Few week back I wrote an article “AutoUSA – Something isn’t kosher!”. I pointed out that somehow AutoUSA had resold me my own test lead 2 times over and I had screen shot to prove
it.
If you read the comments, you will see where Phil Dupree – VP of eCommerce for AutoUSA joined in on the conversation and actually took an initiative to research how this could have possibly
happened.
Phil Dupree said – “All three of these leads were individually entered on the Yahoo! Autos website. Yahoo! Autos has confirmed that they never resend leads—each is uniquely entered by users. Since Yahoo! sends leads from their website only, they confirmed that these leads were typed in on their “get a free price quote” lead form which has dealers listed for selection. Whoever typed in these leads had to specifically select your dealership in order for us to send you the lead. Since the leads are several months apart, we did not filter them out as
duplicates."
To this day I still do not have a clear explanation to why I was resold my own test lead 2 times over. I was never pointing my finger at AutoUSA but yet new something wasn’t kosher.
But..then my boy Chad Long over at AutoOneMedia sent me this link. “Yahoo! Gets Caught With Their Hand in the Cloaking Jar”. As I read this article, I started to wonder if maybe, just maybe it was Yahoo’s ignorant oversights that caused this mishap. If pages within Yahoo autos are/were “accidentally” being cloaked, is it possible Yahoo or a department within Yahoo could be accidentally reselling leads to AutoUSA? I can’t imagine reselling a few leads here and there would ultimately benefit a company as large Yahoo. And if they were doing this on a grand scale, I would think they would have already been caught (but then maybe they have).
I’m still very curious to how this happened and where exactly the blame falls, but we guess I will never know.
