Are phone directories cleaning up their act?

Got a call from a local phone directory sales person this week wanting me to buy an advertisement in their “yellow” pages.

First I asked her if we could advertise using our online business name, A-Florida-Locksmith.com instead of/ or in addition to our legal name which is Martin Security Group, Inc. She said we could as long as we showed her a business license with that name. When I said I didn’t have one for A-Florida-Locksmith.com, she then said that all I would need would be to print out a fictitious name filing from the State website.

Next I began asking her about all the bogus locksmith listings in the phone book.

“Oh, those were a lot of unscrupulous people. They didn’t pay us so we took them out. You’ll see a big difference in the phone book this year,” she said. “I had other locksmiths ask me the same question.”

Okay, I thought. So it was the sales people’s fault – they just sold advertising to anyone who said they would pay.

“Now with anyone who does more than $300 a month in advertising with us, we have to do a fraud check on them,” she continued.

“So what about all the bogus online listings?” I asked

“If they don’t pay, then we pull them right away,” she said. “We can do that much easier with the internet whereas the book doesn’t change for a year.”

Those policies sounded much better but were they accurate? I checked their website for a locksmith in Altamonte Springs. After the first ½ page of advertisers (none in Altamonte), came the bogus listings. Two of the advertisers, by the way, were not registered with the State of Florida – guess they forgot to check that.

Apparently we were talking about two different things. She was talking about how if the advertisers don’t pay, then they pull them. I was asking about bogus unpaid listings not advertisers. I don’t think customers can tell the difference. They just look for a locksmith with the name of their city in its name and call that one. None of the advertisers had the word “Altamonte” in their name, so one would keep scrolling. There were 12 unpaid listings with the word “Altamonte” in their name and not one of them is a registered locksmith in the city or on the State website. It was the same old list of bogus listings with bogus addresses which I had checked out previously.

Well, either the phone company is still working on this and way, way behind or it looks like not much has changed.