Last night I got an email from a friend saying they’d left me a private message at flixter.com. Because I trust my friend, I followed the link. And opened up a whole world of shady marketing practices.
Clicking the link took me to a registration screen. Fair enough. Ronnie had left me a private message after all. So I filled it in. The next screen asked for a whole load of personal information, at which point I took a step back and became suspicious. Why do I need to give them all this info just to collect a message?
I skipped that page and went to the next, which involved waiting while they allegedly ‘created my account’. They advised me to click through a load of special offers ‘while you wait’. So I did. There are pages and pages of adverts. Not good. At this point I ducked out of the process because it felt so dodgy.
Nasty people, nasty website
This morning I had another go, to see if it felt as nasty in the cold light of day. It did. Not only that. I unsubscribed from any more contact with flixter, then tried to register under another email address to check the process out again as reference for this post. Aha… they say my second email address is already registered. As is the third email address I tried. Buggers… I don’t like this at all.
In my view there’s so much wrong with flixter from a marketing perspective that it’s hard to know where to start. So I won’t go into detail. But this is direct marketing without morals. In fact it’s so piss poor that I can’t be certain flixter isn’t just a mechanism for harvesting personal data. Possibly for nefarious purposes. That’s the impression it gives. I also don’t believe my friend Ronnie really sent me a private message. I reckon flixter are spammers.
Flixter’s based in the US so they’ll probably sue my arse if they read this post. So be it. Go ahead and sue. Watch out for flixter emails. They’re downright nasty. If I were you I wouldn’t touch flixter with a bargepole. Time to report them to Google…
