Ruthless Competition:

New Orleans computer, New Orleans tech support, New Orleans Apple... Right now, you could type just about any tech related word plus new orleans into a search engine and you'll get me. Even for just new orleans repair, I'm #3 on google behind a couple auto repair shops.

My competitors will do anything to have a piece of me. The latest is a female robot voice prank- in which she claims to have bought a computer from me off eBay and wants to return it. (ok, I've never sold a computer on eBay)

WHAT IS THIS SERVICE?
I knew it was one of those robot deals, but I rolled with it to try and find out who it was behind it. She didn't seem to answer to direct questions, but more or less had pre-programmed responses such as "That is unacceptable" or "stop playing around." She had me up until she couldn't tell me the computer model. She also bailed out on my interrogation and hung up. Still, her script was cleverly crafted, I'll give them that much- just not genius level.


WHO ARE THEY?
A few years ago, I could have nailed whoever it was- but now, we're so big that it could be anyone and *69 had nothing on them.

The only clue I have is that it's someone who thinks I sell computers on eBay. Because I have never done so, I'm trying to figure out who might have that idea of me. I also got a similar call from Governor Schwarzenegger a month ago, instructing me to answer so his questions immediately.

Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit. for all I know, they're randomly doing it to every shop in town. But I'd still like to find who's doing this. How do you track this stuff?

 

Good job on the SEO.

What was the question again?

 

I've been thinking about this for a while. It took me a while to interpret the meaning of the post, but when I did, I started to think that the way to go about it would be to feign cooperation. Go as far as you can with agreeing to meet their demands. Treat them like you would your best customer.

You don't sell computers on ebay, but if your best customer called up with a complaint about a computer you sold him on ebay, you'd still do the best you could to help him. You'd ask what the trouble with the computer was, you'd ask for detail about the computer. You might even ask him to install a VNC Client so that you could log onto his computer and try to fix it. Do you see where I'm going with this?

But the best option is probably to just call the police and ask for their advice.

 

I think ads in your sig are a no-no but I will leave that to the mods.

 

lost me with SEO

 

actually a sig that links to your website is ok....even if it's a biz....i personally took issue with this thread, because it seems more about the biz than the problem -too heavy on the self-promotion....

with 36 posts tho, we (mods) all decided to sit back and see what develops, as the rest of pawn's posts are reasonable.

 

Search Engine Optimization. He claims his shops show up in the third spot on google results even when querrying for semi-related things, like car repair.

So apparently he did an excellent job optimizing his site for search engines.

 

thanks...I never would have guessed... can't be bothered Googling acronyms/slang

 

Ok but why is an ad in a sig ok but not elsewhere? to me an ad is an ad is an ad...

 

Someone, presumably the OP's competition, is calling him and wanting some type of redress, presumably money. He's asking for suggestions on how to trace the phone call and find out who's calling him so that he can get them to stop.

I don't know how to trace, therefore I suggested the police.

On the other hand, I suggested he do some investigating of his own by treating the prank-callers as if they were his best customer. If his best customer called him with a complaint, he would do everything in his power to solve that customer's problem. And of course he'd be very courteous about it. But he'd have to get lots of detailed information from his best customer in order to be able to solve the problem. If he could get the prankers to go along for the ride, he might be able to pry the same kind of information out of them that he would out of his best customer.

And if not, at least he could keep them on the phone long enough for the police to trace the call.

 

Don't know about caller id, since he mentioned using *69, which is the cheap version of caller id. But I think caller id can be blocked, can't it? It sounds like that's what the pranksters are doing, from his initial post.

And yeah, I think he'd have to answer the phone anyway, since he's running a business.

 

If this is a consistent problem, you might want to get a toll free number. There's no way at all to hide the caller id on a toll-free call. If it doesn't show you their real number, they are either using voip or they're doing something illegal (most robo-dialers are doing something shady through voip)

Be careful with the rates, as most old-school (Eg: non-voip) toll-free providers charge a per-minute rate.