If you got a bill from Sunshine Biz Services – It’s a SCAM! The fake invoice looks like a real bill

The invoice is a fake renewal notice for annual website hosting. It shows a bill of $180 payable to “Sunshine Biz Services Inc.” It also says: “To pay with a credit card or to avoid receiving paper invoices in the future, please sign up for paperless billing at www.trendywebsolutions. com.”

Unsuspecting businesses may get an invoice like this and pay it – that’s what Sunshine Biz Services is hoping you do!  Scams like this try to confuse people by sending these type of invoices knowing that people usually don’t read the fine print.

While this looks like a bill, it does say : “You are under no obligation to make any payments on account of this offer unless you accept this offer. This notice is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to renew your web hosting with Sunshine Biz Services.”

But if they aren’t hosting your website to begin with how can you renew hosting with them? Trendy Web Solutions does have a website that appears to offer various hosting packages. But if any company is this shady – would anyone trust their business website to them?

If you try to call the phone number listed you will end up waiting through many prompts and the automated voice eventually says “This is a solicitation, goodbye!”

This particular scam has been around at least since 2015, according to a Reddit post.

According to the BBB

BBB Alert - Pattern of Complaints

BBB files contain a pattern of complaints from consumers that allege they received solicitation that looks like an invoice to be paid in the amount of $180.00.

On January 18th 2019, BBB sent correspondence to Sunshine Biz Services requesting their voluntary cooperation in providing steps it will implement to eliminate the pattern of customer complaints.
BBB will continue to monitor and update the company's report as needed.

Yelp is an influential site but also tends to continually stir up controversy and disillusionment among business owners.

Love it or hate it - Yelp has the potential to be a force for good but sometimes ends up being one of the worst things that has happened to small business in the last few years. Both reviewers and businesses complain about the filtering algorithm which often hides good reviews while showing every bad one. There have been to accusations of extortion by Yelp, if you pay they claim they will remove competitor’s listings that normally appear alongside your business.

According to Yelp:

“Every Yelp review is automatically evaluated by Yelp’s recommendation software based on quality, reliability, and user activity on Yelp. More often than not, those useful reviews come from active members of the Yelp community.”

Yelp usually puts more weight on reviews left by people who have a lot of friends, and who have left many reviews for businesses. Could it be possible that some customers find if they want to promote businesses they like, they must leave bad reviews for other businesses to make their good reviews look legit. Is it possible that these people will leave much harsher reviews than they normally would, or even leave unnecessarily bad reviews for businesses they have never patronized?

Anyone you will ever talk to at Yelp has no real clue what is going on in their own company, is never of any help if you have a questions and cannot explain how their filtering algorithm works.

"You may not know me and you are probably wondering why you are getting this e mail, right?  I’m a hacker who cracked your email and devices a few months ago."

If you have received this email, chances are there is no reason to worry. This is just another scam used to trick people into paying a Cyber criminal.

Think of these emails like the daily horoscope. Thousands of people can read the same horoscope and think it applies to them directly. This is because horoscopes are so vague and general enough to be somewhat meaningful to a good percentage of people who believe in that kind of stuff.

So the Cyber criminal knows that a certain percentage of computer users aren’t all that savvy, may not be all that up to date on technology, maybe don’t have anti-virus installed, and are very likely doing something on their computer that could be embarrassing if someone else found out.

Like so many other spam email campaigns, "Hacker who cracked your email and device Email Scam" is designed to blackmail people. Cyber criminals send emails stating that your computer has been infected or hacked. Maybe they claim to have installed a remote access tool and taken a humiliating photo of you, or video of you watching porn, etc. . If they are not paid, they threaten to distribute this photo by sending it to all of your contacts.

The Cyber criminals send these emails out to thousands or even tens of thousands of people in the hopes that just one or two people fall for the scam. These criminals have nothing better to do, so they just keep coming up with one new scam after another.

The following is an example of what one of these emails will look like (including bad grammar and spelling errors)

You may not know me and you are probably wondering why you are getting this e mail, right?
I’m a hacker who cracked your email and devices a few months ago.

Proud to be a sposor of the 50th Annual Devereaux - Kaiser Car Meet.

We also designed the flyer, T-Shirts, and Dash Plaques.  Hope to see you there!

I am often asked why I specialize in building Joomla websites when many other web designers seem to use WordPress.

The short answer is that from personal experience I prefer Joomla, I think it is more secure and has more functionality than WordPress.

Back in 2007 when I started switching from static html sites to content management systems I experimented with Drupal, Joomla and WordPress to see which one worked best for me. Being a graphic artist first and a web designer second, I found that Joomla had more flexibility and was much more robust than WordPress.

The basic difference between WordPress and Joomla is that Joomla started out as a CMS meant to serve larger portal-like websites and WordPress is often associated with simple blogs, but it can also be a great solution for landing pages and basic sites.

Joomla is more geared towards developers who want to have creative control and are not afraid to “get their hands dirty” working with servers. WordPress, on the other hand, is more beginner friendly and very-easy to get started with. Many cheap web hosting companies offer one click WordPress installs for those who want to set up a simple site or blog. Joomla is more complicated.

Joomla is known for its complexity and a site built with Joomla can have endless possibilities, but the learning curve is very steep for those with little experience in web development.

Currently over 2 million sites are built using Joomla including The Guggenheim, Holiday Inn Express, U.K National Crime Agency, OpenVPN, United Nations, Linux, Harvard,University, Ikea, Lipton, and the Hill to name a few.

Security

Security is always a big concern and WordPress accounts for 74% of all hacked websites. However – it’s also more likely that amateurs will use WordPress, and those people may not always want to spend the extra money to buy commercial security extensions, keep the site up to date or use premium web hosting.

Due to its popularity, WordPress has a giant target on its back when it comes to security vulnerabilities. There are thousands of plugins available to customize WP, but this also makes each installation a nightmare from a security standpoint because it’s impossible to make sure that every plugin remains compatible with newer versions of the platform.

Moreover, WordPress doesn’t ship with basic features such as forcing a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). In fact, most of its advanced security features rely entirely on plugins.

SSL and 2FA is native to Joomla, it offers its own set of security extensions, and its developers maintain a list of those extensions with known vulnerabilities.

In the very early days when I started out building sites, I used shared hosting or built sites on the clients hosting account. As my client base grew, I was able to upgrade and migrate to my own dedicated managed servers. I have built and manage every site on my server. If you don’t have your own server you are sharing space with a lot of different sites that are most likely not updated or secure, and could be easy targets for hackers.

Search engine optimization

If we compare the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities of both platforms out of the box, Joomla takes a slight edge due enabling its users to set meta descriptions and keywords for new articles. There are those who claim WordPress may be a little more SEO-friendly, but I doubt few serious web designers who would depend on the basic out of the box installation for SEO best results. Joomla can be made even more powerful by purchasing a few addons. I use several commercial SEO extensions that greatly increase Jooma’s functionality.

Performance is one of the weak spots of WordPress. But then again, if you buy a Prius you wouldn’t expect it to handle like a Porsche. Joomla has a good reputation concerning performance. Part of the reason is that it has performance-boosting functionality built in, and it also comes with plugins to make it even faster. Joomla also excels in the area of e-commerce with many extensions and templates for the purpose.

More Joomla Advantages

More advanced user management – Joomla offers a more advanced system for user access controls and user management out of the box.

Flexible for different content types – Joomla’s components and modules give you a bit more flexibility for displaying non-standard content types.

Multilingual support – Joomla has multilingual support built-in to the core, while WordPress requires you to use a third-party plugin.

It doesn’t matter if you are a large corporation or a grandmother with a computer full of family photos – we all need to have good backups.

I’ve had people contact me regarding photos of their wedding I took 8 years ago that they lost when a computer crashed. I’ve had clients crash accidentally delete important files, format hard drives, and lose laptops – all without a good backup of their data.

Having your computer backed up is simple and inexpensive, especially when you consider what your data is worth and how hard it would be to replace.

A lot of people use Carbonite because it’s a well-known backup service with a generally good track record, but recently when I had trouble retrieving files from Carbonite I started looking into alternatives.

The problem with Carbonite happened while I was out of town and had to retrieve some older files for a client. To this day Carbonite can’t explain what happened – but basically, I was able to log into my account but unable to see or download files. Matters were made worse when a technician at Carbonite tried to help and accidentally deleted all of my backed-up files. They claim they were able to recover the files after 48 hrs but I was never able to download the ones I needed. This defeats one of the main reasons to have a backup service in the first place.

At the time I had 2 different plans with Carbonite, a Safe Prime plan at $149.99 per year and a safe basic plan that was $71.99, so I was spending $220 a year for something I could not use. And of course, when I tried to cancel my account after 6 months they would offer no refund.

With Carbonite I had always noticed the interface was horribly slow, and it was just a real pain to view backed up files. When I first installed Carbonite it took almost a month for my first backup to finish. I also believe Carbonite did slow down the computer a bit while backing up even though they claim they don’t. Carbonite does not back up external drives, and you need to manually back up any videos.

Unfortunately, I also found out the hard way Carbonite not only has horrible customer service, but their people really don’t seem to know what they are doing – at least the 5 people I talked to over a period of 3 days.

So after some research, reading reviews, and asking around I settled on a new online backup company called Backblaze. The immediate bonus was that backblaze is only $50 per year per computer – and that’s even for business use. It took less than half of the time to back up my whole computer that Carbonite took – and did not slow the computer down at all while backing up.

Several times now I have retrieved files while traveling and it is easy and quick. You choose the files you need and you get an email when they are ready to download. This usually happens within just a few minutes even for large files.

With Backblaze you can download a free restore of as many files as you need anywhere in the world. There is also an option to have a 128 GB flash drive ($99) FedExed to you, or an external drive up to 4 TB ($189). You can return the storage media and get your money back if you don't want to keep it as an archive.

Historically speaking, the easier backup is, the better chance it'll get done, and I can’t think of anything simpler than Backblaze. I highly recommend it and only wish I had discovered it sooner.

Business owners get overwhelmed with emails daily. Clients, potential customers, and way too much spam.

For someone trying to grow their business an email claiming to get them maximum traffic can sound tempting, and occasionally, an email will come through that says, “SEO Proposal” from a person who is an “Expert Online Strategist” who has reviewed your website and “only wants to help”.

It’s nice to imagine a perfect world where complete strangers would go out of their way to help your business do better.

These mysterious people claim they can magically unlock the secrets to Search Engine Optimization, grow your company’s online presence and make your website the most beautiful powerful website on the internet while sending you so many new customers you won’t know what to do with them all. How can this all not sound amazing? Unfortunately, when you dig a little deeper you find this is nothing but a total scam and these criminals are only out to get as much money as they can from you.

You may think the email is real and that their intentions are pure but if you look closely you will notice that the body of the email is quite generic. It’s common for business owners to be told that their site is failing to rank for important keywords, they won’t identify or specify the ill ranking keywords to you.

It may seem like the email has been directed at you or your company. These scams work in much the same way that horoscopes are written to be generic so hundreds of thousands of people will all read the same horoscope and believe it was for them.

If you’ve received one (or 20) of these emails recently, it was not a personal note to you but very likely a piece of spam generated in bulk by a software program. Often, the sender is an SEO lead generation company whose function is to collect contact information from unsuspecting leads (like you). You can be certain that no human being has spent a single second analyzing your website.

If you contact the sender to discuss web services or search engine optimization, you will be sold to some other unidentified SEO company that will run a quick “analysis” of your site and then try to sell you on a contract for their SEO services that will be a total rip-off.

Last week, Governor Rick Scott issued Executive Order 18-221 declaring a state of emergency due to impacts of naturally occurring red tide in Collier, Lee, Charlotte, Sarasota, Manatee, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. 

Following Governor Rick Scott's emergency order, VISIT FLORIDA launched two programs, the Tourism Recovery Grant Program for Red Tide and Red Tide Recovery Marketing Program, to assist the counties. 

Through the Red Tide Recovery Marketing Program, the following programs are available immediately at no cost to core tourism businesses located in the affected counties. For additional information about red tide, click here.

Complimentary Brochure Distribution at all

five Official Florida Welcome Centers

Available through February 28, 2019, businesses may ship a maximum of 2,000 brochures per Welcome Center for distribution. For more information and to secure your brochure placement please contact the Visitor Services Department at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Complimentary Lobby Booth Program at four Highway Welcome Centers

Available through February 28, 2019, businesses may schedule a time to participate in the Lobby Booth Display program. Please contact the Welcome Centers at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to schedule a

location and time. 

Complimentary VISIT FLORIDA Marketing Partnership

Core tourism businesses located within the affected areas of Florida have the opportunity to get a Small Business Marketing Partnership free of charge through February 28, 2019. With the Marketing Partnership, businesses receive an Enhanced Web Listing on VISITFLORIDA.com, the ability to submit social media posts for consideration, ability to promote Partner-to-Partner specials and more. To submit your enrollment application, click here.

Be careful of cheap online web design companies that offer "free domians".

If you are dealing with an ethical web design company, and you prefer to have them manage your domain that’s fine. But be careful of shady companies that offer cheap web design and a “free domain”. When the time comes to move on to a different company you may find your domain is being held hostage.

Recently a company contacted me to build a new website for them. They had originally used a cheap web design company and quickly found that customer service was nonexistent. The website had multiple grammatical errors, wrong information, the wrong logo was even used. After calling and emailing for months the customer got little to no response and nothing on the site was ever fixed.

Finally in frustration the customer decided they had to move on to another company to get the website they wanted but soon found out it wasn’t going to be so easy to get their domain name.

This is the email we received when we requested a domain transfer:

"Dear All,

We provided him domain free of cost. The value of the domain in today's date is $285. We are going to sell the domain for no less than $300 ass the traffic to the domain and value of it is pretty good. . Please let us know if you interested.

call on the number below.

regards,
Jack
Tel No : 1703-349-7835
Email id : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Life would be so much better if we didn’t wake up every morning to a mailbox full of spam.

Usually when I get unsolicited emails from companies that do not include an opt-out I will reply to the email and ask them nicely to remove me from their list. I normally give them a link to the FTC site and try to educate them about the CAN-SPAM Act. 9 times out of 10 they are grateful because some people still do not understand that there are rules to sending emails.

Occasionally I get someone who will just not listen. For example – over the last 6 months I’ve received emails from a person named Adam J McLean who has what he refers to as a referral website called the Jofi Dream Team (JDT) and he keeps asking me to join for $50 a month. 3 different times I’ve politely told him I am not interested and asked him to remove me from his list. The last time I gave him a link to the FTC website and suggested he read about the CAN-SPAM Act, and this was his reply:

“You are ridiculous. How tough is it to delete an email? It took you more time to send me an email. I get a million emails. Click and delete. That easy!

Have a great week!

Adam”

A few weeks ago I received a disturbing screen shot from an upset client.

A client was notified by one of their customers that while searching the internet to find the business’s phone number the customer saw an ad that had my clients name but did not go to their website.

Upon investigation we discovered the website was hvac.zone and they were running PPC ads using the business name of my client. The PPC ad directs people to a website and asks them to enter information to receive a free HVAC quote.

Turns out hvac.zone is run by Local Clarity Internet Marketing out of Irbid Jordan. So I went to the website and entered my information to see what would happen.

I received calls from Sears and one other local AC company which is a competitor of my client. When I explained to them what I did to initiate this contact and why, they both informed me that they received my information as a lead through Home Advisor.

About 15 minutes later Home Advisor called me to make sure I found an AC company and I explained the whole situation to a pleasant lady who acted like she was very apologetic, claimed she was unaware of this practice, and promised she would pass the information along to a supervisor. I asked her to forward my email address so I could send a screen shot of the ad. I never heard back from anyone at Home Advisor.

Over the years clients have asked about this letter, and just this last year I probably got 25 of these letters myself.

If you receive a letter from iDNS – throw it in the trash.

You do not have to send them a cent, you do not have to transfer your domain name to them, and there is no risk of losing your domain. This is a scam to trick you into transferring your domain to a different company that will most likely take you to the cleaners.

According to the letter: “ You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to Internet Domain Name Services. Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”

I imagine that since so many of these letters are obviously mailed out that there are a lot of people who get confused and fall for this trick. Thankfully none of my clients has done that so I’m not sure what exactly happens if you were to switch your name to iDNS.

But you would be at least paying twice as much to register your domain name, and I also assume that if you wanted to transfer away from iDNS it would be almost impossible to do so or at the very least there would be some very high transfer fees.

If you get a letter from a company you have never heard from you should read it very carefully – especially if it has anything to do with your business or domain name.

I always suggest that businesses have their domain name under their control. You can register your domain at any number of reputable registrars including GoDaddy, Network Solutions, 1&1, etc. But never with a company that sends you a letter in the mail out of the blue.

These letters from iDNS usually appear to be mailed from an address with a Suite # in New Jersey, and the enclosed envelopes have a New Jersey address. I did a Google search for the address 924 Bergen Ave, Jersey City, NJ 07306 – and I found that it was a UPS store P.O. box.

We can fairly quickly promote your website to the top of search rankings with no long term contracts!

How many times have you seen this email? We all get them, and I get a ton of them.

For example:

Hello,

My name is jenny Smith and I am a Digital Marketing Specialists for a Creative Agency.

I was doing some industry benchmarking for a client of mine when I came across your website.

I noticed a few technical errors which correspond with a drop of website traffic over the last 6-8 months which I thought I would bring to your attention.

After closer inspection it appears your site is lacking in 4 key criteria.

1- Website Speed
2- Link Diversity
3- Domain Authority
4- Competition Comparison

I can send you over the report which shows all of the above and so much more which will help you at least improve your site, its rankings and traffic.

I would love the chance to help as well however; this report will at least give you a gauge on the quality of what I do. If you are interested then please share your requirement and contact details.

Is this the best email to send it to?

Sincerely,
Jenny Smith
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Jenny is a liar! She never actually took the time to review your website. This is a form letter sent out in the hopes that someone will email them back.

SEO scams like these typically start to pile up in your inbox once your site has moved to the top results of search engines.

So, Jenny works for a Creative Agency, why does she not say which one? And if it’s a legitimate Creative Agency – why do they not have a website or an email address with the domain name for the agency? And where is the physical address and phone number?

Jenny isn’t her name at all, and if you were to respond to her email chances are you would get a response containing a document that when opened would infect your computer with a virus.

Other ways to tell an email is just spam:

1. The email has no specific info about your company or website – it’s all very vague like a horoscope – it can apply to just about everyone.
2. The correspondence is unsolicited.
3. The message is in broken English.
4. You get the same exact message from different people.