Author: Olly

  • Simon Macbeth – Leeds Scammer – EXPOSED

    –> Meet Simon Macbeth 🙂 <–

    Today’s subject is a chap called Simon Macbeth and I felt compelled to write this blog post after seeing a link circulating on Facebook at the weekend.

    Simon Macbeth lives in the Leeds area, rents a few rooms in his house and runs a few other little businesses – mainly “web design” companies (although I use that term lightly as a proper web design company designs websites!) – and does it all quite badly so it seems!

    There are a few sides to this particular scammer so I’ve sectioned it off for easy digesting.

    Landlord from Hell

    It seems that through some scam many years ago (as per some quote from his autobiography – autobiography? Is he for real?!) Simon Macbeth bought a house, and set about renting rooms out to people shortly afterwards, making more than a few of his house-mates feel a tad uneasy along the way;

    I lived in his house for about 3 weeks, and during this time I was subject to threats of violence as well as some pretty f**ked up things. Within a week, I had received a text from him telling me that he had been in my room. I was a little bit frustrated about it so text him asking him to tell me next time he plans on going in there, to which he replied ‘this is my house and I will do what I want.’

    I’ve lived with other people beside family before, and we never went into each others rooms unless we asked someone to – whether its your house or not, you have to respect peoples privacy. I dislike this assclown already!

    I lived with this disgusting person for 3 months and it was awful. We told him to his face that we wanted to leave and end the contract but when it came to returning the deposit he said we had not issued the notice in writing. There was a strong smell of marijuana from his room the whole time and he was generally unkind, unfair and made a point of making you feel unwelcome.

    What’s the point in renting rooms out to people, if you are then going to do your very best to drive them away? What kind of lying toe-rag does that? Oh wait….

    He also pretended he was studying to be a youth worker, which I now see was a complete sham, to make you believe he had morals which clearly didn’t exist.

    Oh that’s right, Simon Macbeth!

    There are many many more stories on there about him making people feel uncomfortable, and worse. There are too many to quote, so check them out here: www.simonmacbeth.co (looks like he now owns the website, so all links have been removed from this post)

    Wannabe Web Designer

    The part of this story that really tipped me over the edge, was when I saw that he apparently owned a number of web design companies, one main generic one and then a few little “industry specific” companies that sold one type of website to one industry.

    It is all bollocks really as its just one “company” (i.e. him and the WordPress theme repository) and a load of websites that are optimised for specific web design related terms – making him appear to the outside world like he knows what he’s talking about.

    We have to deal with the victims of these amateurs day in, day out. They leave a trail of unhappy customers behind them, many of whom still actually need a website. They eventually find a company like us and we have to re-educate them about the web industry and restore the faith he manages to single-handedly tear from each and every one of them.

    Here’s one Simon Macbeth pro web designer (bwhaha) horror story;

    After an exchange of numerous emails between myself and Mr Simon I paid him for what I understood to be my own website.

    No terms and conditions were discussed. I searched for a domain name and asked him to register this domain name as part of my website. He said no problem and did so. He prepared my website and in the meantime I started with SEO and traffic generation to the website.

    Oh wait a second… maybe we’ve got this guy all wrong after-all?

    He was helping this guy set up his affiliate pay-day loan website, so that this guy could make a living for himself… That sounds alright, doesn’t it? Well after a while this chap hadn’t heard from Simon Macbeth, and after multiple unanswered calls and ignored emails, he started looked into the source code of his website…

    I nearly fell of my chair when I saw they themselves were Affiliates and all the visitors I am sending to my website is cranking numbers on their affiliate link!

    Ooo, that’s a bit naughty, Simon.

    Then next thing they highjacked my domain name, remember they were the registrar and they changed the name servers and redirect their own website to that domain name. Now they have stolen my domain and my traffic as well!

    Since then all I had from them is verbal abuse and some serious threats against me in person!

    Ok. So let me get this straight. He took on a client who paid him to make them a website. He then allowed this client to get traffic to this website via SEO and PPC which would have all cost this client a fair whack (£1795.34 to be precise) He then changed their affiliate ID’s and started profiting from the website traffic himself?

    Wow. That’s a double douche move.

    Another innocent victim of Simon wrote;

    I was looking for a website building company, to start a small online shop, I googled and unfortunately, Simon phony, fakey websites appear all over the place!! I spent hours looking at different companies. and much to my regret I plumped for 1 to 1 website design.

    You can sense the anger she feels for him already!

    She goes on to say they discussed her idea, and he seemed keen to do the job for her (too keen though, as she also believes Simon steals business ideas from people who contact him!!)

    He asked for payment upfront of £1050… I was taken aback by this, told him I wasn’t comfortable paying upfront for something , I told him I assumed he would whip a design or 2, send them to me, and then we would agree on website, and I would pay maybe a deposit and the rest on completion.

    This is technically standard practice for most premium web design companies, but ones that are worth bothering with will invite you to their office, let you meet their team members and chat to you over a coffee.

    She reluctantly sent him the money, and he set about making her the website she dreamed of! Or so she thought…

    I specifically asked for 2 design features… I said I wanted a brick work design and also if he could find it, a dog bone font… I later realise he wasn’t capable of producing either of these things, as he is not a designer, but a conman who has downloaded a free template from somewhere and he does not have the skill, ability or correct software to deviate from this.

    Ah. He’s one of those “web designers” is he (a really crap one that can only install pre-made templates)

    A few days later he sent me a link to the website build… I was horrified… a child could have done it on an iPad in about an hour…. It looked like it was built by a child …for a child!!

    Oh. So he’s not even one of those “web designers” – I don’t even know what he is then?

    It was awful…I emailed him to ring me…he did and I told him what I thought… he then became rude and obnoxious and tried to twist everything, telling me the brick design I asked for looked naff, that he had met my requirements, and I had mentioned the word Quirky in my form, and he told me quirky meant unexpected, and that his design was unexpected!!
    He then emailed me and asked for another £499 to change it!!

    Bwhahaha that’s hilarious. “Oh but you said “Dog” in your brief and the website looks like “Dog Poo” so thats ok innit?” hahaha… golden. What a bulb!

    It does actually get better though!

    I began to realise that his website isn’t what it seems…the team photo on 1 to 1 has been stolen from the Tipperary energy agency (I phoned them and they told me it is members of their engineering staff, not Simon’s web design team) his reviews are fakes written by him, he has fake websites, his photos are stolen from various genuine websites ( I have kindly informed them all of this)

    Simon has seriously taken things to a whole new level of urine extraction!

    Read the full story here. (link removed)

    I hope anyone out there that has used him for web services, or is looking to use him or one of his “companies” manages to get/stay away from him and get back any money that he succeeded in stealing from you.

    We’re not all cowboys, but there are many like Simon Macbeth. Be careful.

    Simon the Mast0r Optimiz0r

    It also seems that Simon is trying to use really bizarre SEO tactics in some feeble attempt at silencing the vast amount of bad press about him on the web – he places a landing page about himself on every website he cons someone to buy off him, and has probably put up loads of his own affiliate websites to try and flood the SERP’s for anyone searching for him, but you’ll never be able to get the kind of traction a site like the Simon Macbeth Exposed will, especially as the links continue to snowball around the social world!

    In all seriousness, the “About Simon” pages he litters everywhere are a little creepy, they read a bit like he has some mental disorder and need to read positive things about himself on a daily basis to keep the voices in his head happy. If I had bought a website and saw that linked in the footer of my website, I’d ask him to remove it straight away and refrain from ever using my website as an outlet for his self-help ever again.

    Simon Macbeth Summary

    Its not often you find so much negative information about one person online – you couldn’t even find this many stories about known and documented conmen and scumbags – and stories of Simon Macbeth are only really starting to surface now.

    Do your bit, visit Simon Macbeth Exposed (link removed) and share some of the content on there. If everyone that reads the stories on there re-publishes at least one of them then we can push his websites out the Google Rankings and dominate with facts about this serial-douchebag.

    Together, nothing is impossible.

    –> Meet Simon Macbeth 🙂 <–

  • Facebook IS spying on you, but not with messenger

    Facebook has recently rolled out its “in house” browser to “open links faster” on Android and possibly iOS devices (anyone confirm the iOS bit?) and I’ve been cool with it so far as it does seem to make things a bit faster – but then the real reason for this new feature suddenly dawned on me!

    Data mining!

    Now, not only do they know what you ‘like’ and what links you click on from within your Facebook app, but now they also know what you do once you are on that page. “Did you click on anything else? What else might interest you? Was the content relevant or did you bounce straight back?”

    *It’s worth noting at this point that they’re not doing this so they can make a clone of you and steal your identities. They are more likely to be doing it so they can learn more about you, which in turn allows them to target their advertising better and improve their service to you… Which in turn makes you a more profitable customer for them.*

    So, despite it actually being a benefit in the form of faster link opening times, it’s just a sneaky way of harvesting more of your data – and as we all know, data is the new gold.

    They’ve already built a multi billion corporation with our content, now they are squeezing more out of our Facebook experience to harvest more data to use and probably sell for a huge (probably tax free) profit.

    Clever move, Facebook. You sneaky little prawn.

  • PCI Compliance Nonsense

    OK – I’ve had about enough of this and I need to rant somewhere!!

    As everyone knows – we make websites and quite recently we have been building  lots and lots of online shops. Its usually much more of a technical job as there are so many more elements to take into consideration, one being payments and how you take them via/on your website.

    There are generally three ways you can take payments, and they are as follows;

    1) Simple “cash holding” payment gateways like PayPal – this takes the money and holds it in your paypal account – not a merchant account.

    2) Similar 3rd party payment gateways like SagePay – these are tied to a merchant account which is a bank account specifically for website payments.

    3) Embedded payment gateways that never take anyone from your site, process the payment on your site and sends money to a merchant account.

    Now all apart from the 3rd (in my professional opinion) do not require any level of pci compliance, as the payment isnt taken on the customer website – its taken on PayPal.com or SagePay.com – who then need to be PCI compliant as thats the point of it all..

    Q: What is PCI?

    A: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

    ~Source

    Now somewhere along the line some idiot at the top of the ladder in the financial industry has decided that everyone who owns a merchant account (which are never and could never be hosted on our clients hosting environment, so again, hosted with a 3rd party) needs to be PCI compliant – what a load of rubbish!

    I agree 100% that if you take/store/send payment info you need to tick every box in terms of compliance – as you are dealing with highly sensitive information –  but why do my clients need to become PCI compliant if they never see the card/payment details themselves?

    What the fools at the banks don’t realise is that by them making a stupid call like this (like the cookie thing a few years ago) they are forcing thousands and thousands of small to large sized businesses to unnecessarily pay to have their hosting environments PCI compliant – when they don’t need to!

    Additionally, many customers with shared hosting might need to move their site to a dedicated server or VPS at a significantly higher cost to themselves – as some PCI scanners say that shared hosting can never be PCI compliant – its an area of much confusion & myth and really needs properly clearing up by someone who knows what they are talking about, not just some suit making a blind call with nothing to back it up.

    Is there anyone out there that can (from a technical point of view, i’m actually able to search Google myself also) explain to me why ANYONE using something like SagePay with an external merchant account needs to be PCI compliant themselves?

    </rant-over>

  • Finally settled on a new layout

    My rekindled love for blogging has also meant i’ve been spending time tinkering with my blog layout and the colour scheme trying to get it just how I want it.

    For the last few weeks I was rocking an awesome theme, to be fair it was the best one i’ve ever had, proper ticked all the boxes…. apart from the fact once I started delving in and altering a few things I realised the guy who made it was a moron and had obviously coded most of the template files with his knees.

    The structure of everything was a mess. I was very sad :'(

    So, I started the hunt for a new WordPress Theme (you’d have thought i’d have one of the ninjas at work make me one haha) and it reminded me about how hard it was to find simple blogging themes nowadays that focus on the written content rather than huge header images and image slideshows and junk.

    …Is that because no one writes old fashioned blogs any more?

    I get that a picture is worth a thousand words but I often visit blogs and they’re using premium themes that are built to focus on large imagery that accompany the published articles, and the authors simply use some crappy stock image because if they don’t they break the layout of the page.

    So is there really any point in having that as a main feature of the theme?

    We did some work for a lady recently who was a travel blogger, and because of what she blogged about she needed large images to be part of her articles else the images of the places she visited wouldn’t get across to her readers – however not everyone blogs about “visual” things so there really should be more choice of themes out there for the rest of us! 🙂

    Anyway, after 20 minutes or so I saw this theme, liked that it was fairly bare-bones and installed it. All credit to Per Sandström for making a great theme that is easily customisable and is made for bloggers!

    Hurray for simplicity!