you are amazing ! your making my day way better.best of luck with them
thanks for the giggles your giving me xx
If you google the number it belongs to several dodgy kitchen fitting companies including Kitchens Uber (2, Sawley Road, Miles Platting, Manchester M40 8BB) and Kitchen Units Co (2 Arrow Mill, Queensway, Rochdale OL11 2ON)
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/kitchens-ube-manchester-england-lancashire-c583331.html / http://www.reviewcentre.com/Kitchens-and-Bathrooms/Kitchen-Units-www-kitchenunits-co-reviews_1463360
Some dreadful tales from Martin Lewis’ site - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=3341984
and http://www.canyoutrustthem.com/index.php?go=details&id=19933
Although the primary irritation is the spam, they are targetting potentially vulnerable, disabled people with their ads for undoubtedly poor standard rip off kitchens (or just a take the deposit and run scam).
This is a company / series of linked companies already investigated and provent to be fraudulent.
We could report them individually to The Advertising Standards Commission - http://www.asa.org.uk but it would be more powerful if the complaint came from the MSS webteam itself - Make a complaint - ASA | CAP
It’s possible that it’s a sales call centre and that they work for various different “companies” selling different things/marketing different things.
I don’t think it’s fair to give abuse to someone who has no authority in the company. You need to take it up with the company itself, not just the bottom rung staff.
I work in customer service and I have absolutely no authority to do anything so if someone calls and starts ranting at me and accusing me of various things, it has no effect other than to ruin my day.
Next time they call ask the caller for the complaints address and procedure and write a letter/email to someone who actually has the authority to do something about it.
And accusing a mere sales caller of preying on vunerable people is a great way of dealing with it.
All I’m saying is there was no need for it. When she called you could have gotten the information without making accusations of her personally who most likely had nothing to do with it.
Following proper procedure will get you much further than throwing accusations around.
Most of the abusive callers I get never even bother to follow up with the complaint. They just rant at me and accuse me, ruin my day and stress me out, but they do nothing that will actually enforce a change.
If you were going to forward all your complaints to the police then accusing the girl that simply was doing her job was unneccessary.
I’#ve just found that the people who have enforced change in our company were the ones who were rational, followed complaint procedure and took it up with managers as opposed to the ones who just ring the CS staff and abuse us personally and never follow up.
If you actually want something to change with this company then great, but you don’t need to trample on people to do so. It’s actually very upsetting to be just doing your job and to be personally accused of all sorts of things and have threats made against you and I think you need to think about your methods before you continue with this.
Accusing someone of sending a criminal around to you, accusing her of being an internet scammer, accusing her of preying on weak and vunerable people and threatening to report her to the police while looking for her surname is abusive. She was just doing her job.
Secondly I don’t (obviously) work for them. I am based in Ireland and I work in Customer Service in the financial sector. I have worked in CS for over 10 years and I have had my fair share of threats, accusations and just plain old crazies to deal with.
Thirdly I am just advising you that you will not get anywhere with the tactics you are using. You are more likely to be accused of harrassment than anything else if you keep up with what you are doing. Staff who work in sales or customer service have the same rights as anyone else. I know you are delighted with your little project but you need to be more constructive and rational with your methods in order to actually make any changes happen.
If you make empty threats and basically make a nuisance of yourself, you’ll get nowhere.
The advertising standards authority are the way to go. Not harrassing staff and wasting police time.
And why should I leave you to it. You’re doing more damage than you are good at this point. There are much better and more effective ways of having this company stop spamming this board. You’re stooping to their level by being bothersome and below their level by being abusive to staff who are simpy returning the call that YOU asked for.
You can be responsible for your own actions but if you’re doing this for this forum, then as a user of this forum, quite simply, I object. I do not want you to do this as I think you will cause more harm than good and this vendetta is not in the spirit of this forum.
… or we could ignore them, just saying
Darren
Just so you know- we have reported them to the ASA- that was months ago.
- We have communicated with the company several times, speaking to several different membes of staff at various levels- and made them aware of the distress they’re causing and the pointlessness of spamming these particular boards, where they’ll find no customers.
- In keeping with the pattern experienced by other websites and forums- the net result of our complaints was that the amount of spam went up, not down.
- As they are in breach of the CAN SPAM act, the MS Society’s legal team has sent them a Cease and Desist and asked for damages. This hasn’t worked either.
- The mode has been changed for comments/threads to “text analysis” with an automatic discard for detected spam, and automatic moderation queue for suspected spam. Some of you may have noticed that your posts have been met by
“Your comment has been queued for moderation by site administrators and will be published after approval.”
- Apologies for this inconvenience. This is all an attempt to prevent these spammers from signing up for membership and riddling out boards.
- What you DON’T see is the sheer amount of spam that is deleted by the hard working mods, who have to report each post and then manually block the poster- all of whom have different names, accounts and IP adresses. There are quite literally hundreds that you’re unaware of- you’re only seeing what slips through. This takes up a lot of our time.
- We have our website developer looking into it. We have Mollom investigating the issue (they are the company that acts as our spam blocker. If we could get Inspector Morse, Batman, DC Tennison, Jessica Fletcher and Hercule Poirot onto it, we would.
Please bear with us while we continue to manage this issue.
Kind regards
Stewart (admin)
Thank you Stewart and thanks to all who are working so hard on this.
Pat x
Hello! I’m the moderator of the internet forum for a well-known British novelist. We have been bombarded with “cheap kitchen” spam too, it’s ruined the messageboard. I’ve read through the interesting events on this thread! I wonder if you found any solutions to the problem? We’ve updated our membership procedures. What else can we do? I’d be very grateful for ideas / solutions! Many thanks, Nic Bouskill
As a mere moderator I cannot claim to have all the answers but I do know that after many failled attempts to get rid we have had to set up a ‘trust queue’ whereby new users posts have to be viewed and published manually three times before they are allowed free rein.
As the kitchen mob post their user names and posts are deleted assuring that they cannot use that name again. They are still ‘posting’ big time but nothing is making it on to the forums. It is a pain for new users but we try to publish ASAP.
I dare say Stewart will add more in due time.
Liz [Moderator]
PS - what novelist? I am a serious bibliophile.
Hello Liz, thanks for your reply. I moderate Jeanette Winterson’s website, just a volunteer, basically removing spam. But the last three weeks we’ve had almost 1000 new members, all posting cheap kitchen spam, destroying the messageboard. Fortunately, yesterday the tech team responded to our concerns. New accounts now have to be activated by a moderator, so 30 account activation requests were made this morning, all of which were denied! It’s very odd. The spammers all have similar gmail / guerrillamail / yopmail / mailnesia email addresses, so they are quite easy to spot. And the spam all arrives between 2am and 8am UK time, another clue! Anyway, thanks again. These acts of internet vandalism are so destructive, but it looks like both your website and mine are coping, I’m glad to see. A “trust queue” is a very good idea. I’ll suggest it to my technician! nic