Machinery, Equipment, Hard assets etc)
2) Working Capital (Capital release, Cashflow, Unsecured Business loans)
3) HMRC Debt (VAT, Corporation Tax, Self Assessment)
Me making some bold claims regarding us being better than everyone else out there would be beyond the reality of this industry, (I know some great and dependable people in other brokers) and a little predictable in a cold introduction email. I prefer to just say we are a dependable long-standing Finance broker that you can rely on, and who will really try and get your business a finance solution that makes good commercial sense within this competitive marketplace. If you are putting your feelers out to see what is currently available, let me help you with that process.
Please don't hesitate to call or email me and I will come back to you to discuss any requirements you may be considering. (T. 0330 122 0620)
Kind Regards
Firstly the email he used to send to me isn't even my own company email. I do some freelancing for a drumming music teacher and in order to formalise communication with outside organisations I was given a company email address by the teacher. I hardly use this email and it's not in the public domain on many websites, although recently I did add this email to a Birmingham website.
Upon further investigation, I realised this was indeed a legitimate organisation and Andy Redman is real, I discovered their website and saw his name on LinkedIn too. Then I looked into the links at the bottom of the email, in particular the privacy statement. I then realised the privacy statement layout and information was exactly the same as two previous unsolicited emails I had received the previous day by Ideal Lighting and Print by Splash.
The privacy statement was identical, with the exception of the email address, which was specific to the company, in the case of ABL it is datacontroller@abl-businessuk.co.uk.
This was another red flag to me and I felt something very suspicious was going on, so I decided to expose the email from ABL on LinkedIn and tag Andy. You can see the post below.
Andy then messaged me via LinkedIn.
I asked him whether he would be prepared to share with me the details of the marketing company, which he promptly did. The company Media Solutions, actually redirects to Pay Per Lead, same organisation, same suspicious practices.
Business card image of Adam Ward-Best | LinkedIn profile says: Managing Director at Emedia Pay-Per-Lead
It is very clear that the company Pay-Per-Lead carried out the email campaign on behalf of Andy and his company and provided Andy with a very spurious privacy statement, which in my view is not legitimate and tries to pretend that they are legitimately collecting email address in order to provide information to companies. Below is the offending clause in their privacy statement. Download PDF with the full privacy statement
"We have researched and collected your ‘Corporate Subscriber’ data for marketing purposes. We are trying to promote our goods and services to your business or place of work. Some of your data may have been collected directly from you or a colleague, but is more likely from a publicly available resource like the internet. Having identified your business as one we want to engage with and offer our products and services to we may have used a number of resources to collect ‘employee contact details’ (Referred to as ‘Corporate Subscribers’), i.e. while researching our target audience, we may have collected your first and last names from one resource and another piece of data from another resource. We never collect and store any information which is not necessary for its intended use. While acquiring this data we are looking for the appropriate job roles/functions within organisations we wish to communicate and engage with and whose responsibility it might be to procure our products and services."
Andy, may have been unaware of the implications of the way this company, pay-per-lead, generates leads for organisations, but in my view as a company registered with the FCA, he should have been far more diligent in researching the activities of this organisation.
I have now reported this whole story to the Information Commissioner's Office and also to the Financial Conduct Authority. It is unacceptable for companies to be collecting email addresses from public sources and then pretend that this was a legitimate way of collecting and spamming people.
This article and others I am writing are part of a project that is ongoing to expose spammers on the internet, whatever means or methods they may be using.
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