Back in March 2009 I added a free listing for my business on the eventdomain.co.uk website – “Web Directory for the Conference, Hospitality and Event industry”. Almost three years later these scammers are pursuing my company for an alleged debt for advertising on their site. I’m not the sort of person to be taken in by scams like this, so they won’t be getting a penny from us. Hopefully anybody else who’s being harassed for non-existent debts by this shower of conmen will find this article and be armed with the information they need to avoid being harassed into paying up.

At the time we registered on their site it displayed a clickable ad: “Add your company for FREE – Register Today”. Clicking the ad led to another page containing the following text:

Standard Listing

Drive targeted Event-sector visitors to your business

A standard entry with Eventdomain gets you the following:

It provides the first stage in advertising and gives you basic internet presence
It’s a low cost way for you to be found
It will help in ranking you in the search engines

It also mentions an enhanced ‘Sponsored Listing’ at a cost of £40 for 13 months.

Being a cheapskate and not being the sort of person who would ever pay to advertise on some tinpot directory site with a very limited presence I entered our details for the Standard Listing. I received the following email from them (links disabled deliberately) on 08/04/2009:

“Advertise on event industry’s number one site

Your targeted advertising just got better. With hundreds of categories featuring business-to-business suppliers to the Event industry, EventDomain is the website of the event and hospitality industry. The site – at www.eventdomain.co.uk -  features categories such as Catering Equipment, Clothing, Photography, Graphics & Signs, Gifts & Incentives and Venues.  Infact, we have 6000 businesses who use our services.

EventDomain is a true one-stop shop for your industry. A Sponsored entry will put your company in front of thousands of event organisers looking for your product or service – whether it’s stand supplies or a marquee.

Take out a Sponsored entry and you’ll get full web stats, including clicks to your website, page views, and can view your stats in your own private area, called My EventDomain.

Testimonials:

“Seen your editorial in the Daily Mirror Biz Bureau section. Great website!”
Regards, Roger
www.societywine.com
More testimonials

A sponsored entry puts you above the standard listings, making you stand out and increases clickthrough by 50% – Guaranteed!    And EventDomain is highly specialised. It’s a site specifically created for people to find services just like yours.

Can you afford not to advertise on EventDomain? To book your slot, just go
online at http://www.eventdomain.co.uk/users.php?action=login -  just login as normal and click the Paypal button to pay.   Once your payment is accepted, your upgrade will activate at once – so there’s no worrying waiting times – just clean, clear target driven exposure.
Once done, your entry will be at the top of the search results, like this one:

http://www.eventdomain.co.uk/subcategory.php?subcat=1055

Advertising is even more crucial now, don’t make the mistake of reducing your ad spend, we can help a lot with our targeted exposure.  £40 for 12 months targeted exposure on Eventdomain is amazing, we just spent £3000 ourselves because we needed the customers – you do too.
Kind Regards
Chris Given
Director
www.eventdomain.co.uk

Obviously I ignored their kind offer – as I don’t pay to advertise on tinpot directory sites run by liars and criminals.

Liars and criminals? Well I think so – I certainly can’t find any record of an Eventdomain Ltd a Crystal Segments Group Ltd or anything similar at Companies House, nor any sign of a Chris (or Christopher) Given listed as a company director. Of course if the website and the emails contained the business disclosures required by law under the Companies Act 2006 and the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 then it might be easier to track down exactly what ‘company’ he’s claiming to be a director of. But I digress.

On 28/05/2009 I received another email:

Dear Client,

During this recession people are still buying untargeted advertising on websites, and others cancel working adverts, while many don’t buy at all – this is insane. Cutting advertising is preventing the flow of visitors to your website – resulting in fewer enquiries and sales.

The whole point of Eventdomain.co.uk is to make your company stand out, gone are the days of endless searching for unrelated websites – born is a vertical, targeted search and advert platform that guarantees results!

Benefits of Sponsored advertising with Eventdomain:

Put your company in front of thousands of Event Planners
You get full web stats
Free extra month on us (13 months for the price of 12)
Free weblink
Highly targeted/Specialist sector advertising

Online Advertising Attitudes Report found 56% of ABC1 adults go to specialist niche sites

Typical results for our clients (for 12 months basis) can be viewed here:

http://www.eventdomain.co.uk/blogs.php?id=25

Can you afford not to advertise on Eventdomain?

To get your sponsored listing, just Login to your MyEventdomain client area and press the PayPal button (located on the far right), then pay by credit/debit card to activate your listing for 13 months. You will recieve a reciept from Paypal on completion.

It’s only £40 and well worth it considering the targeted traffic we send.

Thanks for your time and for using Eventdomain.

Kind regards

Christopher Given

www.eventdomain.co.uk

So on 28/05/2009 I was offered the chance to take out a subscription for 13 months at a price of £40, paid up front by PayPal. I wasn’t interested, so I ignored it.
On 12/08/2009 I received a further email:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I’m just checking your listing and noticed your 1 month sponsored listing on Eventdomain.co.uk has now expired, and wondered if you wish to extend it for a full 12 months?

On renewal/extension, you get an extra month on us, so it’s 13 months for the price of 12, and your standard listing you still get for free.

Typical results for our clients can be viewed here:

http://www.eventdomain.co.uk/blogs.php?id=25

To renew your sponsored listing, just Login to your MyEventdomain client area and press the PayPal button (located on the far right), then pay by credit/debit card to activate your listing for 13 months. You will recieve a reciept from Paypal on completion.

It’s only £40 and well worth renewing considering the targeted traffic we send.

Thanks for your time and for using Eventdomain.

Kind regards

Christopher Given

This email confirms that my free 1 month sponsored listing has expired (some months earlier as it happens) and again offers me the chance of taking out a 13 month subscription for a sponsored listing at a cost of £40, paid up front by PayPal. It again confirms that “your standard listing you still get for free”. I again ignored the offer and forgot all about the ‘company’ and their website.

These emails are clear confirmation that no contract for services had existed between my business and whatever business is behind eventdomain. It further confirms that they were offering to do business with us in return for a prepayment of £40 for each 13 month period.

Over 2 years later, on 2nd November 2011, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from CDS – Clear Debt Solutions Ltd:

VERY IMPORTANT DO NOT IGNORE
Re: Crystal Segments T/a Event Domain
Amount Due: £195.00

I write to confirm that Clear Debt Solutions Ltd has been instructed by Crystal Segments T/a Event Domain to recover the above outstanding debt. Please could you contact Clear Debt Solutions Ltd on 0871 423 6088 as soon as possible.

Should you fail to contact us we will seek instructions from our client with regard to proceeding with further action against you. Such action could include the arrangement of one of our field agents to visit your property to discuss the situation or the formal commencement of legal proceedings.

Therefore, in the circumstances I urge you to take the opportunity to resolve this issue amicably by contacting Clear Debt Solutions Ltd on 0871 423 6088 and making an arrangement to pay the stated amount.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Wilkinson
Debt recovery Unit
Clear Debt Solutions Ltd

I was frankly astonished to receive this letter, having at this stage no recollection at all of any dealings with ‘Crystal Segments’ or ‘Event Domain’. A search of my archived emails for both names revealed nothing so I returned to the letter again to get the contact details for CDS (Clear Debt Solutions Ltd). I don’t like dealing with matters like this over the telephone, it’s far too easy for them to deny what’s been said and anyway they’d only provided a premium rate phone number on the letter – and with no indication of the cost of calling it at that, so I emailed them at the address given at the foot of the letter enquiries@cleardebtsolutions.co.uk:

Re: Crystal Segments T/a Event Domain
Case Reference: XXXXXX.XXX

Dear Sirs

I refer to your letter dated 20th October 2011 and received this morning.

We have no knowledge either of your client or of any outstanding debt due to them. We have certainly never received any invoice or request for payment from them as this would have been either settled within our usual 3 day turnaround or queried immediately.

Please provide copies of any contract which your client believes exists between us, details of when the contract was formed and who at our company authorised it, copies of any outstanding invoices and details of when and where they were sent and full details of any services or goods which your client may claim to have provided to us.

We are quite willing to settle any genuine outstanding debt without any further delay but I do not believe that any debt exists.

Any further communication from your company or from your client will be ignored unless it contains all the requested information.

Yours faithfully
etc.

I didn’t receive any response to my email but on 08/11/2011 I received an invoice for £150 from Eventdomain.co.uk dated 28/10/2011. Leaving aside the fact that the original letter claimed that an outstanding debt of £195 existed 8 days before the creation of this invoice there was still no evidence of any contract existing between us. The only ‘supporting documentation’ was a printout of a webpage at eventdomain.co.uk as it appeared at the time it was printed – 04/11/2011 – presumably intended to support their claim. And the webpage does indeed currently indicate that it costs £50 per year to advertise with them.

Now I had the name Eventdomain.co.uk I was able to find the emails I’ve reproduced above confirming that there had been no contract between us. I was also able to find screenshots of the actual wording of the site on the day I entered my details on it – confirming that the offer I had accepted was for inclusion of our details on this website at no cost.

I replied to both Eventdomain.co.uk (admin@eventdomain.co.uk) and CDS (enquiries@cleardebtsolutions.co.uk) on 08/11/2011:

Dear Sirs

I refer to recent requests for payment from Clear Debt Solutions Ltd and to your invoice XXXX, dated 28/10/11 and received today.

I include below my reply to Clear Debt Solutions. To quote myself: “Please provide copies of any contract which your client believes exists between us, details of when the contract was formed and who at our company authorised it, copies of any outstanding invoices and details of when and where they were sent and full details of any services or goods which your client may claim to have provided to us”. You have failed to supply any of the requested information except for an invoice dated after the letter received from CDS.

I appreciate that it will be difficult for you to provide this information as no contract exists or has ever existed between us. During the period you seem to be claiming that you supplied us with some sort of advertising service you had contacted us apparently inviting us to renew or extend some sort of trial period and requesting that we pay for this by Paypal. The fact that we neither made payment nor agreed to any type of renewal or extension of this trial, that you have waited over 3 years to request payment for a service we never asked for and that you only produced an invoice for this ‘service’ at our request would tend to suggest that this is some kind of a con designed to part unwary companies from their money.

If this is an attempted fraud then you’ve failed. If not then you’re incompetent. Now run along and waste somebody else’s time.

Yours faithfully
etc.

Again I received no response. I did however receive further harassing letters from Clear Debt Solutions Ltd (CDS) dated 02/11/2011, 11/11/2011 and 23/01/2012 demanding that I contact them on their premium rate telephone number. I ignored them.

On 01/02/2012 I received a call from 01772 333340, which turned out to be from CDS. I’d been monitoring calls from this number carefully in order to make a complaint about them – they’d rung repeatedly in October and November, each time ringing off after 2 rings. I was surprised then that somebody actually spoke when I answered the call. She gave her name as Lisa Smith and was an extremely ignorant and unpleasant person, apparently unable to discuss this matter sensibly without trying to talk over the top of me and adamant that they had ‘checked with Trading Standards’, who had apparently confirmed that we had entered into a contract with this eventdomain ‘business’. From what I could work out (and she didn’t appear to understand the argument she was attempting to make herself, so she obviously couldn’t explain it to me) somebody at Trading Standards had agreed that it’s possible to form a contract by clicking a button on a website. She didn’t seem to be able to grasp that the mere fact that somebody could form a contract that way didn’t mean that I had formed a contract that way and that it was up to them to prove that I had formed such a contract by clicking a button (I hadn’t) and that I intended to form such a contract (I didn’t).

The essential elements of a contract are:

• Offer: This scam fails at the first point – the ‘offer’ was for a free service. Subsequent offers for paid services were ignored.
• Acceptance: As above.
• Consideration: No paid-for service was discussed or agreed to.
• Capacity: A ‘business’ with no contact or ownership details on its website is committing a criminal offence and doesn’t have the capacity to form binding contracts through that website.
• Intention: We did not wish to form a contract.

This ‘contract’ fails on all points.

At the time this ‘contract’ was alleged to have been formed the site contained no Terms and Conditions at all, no contact details and no indication that taking up their free offer would form the basis of a contract. The site has subsequently been changed and a Terms & Conditions page added. http://www.eventdomain.co.uk/terms-conditions-eventdomain/ I’ll reproduce it in full so that any A Level law students who come across this page can have a good laugh:

Terms & Conditions | EventDomain

Advertiser relationship with Eventdomain

1.1 Your use of Eventdomain search engine is a legal agreement between you and Eventdomain.co.uk, which is part of Crystal Segment Hospitality Media Group.

1.2 The terms form a legally binding contract for both users and advertisers and you are advised to read them.

Accepting the Terms & Conditions

2.1 To use Eventdomain, you must agree to the Terms.

2.2 You can accept the Terms by simply using the services. Advertisers that freely submit their company details and who benefit from Eventdomain are considered clients of Eventdomain.co.uk.

2.3 Trading Standards and BusinessLink.gov both agree:

Contracts that are formed via the internet are legally binding and enforceable providing that the following conditions are satisfied:

offer – one party must contract with the other

acceptance – the other party must expressly accept the offer

Acceptance of the offer of advertising on Eventdomain is proven by:

1. Creation of a username and password & confirmation of those details

2. Submitting via a security Captcha tool

3. Pressing a submit button to create an advertiser account

4. Creating a Listing within your account

You should note that there is no general requirement for contracts to be in writing or for the parties to actually sign a contract. (Source: Trading Standards & BusinessLink.gov website.)
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Eventdomain Client Accounts

3.1 In order to advertise on our search engines, you will have to create an Advertiser account.

Account. For security purposes you must keep your username and password and email secure.

3.2 You agree that you are solely responsible for any activity under your account, this includes all usernames, passwords, company and website information and descriptions of products and services.

User & Advertiser Submissions/Listings/Adverts

4.1 You agree that your submissions and/or adverts are owned by you and is your responsibility to ensure they aren’t illegal or break any UK/Worldwide advertising laws.

4.2 You agree that Eventdomain is not responsible for the content of individual advertiser submissions.
4.3 You agree that you will not submit content of the following nature: Defamatory, abusive, pornographic material, threatening, harmful, libellous, infringement of copyright.

Eventdomain.co.uk shall not be liable for any third party claims or losses of any nature including, but not limited to: loss of profit, direct, indirect, special damages arising from third party use or inability to use this website.

4.4 Eventdomain sometimes uses debt recovery services. Under UK law, there is a statutory right to charge interest under the late payment legislation and this can be applied to outstanding debtors on an individual case for case basis.

“We will exercise our statutory right to claim interest (at 8 per cent over the Bank of England base rate) and compensation for debt recovery costs under the Late Payment Legislation Act 1998 if we are not paid according to our agreed terms.”
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Intellectual Property

Eventdomain – 2011

The content, design and categories of this website are copyright of Eventdomain. Our website may not be copied, reproduced or downloaded.

It is forbidden to reproduce, alter, modify, or incorporate the content of this website in whole or in part, for use in other documents or in other websites.

2005 – 2011 © Eventdomain. Terms and Conditions apply.

So users are now apparently bound by a contract, the actual terms of which are entirely secret apparently, merely by entering their details on a website. Shouldn’t the actual terms of the contract appear somewhere in the Terms & Conditions maybe? Anyone would think that owner of this site was deliberately trying to trick people into unwittingly entering into contracts. Odd.

And now we come to “the owner of this site”. There are no ownership or contact details at all on the site, apart from misleading ones. The site’s owner is variously described as Crystal Segment Hospitality Media, Crystal Segment Hospitality Media Group, Eventdomain, eventdomain.co.uk, Crystal Segment, Crystal Segment Media and Chris Given.

Chris Given himself is variously described as MD of Crystal Segment Hospitality Media, MD of Eventdomain and just ‘Director’. He doesn’t appear to be any of those things.

The website’s registrant is given in their whois entry as Christopher Given, a UK Individual who alleges that he’s a “non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service”. Now that’s a breach of Nominet’s rules so I’m just about to report him for it. Done.

At the foot of each page of his site there’s a link to another site (Venuedomain.com) registered by him – I say a ‘link’ but in fact he’s so inept that the text ‘Venuedomain.com’ actually links to a non-site at venuedomain.co.uk. Well done.

The Whois for venuedomain.com site reads:

Christopher Given
14 Merten Rd
Romford
RM6 6EH
christophergiven@btconnect.com
07944150075

I’ve also found the number 02085976768 which seems to belong to him.

Now I don’t know exactly what’s going on here but I don’t appreciate people trying to scam me and I don’t appreciate being harassed by debt collection companies for non-existent debts. I’ve wasted far too much time on this already but I’m going to make sure that this scammer is brought out into the open and exposed for the low-life, scamming fool that he obviously is.

As the recession, or ‘downturn’ to put an optimistic slant on it, starts to bite, particularly in the building trade, we’re starting to see more and more new entrants to the same day courier industry. It seems an inevitable feature of every economic slowdown that the industry is swamped with out of work tradesman and redundant factory-workers, keen to put their unused van (or their redundancy payment) to use starting a new business for themselves.

It’s an easy enough business to get into, just a van and a mobile phone required. Nowadays it’s apparently not even necessary to have a collection of maps, or even any map-reading skills; just spend £75 on a satnav and you’re ready for work. That’s the theory at least.

There will no doubt be no shortage of local and national same day courier companies waiting to take advantage of these naïve new starters – high fuel prices, low rates and a general downturn in business has pushed many of their existing subcontractors out of the business and they will no doubt be wishing to put a few more vehicles on the road in the run up to Christmas.

There’s often an (incorrect) assumption that the rates offered by the well-known national courier companies will be the ‘going rate’ and that it must be possible to make a reasonable living at those rates. The reality is that some of the larger and better known courier companies pay their subcontractors mileage rates that haven’t changed for many years. I’ve read recently of one national company paying their subcontractors as little as 44p per loaded mile. That’s £88 for a delivery from Manchester to London, with fuel for the journey costing over £40.

As well as the courier companies wanting to cash in on this new source of fresh meat there’s the internet based scammers circling, all waiting to make a few pounds selling manuals on how to be a freelance courier or charging hundreds of pounds to be a member of their non-existent network.

A quick search on Google brings up a multitude of such dubious offers: ‘How To Become A Courier’, ‘Earn £250+ per day as a freelance courier’, “Make £1,500 a week as a courier’, ‘Join our courier network for just £150’, ‘Become a Freelance Courier’, ‘Want to be a courier? Buy our manual for £50’. It’s all a load of bollocks. Nobody makes £1,500 per week profit driving for a living, even after they’ve been in the industry for 10 years. Most experienced owner-drivers of small vans in the same day courier industry have a TURNOVER of less than £800 per week, often much less than that, for long hours and with high expenses to come out of that figure.

I’d recommend that anyone wishing to become a freelance same day courier should first visit the free forums at www.codforum.org.uk (that’s Courier Owner Driver forum, nothing to do with fish!), whatever your question it’s probably been asked and answered on the forums before. There’s also a lot of useful advice on avoiding the scammers.

I might be giving the impression that it’s not possible to make a decent living as a self-employed courier, but that’s not the case at all. It certainly is possible to earn a living but it’s not as simple as buying a manual or paying £120 to join a network or a web-site. Neither is it as simple as writing a few letters to your local courier companies. It will never be an industry where it’s possible to make untold riches with little effort – you’re driving a van around after all, nothing else, and if it was cheaper for these courier companies to employ drivers rather than using subcontractors then they’d do it. Hard work and dedication can build up a reasonable business, but as a get-rich-quick scheme or as a two month stop-gap venture it’s unlikely to give you the financial returns you’re looking for.

So to recap: DON’T pay for advice that you can get for free, DON’T pay registration or enrollment fees in the hope of receiving work and ALWAYS ask for advice on a forum like Codforum before parting with any money, signing on the dotted line or committing yourself to any new business venture. Oh, and don’t call me looking for work – it’s advertised on our website when we have any.

Not content with lying to their original members about their membership fees giving them life membership, they sneakily bought the courier forum www.link4couriers.com while hiding its ownership from its members, saturating the site with advertising for their associated (and I think highly questionable) business ventures and claiming for two years that it was “by far the largest independent forum for couriers and courier owner drivers”. Independent my arse, about as independent as their courier exchange site that was actually run by a company that was quietly in competition with many of its members.

Anyway, it seems that events have overtaken me and I won’t get the chance to launch the scathing attack on their business that I had intended to. It turns out that the experienced businessmen at Courier Finance Ltd decided that after Amtrak had gone into liquidation in 2007 it would be a good idea to extend credit terms to the newly-formed Netfold Ltd, which bought the business from the liquidators. It also appears that they didn’t notice when Netfold failed to file its first accounts on time in March 2008 and seemingly continued to provide credit to them until they went into administration at the end of August 2008.

Visitors to mtvan.com this evening have been greeted with the message: “We regret to announce that Courier Finance Ltd has ceased trading at the end of Wednesday 10th of September 2008.

The closure of Netfold t/a Amtrak owing Courier Finance Ltd considerable money was just too much.

This in turn has brought down MTvan.com.

To those of you who have supported us in the past, our sincere thanks.

To those of you who are owed money our sincere apologies.”

So that’s alright then.

I wonder if we can we expect a new book in the near future - ”Tony’s Guide To Phoenix Companies”?

If someone was to offer to do £100 worth of work every month for you for life for an up front fee would you accept the offer?

The website’s registered to a non-trading individual. The address is apparently an accomodation address. There’s no company or ownership details on the website. The site’s code contains references to “CRS Employment Escorts”, which seems an interesting sideline for a courier driver agency.
In my opinion they’re about as kosher as Pinky and Perky.

And then there’s all this stuff.

I don’t know what it was like in your region but they blitzed the North West with television advertising last year (or maybe early this year). At the same time we received loads of sales calls from them explaining what a fantastic service it was, how it had generated such fantastic brand-awareness with their television advertising etc.

I’ve not seen one of their adverts for at least 6 months now and their sales calls (thankfully) seem to have dried up. A cynical person might believe that they’re targetting each TV region in turn, and hassling companies into signing up with them on the strength of their TV advertising. Once they’ve attracted their target number of mug punters in the region they could then move on to the next region.

The thing is everyone knows Yell & Thomson – but the fact that you couldn’t even spell ufindus demonstrates that they have some way to go to generate the level of brand-awareness that they would like you to believe they possess.
 

I think they’ve got long-term and short-term parking at Oxford? If you park in the long term you’re meant to buy a pay and display ticket.

Send the solicitors a letter – “According to my records I could not have been at that location at that time. If you have evidence that I was and that I had agreed to this charge please send it to me and I will assess your claim. If you fail to do so I will assume that your claim is entirely spurious.”

Nobody’s going to jump through hoops, provide all the details requested within a reasonable time and take you small claims court 150 miles from where they’re based for the vague chance of gaining £80.