DIMdump

Industry Comment #19--Scams, Scum and Scum

Last Thursday, my stock photo agency, Index Stock Imagery, was hit by a variant of what is known as the "Nigeria Scam."  Here is what happened:

1.  Someone obtained one of our checks.  It must have been one that we wrote to an artist, for a commission payment, because it was written on our Bank of America checking account (which we use only for this purpose).

2.  That person used our check as a template and created a number of forgeries.  These forgeries simulated Bank of America check stock, bank transaction codes, and security information.  They also had a copy of our CFO's signature on them.  The copies were good--professional quality.

3.  The group involved created checks in denominations ranging from $10,000 to as much as $150,000.  Then then presented these checks to businesses and banks all over the country.  In just two days, they attempted to pass more than $1,000,000 worth of fake checks.

It should be no surprise to learn that we didn't have $1,000,000 in that account.  If the scammers knew anything about the stock photo industry, they would not have chosen us to attack!  Plus, Bank of America noticed the checks, and realized they were frauds.  So, the scam ring probably didn't get much for their efforts.  For all I know, they might even have lost $5,000 or $10,000 on their effort.  After all, they had the overhead of making the fake checks and distributing them to a surprisingly large network of confederates.

Of course, our daily operations were completely disrupted.  We had to close our account and open a new one. Bank of America could not figure out how to pay the good checks (those we actually had written), while still rejecting the bad checks.  So, all of our good checks are now bouncing.  The balance in the account is frozen, because Bank of America doesn't know for sure what it should clear and should not.  So, we have to find another account and different funds to support the replacement checks we are writing for our artists.  Each time one of our checks bounces in one of our artist's banks, our artist gets charged a $30 to $50 fee.  If you figure there are 100 to 200 checks involved, we are out $3,000 to $10,000, just in bank fees.  Add the pain and suffering of dealing with this mess, plus the missed mortgage payments and hassles for our artists, and we lost at least as much as the scammers.

We haven't seen any FBI agents in our office, yet.  No alarm bells rang.  I don't hear any speeches saying "this shall not stand" by the President or posturing by our attorney general/candidate for governor.  It seems that scams like this one are part of daily business, these days, and no one in our government or legal system really notices them.

Does this piss you off?  Ok, stack on top of this scam, the cost of spam.  Not only the suffering of opening your email every day and finding 400+ spams that offer you Viagra, disgusting sexual adventures, or bizarre ads in Russian, Chinese, or Japanese.  But also spams that contain viruses or tracking worms.  Thanks to McAfee, Spamnet, and our Sprint email filtering system at work and ZoneAlarm, Windows Firewall, and AdAware at home, my poor laptop continues to survive.  But, for how much longer?  Even if each of these attacks has only a 0.001% chance of succeeding (one in 100,000), at 1,000+ attacks per day, the odds are against me!

Look at it another way.  We are a legitimate business.  If someone registers with us, and wants to hear more about our products, we send them emails.  Those who receive our emails seem to like them.  We get open rates over 10% and our unsubscribe rate is under 1%.  But, we estimate that 20% to 50% of the emails we send are blocked by corporate and private spam filters.  That takes money out of the pockets of our artists, and deprives our customers of information they want.  And it is not our fault, it is the fault of the scum that clutter up the world with spam!

Another example.  My blog is a modest effort, with relatively low traffic.  Even so, some people want to post spam comments and spam trackbacks.  They have some kind of robot posting machine that does this.  I have to log on to get rid of those entries.  Otherwise, what traffic I get would be siphoned off to sites that would embarrass me...

Not pissed off about this, yet?  Spend your time writing an original blog.  Find time in between everything else to do research, think about things, and post your idea.  Then, post your prose and wait.  One day later, some $%#&*@ in Singapore grabs the first 100 words of your blog and posts it on his site.  He links at the bottom of your entry, to your site, so you are supposed to feel flattered.  But, he didn't ask your permission and doesn't mention that he didn't write the post.  Plus, he sells ads on his site...and doesn't give you a share of the money he is making off you and the other 100 people he "harvests."

Scam, Spam, and Scum.  Remember the movie Network?  As Howard Beale said, "I'm mad as hell and I won't take it any more!"  I wish I knew what to do about it.  Here is my modest plan:

1.  Ignore all your spam.  If EVERYONE NEVER BOUGHT ANYTHING from a spam email, they would stop doing it!  NEVER buy from from someone who spams you.

2.  Permit all your good email.  If you are not careful, you may be blocking emails from your friends, potential business partners, even that friend from high school you always wanted to hear from, again!

3.  Every time you get sent to a spam site (one of those ones that lure you in with their high Google rank and "borrowed" content) leave right away! Please DON'T click on any of the ads they carry.

4.  Be careful.  When you are on a Web site and you start getting asked for personal information, look for reassurance.  We have to get social security numbers for our artists, so we can pay them.  We have to get credit card numbers or Purchase Orders from clients, so we can bill them.  We are really careful with this information--you be careful, too!

5.  Vote for people who understand the problem, and will do something about it!  We need help--stronger laws, international treaties, more FBI agents...heck, I'd be happy to see the Marines get involved!  Forget invading Iraq and giving Iran a hard time.  Let's do something about getting rid of Internet scum.

You may not be pissed about this, but I am!  Please do your part to rid the world of these folks.  And, give me more ideas about what we can do, as a community, to get rid of scams, spam, and scum!

Industry Comment #18--The Vice of Voice Menus

Hope you won't mind if I pause talking about categories, and indulge myself in a brief rant.  I am SO tired of listening to voice mail menus--aren't you?

My company, Index Stock Imagery, has a live receptionist.  When you call us, either there is no one here (yes, we go home at night) or you speak to a human being.  I recently had the excuse to call three of my competitors--and got voice menus and voice mail, each time.

I mentioned this to my sister and she told me that there is a whole site devoted the to subject of voice menus, voice mail, and avoiding same, plus lots of other sites that share my dim view of using machines to talk to people.

gethuman -- a site devoted to instructing us on how to reach a human, when you need one

Tricks of the Trade -- lots of professional secrets, including how to avoid talking to machines

lifehacker -- advice to simplify and streamline your life, and put the geeks in their proper place

I'm happy that other people don't like voice menus.  I assume that they agree with my reasons, for preferring humans to machines:

1.  If we are lucky enough to get called by a customer, we want to talk to her or him!  We don't want that wonderful, kind, interesting person to have to make a choice between hitting a 1 or a 2!  We want that lovely person to talk to one of our equally lovely salespeople and give us some of her or his lovely business!

2.  Want to find someone at Index?  We want you to be able to reach that person, too!  A receptionist can page the person you are looking for, quiz his or her colleagues about where the person is, and even ask you to wait while we come back from the bathroom or getting a snack.  And, if you decide to leave a message, you don't have to worry about getting cut off, half way through a sentence.

3.  Not sure exactly who you need to talk to?  Not sure what you want to ask?  A lot of times, when I call a company, I don't know if I need to talk to accounting, customer service, or sales.  Doesn't it make more sense to speak to someone who knows everyone, and can help you get to the right place?

4.  The CEOs of those other companies probably spend a lot of time listening to their voice messages.  I hope they enjoy listening to stock brokers, leasing companies, those fake police beneficial association people...  I don't get those messages, because a human being knows I don't want them.

5.  Does it cost more money to have a reception person?  Those menu machines don't come cheap, and our reception people do a LOT of other things.  Doing image research for the sales team, adding keywords to images, checking invoices, processing inbound emails from our agents...could a voice mail system do all those things?

6.  Can a voice menu machine say "Good morning," every day?  Can he or she wish you "Happy Valentine's Day," the way our receptionist, did this morning?  Machines are good for a lot of things, but they are not great at dealing with people.

Feel free to disagree, and tell me the wonders of allowing a customer to leave you an important message at midnight.  I can answer with letters and emails from customers, artists, friends, and family, who all appreciate not having to agonize over which number to choose!  Why get hung up on, by a machine that doesn't understand you?  I'd rather rely on the intelligence, good manners, and charm of a human being, any day of the week!

Analysis #27--Image Categories and US Travel

What U.S. state is most popular?  One way to measure this is to look at our licensing information by category.  As you can guess, we have a separate category for each state, with subcategories for major cities and sites within each.  It is pretty easy to add up the sales made over the last three years, and announce which states were the overall revenue leaders for that period:

New York

California

Massachusetts

Florida

Washington, DC.

(Please don’t argue that Washington, D.C. doesn’t count as a state!  FYI, at just over 570,000 residents, the District of Columbia has a bigger population than Wyoming and about the same as North Dakota, Alaska, and Vermont.)

There are probably no surprises on this list, nor would it be surprising that these five states lag at the bottom of the list:  Oklahoma, Mississippi, Delaware, Kansas, and North Dakota.  (Poor North Dakota!  Over the past three years, images of it generated only 0.2% of what those of New York brought in.)  If we take the analysis one step further, we can express return in terms of annual revenue per image in the file for each state.  This allowed me to adjust for the fact that major states like New York and California have many more images (5,800 and 6,205 respectively) than less photogenic states like Iowa and West Virginia (33 and 30 respectively).  This adjustment changes the order dramatically, and gives us a whole new order:

Iowa—nice to see a “Midwestern” state get credit for something other than corn and cattle!

West Virginia—one of the few states we have no subcategories for.  Guess no one in our library could think of a special site in this state, that needed its own file.

Arkansas—a cool state, that is more than just the home state of the Clintons.

Maryland—Baltimore has had a big renaissance, and this state’s beaches and meadows are beautiful.

Michigan—nice to see a “Midwestern” state…oh, I said that already.  (Remember, I’m from Ohio and LOVE the Midwest!)

Can data like this lead to a geographical strategy for U.S. travel shooting?  Are there cities or sites that are underrepresented in our file or extra popular?  Given the broad sweep of images and subjects in this area, we probably have to go down one more level to get an answer.  Here are five category/subcategory combinations that look promising to me:

1. Detroit, Michigan.  This city has changed dramatically in the past ten years.  We don’t have many images of Detroit, and a lot of them are not up to date.
2. The White House.  We have just over 60 images of this American icon.  I’m not sure what new angle we could get on this image—but there is a good opportunity here, if you’d got an idea.
3. New York Snow Scenes.  We don’t get that much snow in New York.  But, when the white stuff covers our grime and grit, it is beautiful.  You can’t force it to happen, but when the forecast is snow, grab that camera and get outdoors!
4. Newport, Rhode Island.  If you haven’t seen the mansions, the harbor, the shops and the streets of this ancient (for the US) city, take a camera and go!  Stay at one of the bed and breakfast places and don’t forget to use vinegar on your fries—real Rhode Islanders don’t use ketchup.
5. The Corn Palace, South Dakota.  OK, this one may not be fair, because we only have two images of the Corn Palace and it is hard to know how much more room there is, for such a specialized subject.  However, I want to make the point that there are hundreds of interesting, unique, local subjects, that deserve to be recorded.  Each time a new museum opens, a state capitol is renovated, or a new statue is erected, why not get us a shot for our library?

Please don’t expect instant miracles, if you give us more images on these subjects.  But, it probably makes sense to focus on areas like these (we have less than 100 images on most of them), rather than working in fields that have already been ploughed, planted, and harvested, too many times.