In today's episode of "Clueless Telemarketers Who Don't Do Their Homework" we'll examine cold calls from none other than Comodo SSL certificates. Today we received a voicemail from someone calling from (201) 620-6929. Here's the message they left:
"Hello, we're calling in regards to an expiring security certificate on one of your website and like to talk to you about some renewal options if you can give us a call back at 973-915-3191 the number is 973-915-3191. Thank you."
Notice that at no time do they say the name of the company they're calling from, which is not only extremely unprofessional, but a tactic used by spammers and scammers. At the beginning of the voicemail I can here someone's TV in the background, before the obviously pre-recorded message is played. Yeah, Comodo just gets more professional all the time....NOT.
I did a little Googling, and found the number belongs to Comodo. I also found quite a few businesses posting about Comodo making misleading cold calls, and reporting them going back several years.
"Comodo is performing misleading cold calls designed to trick you into purchasing a SSL certificate with them rather than renewing with your existing provider. Remember when you used to get letters and emails from companies like Domain Registry of America (DROA). I think everyone agreed those were disreputable. Comodo is performing the same sort of activity."
Roger, infosecblog.org, 7/18/2011
Comodo sells SSL certificates. The part their spammer apparently missed is....so do we.
We also don't do business with any vendor that uses these sort of deceptive selling tactics.
