I was following a thread at a forum the other day and we were talking about our Google listings. Someone commented that Truelocal, Hotfrog and others will always bring up your listings first. They didn’t for me, but that’s not the point. At any rate I found a Hotfrog listing for my website much further down and thought I’d go see what was there. Very basic, listed my business name with a web link and my suburb. That’s it. So I decided to claim the listing and proceeded to enter my details. I figure if it’s going to show up in Google I should give it some worthwhile information.

The phone rang. It was a male Indian voice speaking in a muffled manner. The only word I really understood was Hotfrog.  So they’re monitoring people updating their business listings.  After about 15 seconds of muffled speech I interrupted the guy and told him I couldn’t understand him. He began again, still muffled. I told him the same thing.  He hung up.

I continued with my listing. The phone rang again.  Different voice, same pattern. This time I managed to find out that they were calling because of my Hotfrog listing.  I asked who they were representing as they never told me. The guy hung up.

A minute or two later the phone rang again. Hello, a pattern beginning to emerge. The third male Indian to call me. This time much, much clearer. Yes, he was calling because of my recently updated Hotfrog listing. No, he was with another company and they want to help me with my SEO to get me to the top of Google listings. He asked me to go to a website and click… I interrupted him.  I’m not going to go to any website or click on anything at all till you tell me what this is going to cost me.  Click.  He hung up.

I’m posting this just to give you a heads up. Whatever it was they wanted, clearly it was to get me to spend money with them and I suspect it would have been done in a devious way.  Or perhaps they wanted control of my computer by getting me to click on some site that would have released something devastating onto my computer. I don’t know and I really don’t want to know. But I did want to warn you in case you get a call after updating your Hotfrog listing…