Protection Racket

[Maggie McNeill]

I found this via an alert from SWOP; a Denver escort named Beverly Fisher (http://escortblogs.net/beverlyfisher.htm) says many Denver girls got this email last Thursday from a new website offering to sell them good reviews, with the implication that if they didn't pony up in three days they would start getting bad reviews which were equally fake. Since she spread it around boards in Denver the website removed its "Escorts to Avoid" section (yes, they called it that), but they claim to be a national company with websites in multiple cities so I thought it best to post this in national alerts in case they show up in other cities. THIS IS EXTORTION; it's a protection racket, plain and simple, except instead of trashing your store they trash your reputation.

Here's the email:

From: "Denver Escort List" <advertising@denverescortlist. com>
To: [my email]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 1:21:45 PM
Subject: Escort Advertising service you can not afford to pass up

Hello,

I am writing to you to inform you of a great advertising opportunity for your escort service in Denver, CO. My team and I have been in the business of advertising for escorts for about 3 years now and we have decided to expand our business to Denver.

Some facts that you might not know
1. Denver Escort gets searched approximately 1,200 times per month.
2. Denver Escorts gets searched about 4 times as much. That is over 5,000 monthly searches that you could be capitalizing on.

What we do is build a website, which in this case is www.DenverEscortList.com. Then the next step is to start recruiting escorts to advertise on our site. While we are looking for escorts, we also start the promotion of the site. Now I am not going to go into a big lecture about how we get our sites to rank at the top of Google, but that is what we do.

Within 2 months, we will hold the number 1 spot for the local results and the number 1 spot for the organic results. What that means is we will dominate the first page of Google. Out of those 5,000 or more monthly searches we will be getting roughly 80% of that traffic to our site, which is around 4,000 monthly visitors looking for an escort.

We also are members of all the most popular forums and posting boards. We post our site on them daily. Along with backpage, and other classified ads sites, this brings in the maximum amount of traffic daily.

So, I am going to stop right there. Either I or one of my employees found your ad somewhere online and found you to be interesting so we are offering this one time opportunity to advertise with us. You will not receive this offer again.

Our Prices

Regular Escort Listing - $100.00 Per Month - Only 10 spots
- We will give you 7 - 12 good reviews.
- You may upload up to 5 pictures.
- We will design your own personal page with whatever you want it to say.
- You will receive a personal email with our domain. Example - yourname@denverescortlist.com.

VIP Escort Listing - $150.00 Per Month - Only 5 spots
- We will give you 12 - 15 good reviews.
- You may upload up to 12 pictures.
- We will design your own personal page with whatever you want it to say.
- You will receive a personal email with our domain. Example - yourname@denverescortlist.com
- We will provide you with a local number that forwards to your number, so you can track how many clients you are getting from our site.
- You will have a spot on our featured slide bar, at the top of the home page.
- You will also get 6 days as our Escort of the month on the first page, per month.

If you choose to not advertise with us, you will be listed in the Escorts that we do not recommend section of our website. Oddly enough this portion of our sites gets quite a bit of traffic also.

Again this is a time sensitive one time offer. You have 3 days to reply to this email, or the offer goes out the window and will never return. We will never ask you to advertise with us again.

To claim your position on our website today, just email us back and let us know you are interested. After payment is received we will have your listing up within 24 hours. You have total control over your listing and always have to approve it before it goes live.

We look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Josh Haso
www.DenverEscortList.com

P.S. We are offering the first 5 escorts a yearly special. Pay in advance for one year and get 2 months free.
Regular Escort Listing - $75.00 x 10 = $750.00 for the year.
VIP Escort Listing - $150.00 x 10 = $1,500.00 for the year.
This is only for the first 5 escorts that choose this service.

****************************

[DEPmic05]

"If you choose to not advertise with us, you will be listed in the Escorts that we do not recommend section of our website. Oddly enough this portion of our sites gets quite a bit of traffic also."

Wow...I like the way they just inserted that little tidbit and in such a nice, polite way.

Hope we get the word out quickly enough to effectively shut down this site.

[Chica Chaser]

Originally Posted by AngelOK

If you choose to not advertise with us, you will be listed in the Escorts that we do not recommend section of our website. Oddly enough this portion of our sites gets quite a bit of traffic also.

I'm thinking their "do not recommend" list is going to be pretty long while the "recommended" list will be short. $100/mo - $1200/yr, to be "exclusive"? or be listed as not recommended? What a deal...I can't imagine why the ladies are not jumping on this phenomenal bargain!

Who cares, really? In Denver TheOtherBoard and Sowet have a big lock on the market and these scammers coming in threatening every escort in town won't go over very well and they will be exposed for what they are. I would certainly never look at this board when visiting Denver.

[Maggie McNeill]

Originally Posted by DEPmic05

"If you choose to not advertise with us, you will be listed in the Escorts that we do not recommend section of our website. Oddly enough this portion of our sites gets quite a bit of traffic also."

Wow...I like the way they just inserted that little tidbit and in such a nice, polite way.

Hope we get the word out quickly enough to effectively shut down this site.

I think they're pretty much shut down; by yesterday they had taken down the "Escorts to Avoid" tab and the site now consists of nothing but a whiny, backpedaling denial entitled "The Harassment Has Began" [sic]:


We have already received quite a few emails about the advertising offered yesterday. We have been threatened and people are trying to scare us with their internet words. We are also being accused of extortion.

We are extorting escorts for offering them a service? I don’t think so. All we are doing is offering advertising for escorts in the Denver, CO area. Escorts that need an easier way for clients to find them. Which in most people’s eyes is a good thing.

Of course we are charging for this service. We have to WORK to get the site ranked number one. We have to WORK to get clients to the site. So, Yes we want paid for this work.

We think we have pretty reasonable prices also. If you don’t like the prices go somewhere, but nowhere else are you going to receive the traffic or personal touch you would receive with us. That is your decision though not ours. We have been helping escorts for over three years now, and also saving a lot of clients from meeting up with a bad escort or escort with poor reviews.

We are currently booking positions right now for the VIP and Regular escort listings, and these escorts will see how great this service is. For the ones that think we are extorting them, keep posting your ad on forums that cost more and are less effective, keep posting your ad on backpage.com which costs $5.00 right now, and is going to be shut down just like craigslist. What are you going to do then?

We wish you all the best. If you decide to advertise with us, we look forward to working with you. If you choose not to, then we sincerely wish you the best of luck.

The team at Denver Escort List

[Likinikki]

Wow...thank you for bringing this to our attention AngelOK!

[Maggie McNeill]

Originally Posted by Likinikki

Wow...thank you for bringing this to our attention AngelOK!

You're welcome, Nikki, but the person who really deserves the credit is Beverly Fisher; her quick thinking got these gangsters effectively shut down before they even started.

[kendra kayy]

I love how they convienently left out the extortion part in their webpage response. But then again, what could one say to justify the threat of posting fake negative reviews. Lol the nerve of some ppl!!

[Lily Blair]

What gets me is how guys like this don't realize that many women in this business got to where we are through professionalism, intelligence, and chutzpah, not fear of the little man behind the curtain.

[Maggie McNeill]

Originally Posted by Blond_Lily

What gets me is how guys like this don't realize that many women in this business got to where we are through professionalism, intelligence, and chutzpah, not fear of the little man behind the curtain.

Good point, Lily! If we don't let "Big Brother" boss us around, why should "Little Gangster" be any different?

Oh, and Happy Birthday!

[Humpty Dumpty]

This idiot needs to be tossed in prison for extortion!

[Silvermane]

Originally Posted by Blond_Lily

What gets me is how guys like this don't realize that many women in this business got to where we are through professionalism, intelligence, and chutzpah, not fear of the little man behind the curtain.

Yeah, that's absolutely right!

Btw, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

[niceguy]

I have seen a lot of scams over the years on the internet, but this one has to be very near the top of the list.

Congratulations on you ladies catching it so quickly and passing the word.



WELL DONE!!!


PS

I looked up the owner of this site in the whois data base and this what I found. The site was registered September 9, 2010. He only did a one year registration.

This is public information that any one could find. I am amazed that he did not do this as a private registration.

Administrative Contact:
Hanson, John jhaso1980@yahoo.com
PO box 912
Littleton, Colorado 80123
United States
(303) 654-8878

Technical Contact:
Hanson, John jhaso1980@yahoo.com
PO box 912
Littleton, Colorado 80123
United States
(303) 654-8878







XXX

[Capt. Lincoln F. Stern]

Originally Posted by AngelOK

I found this via an alert from SWOP; a Denver escort named Beverly Fisher (http://escortblogs.net/beverlyfisher.htm) says many Denver girls got this email last Thursday from a new website offering to sell them good reviews, with the implication that if they didn't pony up in three days they would start getting bad reviews which were equally fake. Since she spread it around boards in Denver the website removed its "Escorts to Avoid" section (yes, they called it that), but they claim to be a national company with websites in multiple cities so I thought it best to post this in national alerts in case they show up in other cities. THIS IS EXTORTION; it's a protection racket, plain and simple, except instead of trashing your store they trash your reputation.

Here's the email:

From: "Denver Escort List" <advertising@denverescortlist. com>
To: [my email]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 1:21:45 PM
Subject: Escort Advertising service you can not afford to pass up

Hello,

I am writing to you to inform you of a great advertising opportunity for your escort service in Denver, CO. My team and I have been in the business of advertising for escorts for about 3 years now and we have decided to expand our business to Denver.

Some facts that you might not know
1. Denver Escort gets searched approximately 1,200 times per month.
2. Denver Escorts gets searched about 4 times as much. That is over 5,000 monthly searches that you could be capitalizing on.

What we do is build a website, which in this case is www.DenverEscortList.com. Then the next step is to start recruiting escorts to advertise on our site. While we are looking for escorts, we also start the promotion of the site. Now I am not going to go into a big lecture about how we get our sites to rank at the top of Google, but that is what we do.

Within 2 months, we will hold the number 1 spot for the local results and the number 1 spot for the organic results. What that means is we will dominate the first page of Google. Out of those 5,000 or more monthly searches we will be getting roughly 80% of that traffic to our site, which is around 4,000 monthly visitors looking for an escort.

We also are members of all the most popular forums and posting boards. We post our site on them daily. Along with backpage, and other classified ads sites, this brings in the maximum amount of traffic daily.

So, I am going to stop right there. Either I or one of my employees found your ad somewhere online and found you to be interesting so we are offering this one time opportunity to advertise with us. You will not receive this offer again.

Our Prices

Regular Escort Listing - $100.00 Per Month - Only 10 spots
- We will give you 7 - 12 good reviews.
- You may upload up to 5 pictures.
- We will design your own personal page with whatever you want it to say.
- You will receive a personal email with our domain. Example - yourname@denverescortlist.com.

VIP Escort Listing - $150.00 Per Month - Only 5 spots
- We will give you 12 - 15 good reviews.
- You may upload up to 12 pictures.
- We will design your own personal page with whatever you want it to say.
- You will receive a personal email with our domain. Example - yourname@denverescortlist.com
- We will provide you with a local number that forwards to your number, so you can track how many clients you are getting from our site.
- You will have a spot on our featured slide bar, at the top of the home page.
- You will also get 6 days as our Escort of the month on the first page, per month.

If you choose to not advertise with us, you will be listed in the Escorts that we do not recommend section of our website. Oddly enough this portion of our sites gets quite a bit of traffic also.

Again this is a time sensitive one time offer. You have 3 days to reply to this email, or the offer goes out the window and will never return. We will never ask you to advertise with us again.

To claim your position on our website today, just email us back and let us know you are interested. After payment is received we will have your listing up within 24 hours. You have total control over your listing and always have to approve it before it goes live.

We look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

Josh Haso
www.DenverEscortList.com

P.S. We are offering the first 5 escorts a yearly special. Pay in advance for one year and get 2 months free.
Regular Escort Listing - $75.00 x 10 = $750.00 for the year.
VIP Escort Listing - $150.00 x 10 = $1,500.00 for the year.
This is only for the first 5 escorts that choose this service.

****************************

who wants this websites real registered owners email address, phone # and P.O box?

(before you ask how, I used to work in the web hosting biz on the behind the scenes stuff... I know how to research this stuff)

[Side Street]

This guy (and others like him) need to be shut down where ever they set up shop.

Excerpt from Denver's TOB Thread...
http://www.theotherboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18737

"the following domains have been previously registered but are now available

longislandescortlist.com
phillyescortlist.com
spokaneescortlist.com
dcescortlist.com
vegasescortlist.com

the following domains have been registered but only show the godaddy parked page and the registerations are all godaddy by proxy, with the exception of seattle.


Domain Name: BOSTONESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 07-Jun-10
Expires on: 07-Jun-12



Domain Name: ATLANTAESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 15-Apr-10
Expires on: 15-Apr-11




Domain Name: CHICAGOESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 15-Apr-10
Expires on: 15-Apr-11


Domain Name: MIAMIESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 15-Apr-10
Expires on: 15-Apr-11



Domain Name: LOSANGELESESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 15-Apr-10
Expires on: 15-Apr-11



Domain Name: NEWYORKESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 15-Apr-10
Expires on: 15-Apr-11



Registrant:
Tom Jones
5001 S Iris
Littleton, Colorado 80123
United States

Domain Name: SEATTLEESCORTLIST.COM
Created on: 01-Sep-10
Expires on: 01-Sep-11



my theory:

he's running a cash a dash scam on the girls
he registers the domain with a fake name and address
he runs this email campaign
gets the money
takes down the site so it reverts back to the parked page
changes the registration to anonymous


i checked the archives on the previously registered domains but he used a robots.txt file to exclude them.

this aint his first rodeo"

[Capt. Lincoln F. Stern]

Let me take a crack at them.... I know of some places that get past the robots