Sbshow's fast growth and the success our member-advertisers are achieving has made SBS a target for marketers from other services and even some out-and-out scam artists.

The purpose of this "Consumer Watchdog" section is to help make you an informed consumer. If you are a member, please send e-mail to us about any questionable contacts you've experienced where people are claiming to represent us or when something "just doesn't sound right about a pitch you are receiving."

Remember the old adage: "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is."

Sept.-Oct. 1998 -- Spam e-mail campaign

Many Small-Business Showcase members reported receiving a series of bulk e-mail messages in September and October, from someone who claimed to have visited their SBS site and was offering to redesign their site for "free," wanting only "honest criticism" and then offering an extremely low "hosting" fee if they decided to keep the ad. This person (he cloaked himself in a pseudonym -- we'll just call him "Bob") eventually took five customers from us by stealing the text and artwork off the pages we created for them, and making some slight cosmetic changes.

How's his traffic? In what has to be one of the more bizarre "features" that "Bob" touts, he links all his customers' pages to a common Web discussion board. There have only been six posts to that board in two months -- three of them by "Bob" himself (posting with two different e-mail addresses), two by one of the clients he took from us and the remaining message just reads, "Is this Brenda's posting board?" That begs for our question: "Will the last one leaving this Web site please turn out the lights?"

There's a saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a giant chicken." The translation is, the inexpensive, global reach of the Internet makes it easy for people to pretend to be what they're not and make promises they can't keep. There are legitimate entrepreneurs starting small Web shops, but there are lots of flakes, too. Watch out for Internet dandruff!

What would you like to do next?

• Do a search for a Web page on Sbshow
• Do a search for a classified ad
• Find out about Small-Business Showcase
• Visit our frequently asked questions (FAQs) area