There are an abundance of online scams going on, ranging from the tedious ‘Nigerian Lottery’ emails, to the increasingly more common ‘Domain Appraisal Scam’. Given that I do quite a bit online, I have been made aware of these scams. Fortunately for me I tend not to fall for them.

Admittedly there are also a lot of offline scams. I, however, have never experienced one apart from on the box in the form of TV Show ‘Watchdog’ (here in Britain). That was up until, well, about 2 months ago.

My father received a letter from ACS Law. It went along the lines of ‘We want £500 from you because on random date you downloaded a Scooter song from a P2P Network’. The first clarification that needs to be made here is that no-one in my family has ever used a P2P network. The second clarification is that when we do BUY music through Itunes, nowhere in our playlists would you find ‘Scooter’. Do people actually listen to Scooter?!

I took a look on google, and there are a lot of threads at various problem about this ‘offline spam’. I am unsure how names, and addresses have been acquired, but there does seem to be some serious automation going on here such that in our A4 envelope, we actually had the exact same letter with a different name on it!

Unfortunately it seems people are getting scared, and paying these fines. This seemed absolutely preposterous to me.. why pay for something you did not do. None the less, as the claims were false we simply ignored the letter.

Today we got another letter along the lines of ‘We are still pursuing our false claims, and want to damage any reputation we have left’. We were given a lowdown of 7 days to pay or be taken to court.

Father wanted to reply along the lines of ‘Go away, we didn’t do nothin !’. I, being the diplomat, went on google again, and looked up suggested responses. We downloaded a template letter from Being Threatened, and will pop it in the post tomorrow. Then it is a waiting game to see what happens. Kudos to whoever set that site up as it saved me a lot of time, and effort.

The letters they sent out are legally binding, it would have been foolish to ignore it once again. Just imagine if somehow, someone was allowed to spam.. and it was legal.

Media companies, fair play to want to defend your rights, but hiring companies like this with their disgusting scare tactics only does you damage, and destroys your credibility. Who on earth will support an industry that threatens the innocent? No-one.