UPDATE:
I like to try and be fair and balanced in my reporting, so I thought I should add the comments received from the people responsible for this product. So far, I have seen nothing that makes me think differently about the business. If a business is legit, why doesn’t it behave like one?
“Michael Smith” writes in a comment below:
The Customer Service Summit provides good value to its members and has a strong retention rate from year to year. Please call me directly if any questions about the Customer Service Summit, my contact information follows below. If there are any questions about the value, you may also visit our site and request a link to a past meeting recording so you can listen in and judge for yourself if the ideas discussed by some of the top executives in business are good ones. Also, thank you for some of the recommendations above (we will be changing the signup pages to https secured, etc) and we appreciate the feedback.
I strongly urge you to read through the comments and decide for yourself on this one. Here’s one from me, that summarizes my suspicions and here is a link to a forum that discusses the topic as well. “As legit as Quixstar” was a phrase that came up as well.
UPDATE: The word appears to be getting out, or “Chris” is getting more aggressive in his marketing. Here are the stats on this issue running from the original post until January 16, 2007.
So, this guy “Chris” emails me at work to invite me to join in on this great opportunity on behalf of a “board”. The site looks impressive. The names I could be hobnobbing include some of the top executives in some of the biggest companies around.
But I’m no dummy. I know about phishing schemes.
So, I check their information. Oddly, besides their site, I can’t find any information about these guys. They claim to be subsidiary of BizSummits which also looks pretty interesting. See, there are these scholarships offered to advanced high school students.
But the bells are still ringing. I can’t find who owns this service. So, I try the Ask-a service. I ask point-blank about the “board” that invited me to join this service. What’s the governance situation here? The response? Sorry, I don’t have the answer for you. You better talk to “Chris” about that.
An employee of a company does not know who the CEO is? Or at least a single “board” member? What gives?
Then I look into some of the impressive names listed as “members.” I find out that at least one is a senior finance VP. A Finance VP at a customer service summit? Not to deride finance people, but my experience is that they usually leave the customer service stuff to flaky guys like me. Besides they are too busy keeping our budgets in check.
Still, there _is_ an allure. Here’s how they claim to come to the decision that I belong in their elite group:
“While we cannot disclose individual nominations for privacy reasons, it is always one of two sources. Either a member directly nominated you, or we specifically wanted your company involved and researched the best executive.”
Of course I think I am the best executive. Of course I want the opportunity to mine the brains of the worlds most successful executives.
On the other hand, there’s always email. So, I email one of the listed executives. The response? The person has asked to have his name removed from the list because he has no affiliation with this group.
There is it. I hope someone does a Google search on these guys and sees this blog entry. While I can’t say for sure what these guys are up to — I do know 1) they do not want to tell you who owns the company, 2) they lied at least on one occassion about who is currently a member of the site and 3) they are asking for credit card information to charge you 300+ USD.
If you join this group, the best-case scenario is that you join a bunch of unprofessional hacks. At worst, these guys could be trying to steal your identification. Caveat Emptor dudes. It’s a nasty world out there.
-
1
Pingback on Sep 25th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
[...] The original blog post here. [...]
-
2
Pingback on Mar 6th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[...] lack of information on the website about who and what these folks are about, a trend similar to the Customer Service Summits email I received before. Beware of this. It is likely a [...]
Leave a Comment
-
Recent Comments
September 6, 2006 at 2:30 pm
got the initial invite (which i just tossed as spam), and then a personal followup note from ‘chris’. did sound very strange, so googled. thanks for this blog - otherwise i would be wondering too
October 4, 2006 at 12:46 pm
I’ve previously received 2 invitations. Both of them ended with a form that says “This message was send to _____ 0f _____ at _____. please disregard if you are not the intended recipient.” And yes, it said ’send’ not ’sent’. This made be suspicious.
Today I received a third that says, “Did you get the email I sent you last? Just in case it didn’t get to you I’ve copied it below for your review. If you get a chance please let me know of your interest.”
Spent a bunch of time googling and finally found this site. Thanks for confirming for me that this is junk.
October 4, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Yeah. I got a followup reply to which I responded “I am waiting for you to show me some governance information such as the names of the board that approved my invitation.”
They responded with another followup message. Ha!
Either their customer service sucks or they are a rip off.
October 5, 2006 at 1:08 pm
I got the same invitations and follow-up, except they were for the CIO Summit. Thanks for the warning.
February 19, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I’ve been getting these from “Chris” for a while, I think I even got a phone call. I could never figure out what they were up to. so I’m glad I finally googled my way onto your blog. Thanks for the heads up.
July 3, 2007 at 12:58 pm
I know I’m very late with this comment, but thank you for making this public. I have been receiving this guys emails for some time and was always wary of them.
Another Scam Foiled!!!
November 15, 2007 at 1:01 pm
The scam continues. Apparently this is fairly well organized, at least in an attempt to charge the $300. I too was “invited”:
“On behalf of our board, I wanted to personally invite you into The Customer Service Summit because of your key role and experience.”
Really… wow, I’m getting goose bumps. OH, one small thing, I am a CTO. I do not deal directly with our constituents. My drive is technology planning for our organizations. Hmm. Nice try, wrong hit. But then, in mass scams, you’ll get that from time to time…
November 20, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Received an invitation to CIO Summit from Chris Jameson. One of the odd things is that the url turns into an IP address (64.41.119.180) when you go to the site. He’s asking $1000.00 for the CIO Summit. There are a number of Summit sites with the exact same layout.
November 20, 2007 at 6:12 pm
Got mail from Chris too, addressed to an email of mine from a company I was CTO at 3.5 years ago. These guys are clearly not doing their homework. Googled and here I am. Thanks.
November 21, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to post. For a brief moment I was sucked in by being one of the “very best executives and visionaries in customer service management”. However,the anonymous nomination raised flags for me right away. Gotta love Google.
November 29, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Thanks guys. I just got my invitation from “Chris”, and decided to Google The Customer Service Summit before clicking on their website or deleting the e-mail as trash. Now I can delete with a clear conscience.
Not a bad scam. I can see how this could look interesting to incautious guys looking for something to add to their cv.
Tom
December 5, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Just received a followup from a Chris Jameson to the ‘invitation only’ CIO Summit. The email was sent to an address that is, purposely, only posted to our web site. I ran a WHOIS on the domain ‘CIO-Summit.net’ and discovered it was created a month ago, 07 Nov, 2007. The web site has a polished facade, but the address displayed as “http://64.41.119.180/ciosummit/”. Googling turned up nothing on them at all, yet they have this scrolling list of big company names on the web site. Fishy.
Besides, I really couldn’t see how some unknown group would be interested to hear my opinion on CIO issues.
Apparently this is some B-school grads senior-project idea on how to make money:
1) Buy mailing lists of supposed CIOs, CTOs, Customer Service, etc.
2) Send out emails trying to flatter the folks on the mailing list by inviting them to an important sounding summit.
3) Give the invitees the honor of paying $300 or $1000 or whatever to allow them to join the exclusive summit.
4) Profit!
Thanks for this site and the comments.
– Mark
December 5, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Thanks for this info. I did indeed turn to google to check out what definitely looked like a suspicious email. Thanks for the post. It saved me the time to go through all the steps you did to check this out.
December 11, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Thank you so much for publishing this - there isn’t a lot out there about this hoax! In case anyone is interested, it appears there are several different “summits” operating under this same facade. My invitation was from Alex Parnell to the Public Relations Summit.
December 12, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Thanks for everyones comments on this scam. I got it too, Scumbags.
The funny part is, I work for a guy named Chris Jameson. So I thought he was messing with me.
We need more blogs like this one that inform people of scumbags like this “Chris”.
Thanks again.
December 17, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Thanks for all the info. My boss forwarded his invitation to me to check out. Gotta love google!
December 19, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Figured it was something stupid like this, thanks for this site! I got another mail that seemed similar it resolved to 64.41.119.180; the same site address as this summit! beware!
December 19, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Oh yes the IP was from “Hiring Spring” website that was trying to recruit me.
December 19, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I got this email too. I should have known it was spam — my filter’s usually good at these things, but sadly it missed this one. It was addressed to the completely wrong person (my domain is a catchall) so I stupidly replied and said they had the wrong email address - damn. If I’d waited 3 more mins I would have found this page. Luckily I don’t like in the States so I presume they’ll leave me alone!
December 20, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Based on the Comments dates, I’d say they are running on a quarterly scam/scheme. I also got the follow-up, having deleted the original as spam, and decided to look into it. This was one of the first sites to pop up, so thanks Ryan for posting it, and everyone else for keeping it going.
December 21, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Hey Andrew,
I was looking at data for visits to this post and cannot find a quarterly trend based on that. There was a spike in August and then again in November which seems to be holding right on up until now. If I’m bored, I may put my data through some seasonality stats tests.
It’s hard to say what the visits are all about though — with the increase in comments, my post may be just easier to find via search engines. Also, blog rankings increase over time of course. Or maybe “Chris” is expanding his ops over time.
Either way, the more people who discuss this scheme, the better.
December 22, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Well, “Chris” has mailed me personally today after his first post didn’t get past the spam filter. I’m just an engineer living in a cellar at a startup! Why me? And they got my firstname/lastname and company correct, too - one would expect a mangled e-mail label instead. Maybe because someone put my name somewhere into “LinkedIn” during the last month?
Googling “bizsummits ciosummit” just gives two entries, on of them this blog.
Some raw domain name info and data from ARIN:
[www.]ciosummit.org –> 216.40.45.31 (hosted by Tucows International, Toronto). Reverse name resolution yields “31.0/24.45.40.216.in-addr.arpa.”
[www.]bizsummits.org –> 216.40.45.31, as above
http://www.TheCIOSummit.org —CNAME–> theciosummit.org
theciosummit.org -> 66.111.39.41 (hosted by United Colocation Group, Inc, San-Francisco). Reverse name resolution yields “theciosummit.org.”.
But!
If you point your browser to “www.theciosummit.org”, you browser gets a “redirect” response which makes it read from “http://64.41.119.180/ciosummit/” instead. That IP address belongs to “Hostway Corporation” of Chicago. It doesn’t reverse-resolve.
And now point your browser to “http://64.41.119.180/” directly.You get the web page of something called “MobileSoft” apparently also called “MobileBriefs”, which indeed is hosted at that IP address.
Curioser and curioser….
December 27, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I got the email today. Thanks for posting the info.
January 2, 2008 at 11:35 am
I have never been a CIO or CTO. I’ a codemonkey/tech support person. And yet, I got a special invitation - and follow-up - to an exclusive CIO summit.
A fishy smell would be preferable to the odor this thing has.
January 3, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I received the “follow-up” invite to cio-summit.net this morning. Always wary of scams and phishing, I found my way here. Thanks for doing the leg work, and thanks to everyone else here for posting their experiences with the scam and how irrelevant the invites usually are to their positions.
(btw, I’m a webmaster at an alternative rock radio station - a sure candidate for clandestine teleconferences with major business players, yes?)
January 4, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I, too, received an invitation from Alex Parnell, and found your page via Google. Thanks for the research. While I do have the important-sounding title of Communications Specialist at my 20-person firm, I certainly don’t consider myself one of “the nation’s leading public relations executives.” And I’m a little annoyed that they found all of my contact information.
I’m really looking forward to the follow-up…
January 4, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I have also received several of these messages from Chris. This last one sounded concerned that I have not gotten back to him. Started digging around and found much of the same info as above. This one kind of catches your eye. I get CIO stuff all time, the real kicker was the $1000 right to participate.
January 8, 2008 at 11:34 am
I appreciate your blog post here. Received one of these invitations as well. Thanks for taking the time to log your experience!
January 8, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I, too, had the honor of being “invited” to join. Also a skeptical type, I was delighted–and not surprised–to find this site as the only other listing in my Google search. Thanks to all for making my suspicions seem all the more valid. Anyone else get taken by the “Cambridge Who’s Who”?
Thanks!
January 10, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I’m a network admin. Did a Whois lookup on cio-summit.org and saw bizsummits. Did a google of that and found this blog. Thanks blogging. Cio-summit.org is now on our mail server’s blacklist.
January 14, 2008 at 11:39 am
I got one of these today, only the guy’s now using cio-summit.net, which forwards to http://64.41.119.180/ciosummit/. I’ve forwarded the email to us-cert.gov and antiphishing.org, and sent a note to cio-summit.com making them aware of this scam.
January 14, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I am/was an IT Manager over eBusiness integration for division of the worlds second largest sporting goods company and of course feel I am CIO material right? But to be invited to the CIO-Summit by their board… what and honor! Now given my position is being eliminated as of 01/31/2008 and I am looking for work this sounded like a great opportunity to network… thanks for you blog and to the others who have kept it going with post. You have confirmed my instinct and saved me the time of more research. For those real CEO, CIO and VP of IT/MIS out there who need solid people who happen to also be professional ITers… I can be found at itsprez@yahoo.com.
January 16, 2008 at 12:16 am
received this today from “Chris Jameson [chris@thecustomerservicesummit.org]” . . .
from thecustomerservicesummit.org ([207.36.237.158]Received: from 207.36.237.158 ([207.36.237.158])
by thecfosummit.org
He “hadn’t heard back from me” and “inviting me to participate” not that I have the time these days. thanks for tracking this; I was suspicious enough to avoid clicking the link altogether . . .
January 17, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Thanks for the blog. Got an e-mail today from “The Public Relations Summit” but it all led to the same group.
January 18, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I got an email from these guys too. Looks like it goes from ciosummit.org to bizsummits.org up to vcsouth.com. VC South actually has bio’s and photographs of people in the company. Bizsummits is one of the things they own.
January 18, 2008 at 3:53 pm
The general partner “Michael Price” could very easily be mistaken for this guy too.
Again, I’d focus on the fact that their credit card form has not https:// on it, nor does it use SSL.
Also, there are a number of press releases out there about their quarterly earnings that have made the mainstream media too. The release mentions names of people who do not exist in the “Team” page of the VCSouth website.
January 18, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Another update. Just asked a few business librarians out there the questions “is bizsummits or VCSouth in any stock market you are aware of?”
Response: “I can’t find any reference to them being a publicly held company. Also not for parent co, http://vcsouth.com/ - private eq firm.”
That makes This Press Release seem quite dubious.
January 21, 2008 at 4:26 am
Wow, this is very strange…
I’m 15 and do little with computers and I got this e-mail (well, the one from Alex for the Public Relations Summit), but apparently I have the same name as a chief scientist at Chevron Petroleum Co. with a Ph.D in geological sciences (the magic of google). Stupid scammers can’t even get e-mail addresses right between different people.
January 23, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I just got a “followup” email from “Chris.” He/She sounded a bit hurt that I hadn’t replied to the first missive (which I discarded as Spam.) PJ
January 23, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Greetings readers of The Other Librarian: This blog and the postings were brought to my attention today by a prospective member, and I thought I should comment. I am the President of BizSummits, which is a legitimate, professional development organization that has 13 individual summits providing 12 teleseminars a year in each of those individual summits. Our organization has been active for over 3 years. We have a fulltime program development staff and full time customer service. It looks like there has been a problem with the online membership form and perhaps with some erroneous invitations, as well.
Based on these comments, I’ve alerted our IT staff and offer my apologies for any inconvenience or concern this may have caused. We are registered in the state of Georgia and the Secretary of State can certainly verify this information if needed.
In short, we are a legitimate organization providing quality speakers and value to our members. I appreciate the opportunity to post here to clear up the misconceptions and the quality feedback received.
January 24, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Lee,
I am glad you want to prove yourself a legitimate organization. Of course, being a registered business has no bearing on the legitimacy of your business practices, many of which I believe to be suspect. Let me start from the top.
1. While bizsummits and its possible parent company VCsouth may be registered businesses, a business librarian has not been able to find them as publically traded companies. Have we erred here? Are these companies private or public?
If these companies are private, here’s the problem: this press release comparing your end-of-quarter growth to the Corporate Executive Board Company is very suspicious. Why? Well, such press releases are usually intended to attract investors to publicly traded companies. Since bizsummits does not appear to be publicly traded, there are no investors. So, who is the audience for this press release? What private company wants to give its competitors such an edge?
One could suspect that the press release was sent to dupe people into thinking your service is more than it is (you have to admit, scams are pretty common these days). You could, of course, fix this by 1) providing a stock ticker symbol for your company or 2) explaining why you would put out such a misleading press release.
2. If your IT staff does not understand that a form with credit card information should be placed under a secure connection, they should be fired immediately and you should be fired for hiring them. Further, any company that does not understand this small obvious detail has no business hosting CIO summits.
Of course, your IT staff does seem to know how to make certain pages of your website unlinkable & unindexable. Why is this a suspicious practice? Well, you see the people you highlight as participants in your “summits” for instance would not be able to search their own name to find it on your site. One could suspect that this fairly advanced technique is used to prevent people noticing that their name is being used to attract unwitting scam victims to your site.
So, your IT staff appear to be ignorant of fairly obvious practices on the one hand, and fairly knowledgeable of not-so-obvious practices on the other. You must understand that a business with such suspicious business practices would make your average joe like myself think your business falls under one of two categories: a) weirdly incompetent or b) a scam.
The obvious solution to these issues would be a) include a secure connection for the credit card info — even better, use a service like PayPal to increase the security of your transfers b) do your website normal, with pages or database queries like everyone else.
c) Your company appears to be going through alot of turnover for one that seems so “successful.” Where’s Chris? Where’s Alex Parnell? Why is Lee Culberson stated as the COO on the vcsouth page (as of today), yet here you call yourself the “president” of bizsummits? And why can’t I link back to the page where you show your shining faces to the world?
d) The only reason we got to your site is because you spammed us.
e) Oh yeah, I brought this blog post to “Chris”’s attention a while back, and its been in the top Google results for quite a while now. Are you telling me that no one in your organization has ever Googled your company? What kind of marketing is that? Alot could be resolved if you just responded to the concerns say, last year.
In short, while I cannot confirm whether or not your business is truly a scam, I can say that I find many of your business practices are daringly cunning, yet notably incompetent to someone who has a cursory understanding of good business.
Your business sucks too bad to justify your comparison to the EXBD, and it lacks the transparency to allow me to let your claims of “legitimacy” go unanswered. I trust that the readers of this blog will understand my view on this.
January 24, 2008 at 1:02 pm
I’ve been corrected on this one. Of course, a private company can have investors — except a mass press release would imply that a company was appealing to investors in a public market, as opposed to partners in a firm.
January 25, 2008 at 1:11 am
Typos. Vague references. And the best of all — Claims of a PR elite from a firm so elusive about its own people, in the world of PR that does just the opposite?
A Google search reveals nothing. An aerial map search brings you to a blank intersection. But hey — at least they’re a Quiznos close by.
January 28, 2008 at 2:41 pm
“Chris” seems to have a girlfriend named Lee Culberson, whose email subject was, “Peggy-a quick question” from CIO-summit.org. I’m not a CIO. Glad I found you to confirm my suspicions and make me glad I didn’t open it.
Thanks.
January 31, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Wow, I’m so excited to be invited by Alex Parnell to be considered as an elite public relations executive. What an honor for a worship pastor who is more concerned about his guitar than PR! However, my first and last name and church were correct, but he must mean the other worship pastor at a church with the same name more than 200 miles away. Darn, that other me must be so proud.
February 1, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Thanks, they’re incredibly patient on live customer support, feel free to mess with them.
February 1, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I socially engineered a free account. It looks as if they do have poor schmucks that get suckered in, but none of the content on the site is worth listening to. There are some homemade audio clips and recordings of the members-only teleconferences. None of the big names they advertise actually use the site. Obviously.
I’d rank them as “as legit as quixstar” They probably won’t illegally use your credit card, but honestly, it’s just a huge payment with little/no product.
February 3, 2008 at 8:13 pm
GOOD GROUP TO JOIN
The Customer Service Summit provides good value to its members and has a strong retention rate from year to year. Please call me directly if any questions about the Customer Service Summit, my contact information follows below. If there are any questions about the value, you may also visit our site and request a link to a past meeting recording so you can listen in and judge for yourself if the ideas discussed by some of the top executives in business are good ones. Also, thank you for some of the recommendations above (we will be changing the signup pages to https secured, etc) and we appreciate the feedback.
[Ed. note: Further commentary deleted. ]
February 4, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I think this forum is a good spot to determine whether you ought to believe Michael Price’s comment or not.
While I’m not too keen to have a mudslinging competition on my blog, I did think the thread was pretty funny.
February 13, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I decided to google these guys together with the word “scam”. I arrived here!
It warms my heart to see how our Internet community looks out for each other.
Thanks to everybody who participated in this discussion. Keep up the good work.
February 16, 2008 at 5:44 am
I think this is a conspiracy …
I received the Alex Parnell Public Relations Summit email. We know it’s a scam. Google then leads to this Blog. I think there’s some some collusion here!
Just kidding.
Thanks for the heads up as well as a very entertaining and engaging thread.
I must admit though, it did feel good to receive SPAM that validated the work and effort I’ve put in all these years!!!
February 19, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Here’s the e-mail I just got from “Chris”
—————————————-
Did you get the email I sent you last? Just in case it didn’t get to you I’ve copied it below for your review. If you get a chance please let me know of your interest.
Thanks,
Chris
—–Original Message—–To: From Name: Chris JamesonSubject: question.
Hi
On behalf of our board, I wanted to personally invite you into The Operations Summit because of your key operations role and experience. The Operations Summit is an invitation-only group comprising the very best executives and visionaries in operations management. We meet monthly by teleconference to exchange what is working, what is not, strategies and ideas. It is a confidential forum with dedicated groups of other successful leaders whose primary agenda is to help each other outperform. I am certain you will find the experience both enjoyable and useful in your efforts. Here is our site as background, http://www.TheOperationsSummit.net. Take a look and please let me know of your decision. Thanks.
Sincerely,
Chris Jameson
The Operations Summit
1200 Abernathy Road
17th FloorAtlanta, GA 30328
Chris@TheOperationsSummit.net
http://www.TheOperationsSummit.net
February 21, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Chris made a BIG mistake. I work at the same address, same floor, so the management is well aware of the inappropriate use of their address being used. They have no record of the company or “Chris Jameson” working there. If they do not reveal themselves to the management, the suspicion of address theft could be pursued.
March 3, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I have received emails from the same Abarnathy Road address - but with different names and events.
Most are using Chris as a first name.
Scam artists who are using multiple identities often keep their own first name and alter the surname. - so that if they are approached in public, they will always be able to answer to the first name without raising the suspicions of people within earshot.
These names should be added to this blog so that others will find this on a search:
Feb 21 2008:
Alex Purnell of
PackedEvents.com
Feb 13 2008:
Chris Taylor of
SurveyExecutives.net
Dec 3 2007:
Chris Landon of
LeadFunnel.com
March 5, 2008 at 6:23 pm
And the Abernathy Road people keep on coming…
Mar 5:
Jordan Freedman
MarketingExecs
Feb 27:
Marcie Harruff
SurveyExecutives
Sending any reply at all will only verify that your email address is valid - potentially to be put up for sale to phishing scammers.
March 6, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Whoever this Chris is, he’s done some homework. The email I just received says:
“For my records in case any follow-up is needed, I show your contact information as:” then lists my correct full name, company, email street address, city, state, and phone number. The only error is the zip code, it’s 1000 miles away and not even numerically close.
Freaky. Thanks so much for keeping this open!
April 1, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Thanks so much for this blog post. It just saved me from asking my bosses about it and looking like an idiot!
I have no beef with Alex or others who work for this organization. They’re just an events organization trying to provide networking and seminar activities. It’s honest work. At least they were polite by working over email and not harrassing me on the phone like other vendors.
The problem with this service is the 1) ego trap it lays for prospective users, an insult to our intelligence in the long run, and closely related 2) their attempt at cloaking the “invite only” selection in mystery — if you’re just spamming us as prospective members then admit it. It’s called marketing, not invite-only.
At the end of the day, there are FABULOUS PR and other industry organizations out there created by the professionals working in that sector in a non-profit setting. PRSA and IABC are truly fantastic for the PR industry.
I don’t resent receiving a solicitation from this group. I do resent the misleading sales tactics. Even though the schedule of PR events they are hosting look interesting, they lost me at hello…
April 17, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Steer away from these guys. I’ve been serially spammed since Q4 last year by a variety of people, curiously all with the same Abernathy Rd. address in Atlanta. As above, they use multiple web sites, such as TheCMOSummit.org, PackedEvents.com, MarketingExecs.net, ConstantLeads.net, MeetingSetters.com, etc. If you check out the registrar of each of these sites, they all go back to Michael Price, the founder/CEO of VCSouth.
I have asked on at least 4 occasions (via reply email) to be taken off of their email / spamming lists, to no avail. Minimally they are in violation of the Federal CAN-SPAM act by failing to comply with these requests. Despite their protestations posted here, no legitimate organization would risk fines and reputational risks by failing to follow this simple law.
Be aware!
April 29, 2008 at 10:28 am
They are also soliciting those in the security arena as well. I received an invitation to the CSOSummit (chief security officer) recently. Same address and this one was openly registered to mprice@vs-south. The email was from a Taylor Evans.
I think they are trying to build a business around these summits but are using questionable tactics in the pursuit of selling more people.
April 30, 2008 at 11:22 am
I too received an email from this group (not Chris, but Taylor), except mine was for the CSO Summit. I became skeptical as soon as they stated they were an “invitation only group” - I thought hmmm… who invited me? Then they clearly said they couldn’t disclose that information. Here’s the email:
Hello, Dan. On behalf of our Board of Directors, I wanted to personally extend an invitation to you for The CSO Summit because of your key role and experience.
As an introduction, The CSO Summit is an invitation-only group comprised of the nation’s leading security management executives. We provide these professionals who are short on time the opportunity to consistently gain
fresh insight and experience of other top-flight security professionals to solve pressing matters of common interest. We meet monthly via interactive teleconferences to exchange what is working, what is not, strategies and ideas. It is a confidential forum with dedicated groups of
other successful security executives whose only agenda is to help each other outperform.
I am certain you will find the experience both valuable and useful in your efforts. Here is our site as background if you could take a look and please let me know of your decision. Thanks, Dan.
http://www.TheCSOSummit.org
Sincerely,
Taylor Evans
The CSO Summit
1200 Abernathy Road
17th Floor
Atlanta, GA 30328
T 404-592-9903 Ext 804
Mail back to decline further.
http://www.TheCSOSummit.org
May 8, 2008 at 11:37 am
I wouldn’t characterize this as a scam, though I would question its value.
Here’s another slightly different sample in its entirety (my info redacted). Please note that I am not an executive and I assume my spam-blocker caught the first e-mail he refers to. Also, the contact information at the end is readily available on our company Web site:
————–
Matt,
Did you get the email I sent you last? Just in case it didn’t get to you I’ve copied it below for your review. If you get a chance please let me know of your interest.
Thanks,
Alex
—–Original Message—
To: Matt ________________
From Name: Alex Parnell
Subject: Matt, question.
Hello, Matt. On behalf of our board, I wanted to personally invite you into The Public Relations Summit because of your key role and experience.
The Public Relations Summit is an invitation-only group comprising the nation’s leading public relations executives. We meet monthly via interactive teleconferences to exchange what is working, what is not, strategies and ideas. It is a confidential forum with dedicated groups of other successful public relations executives whose only agenda is to help each other outperform.
I am certain you will find the experience both enjoyable and useful in your efforts. Here is our site as background if you could take a look and please let me know of your decision. Thanks, Matt.
http://www.ThePublicRelationsSummit.org
Sincerely,
Alex Parnell
The Public Relations Summit
600 Northpark Building
Atlanta, GA 30328
800-518-8652 Ext. 804
Mail back to decline further.
Alex@ThePublicRelationsSummit.org
http://www.ThePublicRelationsSummit.org
For my records in case any follow-up is needed, I show your contact information as: Matt _________, (Company), (work e-mail), (Address, City, State, ZIP), (phone number)
May 15, 2008 at 11:04 am
Hi folks,
Also received the PR Summit invitation. Like many of you, I’ve only seen a message labelled follow-up , not the original.
Given the absence of a time-date stamp on the original message ‘Alex’ includes, I suspect the follow-up aspect is just another part of this well-constructed ruse. Obviously the message has just enough credibility and individuality to encourage each of us to look for more information - just in case! - instead of deleting it outright.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve taken the time to investigate one of these kinds of missives. I am a little bit ashamed to admit I was so eager to succumb to the flattery…
Thanks very much for the warning!