Today, much to my delight, I got a letter from Cambridge Who’s Who. I was a bit excited that someone actually wanted to list me in a database along with other notable people! After all, I am running for Mayor, I had owned my own business, I’ll be finished with Community College very soon, and everything seems to be going fairly well for me. It sounded like a great deal at first, but I’m definitely not a sucker for these kinds of gimmicks, and right away I smelled something fishy.
First thing’s first: I checked Google. Sure enough, the fourth, fifth, and sixth matches for “Cambridge Who’s Who” were reports of a ripoff. After reading in a bit, I found stories of people getting these form letters inviting them to be included in Who’s Who publications. Most of these claim “No Inclusion Fee”, but after calling these companies you’ll find out, after a lengthy process, that they will want anywhere from $100-$1000 just to include you in their database. (The fee is probably determined by what you tell them on the phone.) My particular letter specifically said “There is no cost to be included in the Registry.”
The letter I received was signed by Jennifer A. Gonzalez…. actually, it was not even signed with a pen. It was simply a computer-generated copy of a signature that looks like “V G GR,” nothing close to the “J A G” I would expect. One particular other article I found mentioned her directly: and even talked to her on the phone! How many times have you ever gotten the Editor in Chief to conduct long phone interviews for anything important? Probably never, even if you’re famous.
The whole deal, however, does have one or two online proponents (although their identification is of course in question). A couple of people claimed to have gotten a number of calls from important people, helping them with social networking, because they’re in such a registry. But another case seemed much more common: Solicitors will start to call you saying “I noticed your name in such and such a place, and would you like to donated to such and such charity?” So maybe if you have a spare $600 to advertise yourself, feel free to drop it in these guys’ hands… or use it to buy yourself an advertisement in the newspaper (you’ll get more readers).
Cambridge is not the only name out their doing this. Manchester Who’s Who is another one. My suspicions is that one or two people run these operations from their basement, get as many saps as they can, and then mail out some cheap Who’s Who registries just to the people in the registry. These will include the names of everyone who paid, and probably dozens more names to make it look more legitimate. My personal advice if you get one of these fancy looking letters: throw it away and don’t waste your time.
