Radius Group

 

This is a cautionary tale that every company should know how to handle.

There is a perfectly legitimate company called Radius Investments LLC in Santa Barbara, California.

They have two web sites at :-

http://www.radiusgroup.com/index.cfm
http://www.radiusinvestments.com

Which are related. I have looked at them on the internet and the company seems very reputable, in that are a typical locallly based American real estate company.

For the last few months, I've been getting a whole series of spam e-mails from a company called Impex. They are one of these advance fee fraud people, who mention Western Union and getting ten percent for just transferring money. On Monday, I noticed that the Impex frauds were declining and they stopped yesterday. Usually when one of these stops, it means that it's run it's course and they will be starting another.

So I searched all the spam I was getting and found that another one had been started based on a web site at :-

http://www.radiusgr.net

This web site has been cloned from the legitimate Radius Investments and takes these sort of frauds to a new level, in that it has no spelling mistakes, has been put together in a professional way and all the people in it are legitimate. It gives a Tokyo address, although the site was registered on the 20th January this year in New Jersey. The street address given seems to be legitimate.

Needless to say it is certainly spam, as it contains the usual rubbish to fool spam filters and a graphic.

I have e-mailed Radius Group and they have put a private investigator on the case.

Now to me this is serious fraud and it could have serious consequences for the company, if they do not handle it properly.

If it happened to my company, I would come clean and bring in the media and show what a good company we are and show up the fraudsters for what they are. After all how many opportunities do you get to get on National TV and Radio?

Not many! And as they say "all publicity is good publicity".

The original author was Brendan Behan, but he really said "All publicity is good publicity except your own obituary".