Yahoo Search Marketing Promotion.  This deal is no deal. Where I am from it’s called fraud.

Recently I was asked to set up an online advertising campaign to promote a friends business.  I was going to set up a Google Adwords account for them, but I saw this great offer from Yahoo Search Marketing Small Business and decided that I’d set up both an Adwords account and a Yahoo Search Marketing account using this advertiser coupon / bonus / credit.

Please note the nice young lady with the sign.  Oh sure she looks friendly enough, but watch out! She bites!  Just to the right above the ’sign up’ button,  plain as day you can see the $100 credit offer.

Will you get the credit?  Absolutely not! A customer service inquiry got me the answer that the promotion was not valid and that they could only offer a $25 credit.  Other reports online say that I was lucky to receive even that.

Notice the little tiny ‘1′ on the left side of the sign up button?  Check the fine print on the  bottom of the very same page where is says $100 and you’ll see that they are going to give you “$0 credit into the account”.

So at this point, Yahoo has my friends $30 and my friend has been cheated by Yahoo.  What did I do?  I got another friend to sign up and I used a page that says it will give you $100 on the top and in the fine print.  Guess what?  They still will not deposit the credit. Having had two experiences with this on different offer pages for two different peoples accounts, I can tell you that this is a repeated pattern of criminal behavior on the part of Yahoo.  If I didn’t have two responses from their customer service reps to show, then I would not say that, but I’m calling it like it is.

Attn Yahoo: You can respond any time and tell us all exactly how sorry you are and what you are going to do to correct this for my friends and for the millions of customers out there that you are currently cheating.  Come clean and this post gets updated.  Come really clean and make good and I’ll even delete it and call it a temporary error on your part.  Until then in the interest of public safety in avoiding online scams, the post stays.

Please consider an MSN account in addition to your Adwords account.  Both companies actually follow through on their offers and the performance on MSN, although lower traffic, has been startlingly good.

This has been a Dave Williams Public Service Announcement - File under Staying Safe Online

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