Digital Marketing Scam in India - Why Indians Don't Trust Digital Marketers
Here is another article of a scam that was busted yesterday Feb 3, 2017. The Special Task Force said that the accused duped people on pretext of providing "digital marketing" solutions and had collected money from as many as 700,000 people under this ponzi scheme.
As I understand, the scammers used opened a site called socialtrade.biz where they accepted investors into a ponzi scheme to pay subscription fee between Rs. 5,750 ($85) to Rs. 57,500 ($855) to increase online hits of companies looking to increase online hit count on digital platforms. Investors then received URLs on their cell phones which they had to open, hit "Like". They were told that they would be paid Rs 5 ($0.07) per like. The URLs were sent from a fake server, and the URLs terminated on the same server.
While this is one of the biggest scam in recent history of digital marketing in India, it is not alone. Every few months such scams appear in the news, driving away people from marketing emails, online purchasing, and even registering for valid online services (e.g. bill payment, bank account). This includes criminal activities like phishing, DDoS atacks, viruses, malware, etc.
People in India, who still purchase most of their stuff from physical stores, have lot of reasons to not trust online digital marketing. For a supposedly tech-savvy country, very low percentage of retail commerce sales happens online. Even though the online sales grows, it is not expected to grow in leaps and bounds. Even when new secured payment services (NEFT and RTGS) were developed, people are reluctant using their credit card and debit card for online purchasing.
Report Retail ECommerce Sales in India Growth 2014-2018
Here is another article of a scam that was busted yesterday Feb 3, 2017. The Special Task Force said that the accused duped people on pretext of providing "digital marketing" solutions and had collected money from as many as 700,000 people under this ponzi scheme.
As I understand, the scammers used opened a site called socialtrade.biz where they accepted investors into a ponzi scheme to pay subscription fee between Rs. 5,750 ($85) to Rs. 57,500 ($855) to increase online hits of companies looking to increase online hit count on digital platforms. Investors then received URLs on their cell phones which they had to open, hit "Like". They were told that they would be paid Rs 5 ($0.07) per like. The URLs were sent from a fake server, and the URLs terminated on the same server.
While this is one of the biggest scam in recent history of digital marketing in India, it is not alone. Every few months such scams appear in the news, driving away people from marketing emails, online purchasing, and even registering for valid online services (e.g. bill payment, bank account). This includes criminal activities like phishing, DDoS atacks, viruses, malware, etc.
People in India, who still purchase most of their stuff from physical stores, have lot of reasons to not trust online digital marketing. For a supposedly tech-savvy country, very low percentage of retail commerce sales happens online. Even though the online sales grows, it is not expected to grow in leaps and bounds. Even when new secured payment services (NEFT and RTGS) were developed, people are reluctant using their credit card and debit card for online purchasing.
Report Retail ECommerce Sales in India Growth 2014-2018
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