Bill Rice of Kaleidico comes out of the wood work to call out potential scammers of the Lead MarketWatch Widget. He puts out a pretty stiff warning to anyone who is thinking of ways to game the widget.

Here is the warning: If you are willing to compromise your integrity in the marketplace we will not allow you to leverage the Lead Marketwatch in that scam. If you are a lead provider your data will be indefinitely suppressed in Lead Marketwatch with no appeal. If you are a lender you will be terminated from the lead management network as a violation of our terms of service.

I was wondering when someone would actually get caught gaming the widget. I have speculated in the past about lead providers possibly gaming the widget here and here. It turns out that a lead provider actually been caught doing so.

So after seeing Bill’s post I was really curious to know what the details were of the scam and which company was trying to boost their results on the widget. I figured Bill wouldn’t give out the dirt so I called one of their reps to get the details and this what I found.

Apparently, the lead provider purchased seats on the Kaleidico platform and sent leads to the seats they purchased. According to Kaleidico it all seemed legitimate. There were multiple LO’s and a real office address. Red flags were sent up when they noticed a disproportionate amount of leads compared to the amount of LO’s going into the system and they were all coming from one provider. Not only that, but the leads were being marked Application very quickly.

They researched the address on the credit card and it led to the Lead Providers location. Now, who was the company? I don’t know, they wouldn’t tell me, but in the blog post they said that the provider has been removed from the Widget and the Featured Lead Provider List. I don’t keep track of the widget so I wouldn’t know who is on the widget one week and not another, so this maybe tough. I went ahead and checked Google’s cached records for Kaleidico’s website and this is what I found. Here is a link to a cached page. and a link to the current page. I also took screen shots:

I can’t confirm this and Juicy Leads may not be involved in this scam at all, but the evidence does look as though this might be the case.

Anybody have any guesses?

To the culprit: Do you really have to game, spam and scam everything?? Can you have a little respect for the industry, lead buyers and yourself? For crying out loud, spend more time on trying to improve your leads then scam everyone into believing you generate quality leads! You should be ashamed!

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