Thursday 24 October 2013

Highland Titles Fake "Laird Scheme" Review Website

As if using fake newspaper articles to promote their fake titles fake land sales scheme wasn't bad enough, it seems Highland Titles may have sunk, if that is possible, even lower. Recently revealed over at the scots-titles.com forum, it is alleged that Highland Titles are behind a website which claimed to be giving impartial reviews of various "laird schemes". The website was lairdreviews.com which was pulled down shortly after it was claimed on the scots-titles.com forum that Highland Titles were in fact behind it, though the site is now up again.

Update
The fake review website at lairdreviews.com has just undergone an overhaul. The trolls page which was used to abuse critics of these schemes has now gone entirely, as have all the fake contact details, there are currently no contact details at all ..... Update - The Trolls page is now back.

Read the forum posts by Andrew and PetePiper

Rather annoyingly for Highland Titles, an email address seemingly belonging to Helen McGregor of Highland Titles (helenmcgregor55.gmail.com) appeared on a little known record called the SOA Record for lairdreviews.com


The name server for the domain was also changed immediately after the forum posts. As noted above, before the change, the name server for lairdreviews.com was NS1.17135745287.COM.

This name server was used at that time for four domains:

LAIRDREVIEWS.COM reviews (en) laird (en)
ALDERNEYBELLS.COM Alderney (en) bells (en)
GLENCOEWOOD.COM Glencoe (en) wood (en)
CIBELLS.COM bells (en) ci (fr)

The name server change can be seen here

All the above domains except lairdreviews.com are registered to the Bevis family who run Highland Titles.

http://whois.polodomains.com/nameserver/NS1.17135745287.COM/1.html

 The email address helenmcgregor55@gmail.com can be associated with the following domains:

lairdreviews.com
ehic-support.org
fakescotstitles.com
sar.co.uk
glencoewood..com
aldeneybells.com
cibells.com

https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=cr&ei=44JlUr3MHfHY4QS94YGACA#filter=0&q=helenmcgregor55.gmail.com&start=0

The site itself gave glowing reviews of Highland Titles, while being a little, and in some cases, a lot less kind to competing company's offerings.

(As an act of common decency I have obscured any real names from the review quotations below.)

Quotations from the Monarch Of The Ben - Laird Of Ben Nevis review ....
"suggests that the owners are trying to evade paying tax and we would certainly not want to do business with such a Company"
"A****  M**** is well known to Trading Standards and a journalist colleague that we consulted "
On Highland Heritage - Laird Of Glenmore / Laird Of Kingsdale ..... 
"Domains by Proxy are owned by B**** P****, and his services are used by shady grops who wish to protect their privacy from the taxman, customers, Trading Standards, etc."
"They also trade on eBay, where they share that forum with some rather dubious vendors and some very unlikely titles."
 On Native Wood Preservation -  Laird Of Blackwood ....
"The first disappointment comes with a page describing the land on offer – Loch Wood by the village of Blackwood. Blackwood sits adjacent to the M74 motorway – Scotland’s main arterial route South to England. It is no more in the Highlands than London and being a Laird is all about the Highlands"
On Mac Sothis - Laird Of John O' Groats ....
"The order process is incredibly basic with room for error and only payment by Paypal is accepted.  We are always wary of shops that only take PayPal; lots of internet scams make use of PayPal"
Of course the Highland Titles offering is described in glowing terms ....
"Our email was replied to within 20 minutes and a follow-up telephone call was answered second ring by a helpful human.  If only all the businesses were like Highland Titles"
(Eh..... it took 20 minutes to answer an email they sent to themselves!!)
Then there was the "Trolls" page, which was nothing more than a personal attack on John Duncan and William (Robin) Cunninghame Graham, completely misrepresenting their positions and making claims they use multiple identities and produce multiple blogs without a shred of evidence in support. Currently the page is still available via the Google cache here.

Should the site vanish again it may be available via the Google cache, follow this link, click the little arrow to the right of the domain name, and click on "Cached".

I find it completely hilarious, there is much evidence to support the theory that Highland Titles use multiple identities all over the internet, and have allegedly produced several blogs to support their scams and attack people they don't like ..... but always somehow "forget" to put their name on them. Yet that same accusation about others is made on a fake review website without a single example of any specific instances to support the allegations made!

Fake newspaper articles ... fake review websites ... accusation that others are trolls when Highland Titles are seemingly using a fake review site to promote their own products and make the competition look very unappetising .... can it get any worse?

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