Beware of Best University of Bangladesh Scam

Recently one site called bd-university.com announced a competition where Best university in Bangladesh for 2009 would be ranked based on online users' vote.

At first glance it seems to be ok. Lots of students are going there to vote because they wanted to see their University at the top. The site listed all the Universities in Bangladesh



My first question is why this is needed? Can a University be measured like this? Absolutely not! Universities are not cosmetics or closeup1 song competition. They differ among themselves in terms of quality of study, faculty, facilities, curriculum and what not. As you cannot compare apple and orange, you cannot say BUET is better than Agricultural University or Not.

Next comes a question who are the people behind bd-university.com? What's their interest? Research or just creating buzz for cheap traffic or anything else? What's the guarantee that statistics shown in the site are fair? Is there any university connected to this site to show themselves at the top and raise status in news media?

If you visit the site you will understand it has not a single line about them. I quickly did a whois search and found the domain is registered few days back by some "CelluloidPlus FriendsWing". Address is fake, infact no address. Country is USA but phone is fake with Bangladesh ISD code. Why hiding identity? According to ICANN any site who does not provide correct WHOIS information may be punished.

Registration Service Provided By: 1COMS.COM
Contact: +44.7773590344

Domain Name: BD-UNIVERSITY.COM

Registrant:
bd-university.com (Registrant)
 CelluloidPlus FriendsWing        (admin@bd-university.com)
(address: )N/A
(city: )N/A
,(zip: )11432
US
Tel. +880.0111001010

Creation Date: 16-Feb-2009
Expiration Date: 16-Feb-2010

Domain servers in listed order:
ns2.hostmonster.com
ns1.hostmonster.com

Its not hard to understand that bd-university site is Email Harvestor. Are they tempting gullible university student to share their email address so that they can sell emails or make marketing campaign? According to Term & Condition

By clicking vote button a user at Bd-University.com agrees with us that we are allowed to send administrative or marketing e-mails to user's mail boxes.

Bottom line is bd-university site is nothing but a scam. I warn anyone not to get trapped into such service and mess up one's inbox as well as waste valuable time. We should raise voice against such spammers and here is one sample badge we can share in our blogs.






PS: I believe there are opportunities for online surveys for our Universities that helps improving our Academic institutes. Unlike this voting system we may capture information in defined forms based on criteria like infrastructure, curriculum, campus, hall, quality of teachers, level of research work etc and then publish the result in better way.