Virtual Office London UK Blog

About 3 weeks ago, we received a phone call enquiry with the calller asking many questions about not only the services that we offer, but also about the background of the company, level of turnover, number of staff etc etc. The call lasted about 25 minutes and as the caller did not want to leave an email address or contact telephone number, we did not followup this initial enquiry. The caller id on the incoming call was witheld.

Then, last Tuesday week, we received another phone call from what seemed to be an offshore call centre with an offer to send out ‘100 million emails’ to addresses all over the world, with a sales pitch in it. We explained that we did not get involved in spamming, but the caller was extremely careful to deny that this was spam, as his lists were all double optin, and all addresses were verified as being willing to receive sales related emails. After going over the same areas, we declined the email broadcast offer.

Yesterday, we received about 1400 returned emails, all genuine non-deliverable email addresses, but all appearing to come from one of our valid email addresses, sales@ofiz.com.

Already today more than 70,000 of these non-deliverable emails have jammed up our incoming mail servers, and within this mass of returned email are many many very angry emails from people who did not request any details about the services we offer. Once again, the originating address has been faked as sales@ofiz.com.

Has anyone else got experience of this type of campaign being done for them, even when they have explicitly declined this type of offer?

Despite all the talk of a recession, and a hard recession at that, there is no sign of a drop of in demand for virtual offices, certainly within the London market.

In chatting with other virtual office providers, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new companies that are signing up for virtual office services.

One of many reasons why this is the case seems to be that small business owners are starting to hoard cash, and are looking at ways to save costs to ensure that their company survives this market downturn. It certainly makes sense for a small company to use a virtual office is they are currently renting a premises that is only being used part of the time.

Another reason we are hearing from new clients is that they are taking the opportunity now to test new markets, as they fear that their current markets may reduce demand for their services or products.