I recently picked up the phone to a sales pitch. The opening line of which contained the phrases "We have an opening for companies in your field" and "have you heard of Google?" in the same sentence.

Stiffleing a chuckle to myself I played along to see where this conversation would go. Well it seems this UK based company were calling me "on behalf of Google" and they were apparently promising to sell me Google search results that would place me on the top page for any search term I could ever dream of. This, of course, is total nonsense. Google do not cold call selling advertising, nor to they hire others to do so.

At this stage i decided to point out that most companies in "our field" (eh that's Web Design, you might look at our website lads before calling us) have indeed "heard of Google" in fact we're more then familiar with Google and we happen to know Google don't sell search results, apart from Google Ads, with which i am very familiar. This didn't put off our intrepid sale man, he proceeded to promise me all sorts of things which I happen to know are not possible. I'm not sure if he was ignorant to how Google works or whether he was trying to fool me into signing up with them.

On reflection I wish I'd paid more attention to the company name and reported them to Com Reg because they could easily fool people into believing they're going to get something that simply is not possible.

The moral of the story? Beware of phone calls from companies promising to sell you search results. For some reason the calls seem to come from the UK and in effect they're after your money and seem to have no shame as to what they'll promise you to get you to sign up.