“A fraudster put out Johan’s apartment for rental at a large classified service” was the headline yesterday in Sweden’s largest newspaper Aftonbladet.

The classified service had troubles in tracking the fraudster since he/she used a temporary mail address in the advertisement. According to the police they receive about 30 similar cases a month.

Eniro has implemented the Freespee privacy protection service in their classified service. Hence, their advertisers receive privacy protection, but not by opening up for Fraud. Instead, that door is closed, forever. More Classified partners are about to be disclosed later on this year, which is good for the consumer. Our ambition is to remove fraud and uncertainty from Online sales.

Today Freespee is covered in the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter with an article about temporary numbers and privacy online. The article describes our service with temporary phonenumbers that guarantees your integrity, since you can give different numbers in different forums, especially forums where you might usually hesitate to give out your number, like online dating or when selling stuff online on sites like blocket.se.

The full article (in Swedish) can be read at www.dn.se if you don’t have access to the printed magazine.

Metro, the daily newspaper, wrote today about Freespee, or almost. The Metro journalist wrote about the risk for thefts that comes with advertisements in Online classified services. In most countries, your private phone number connects you to an physical address, your home. This is information that the telecom operators hands out to the whitepages. Hence, by placing an advertisement on a leading classified service where you also state your phone number, it is easy to find your address and your gods. This is used by criminals! Every day.

So, what could I do as a consumer? I can’t sell a premium mountainbike without letting a potential buyer contact me by phone to ask relevant questions. What did the Metro article propose? Do not put your number in the Ad. Wrong!! This will significantly decrease your probability to sell your product. The sales cycle will be longer.

Now the journalist knows about Freespee. This is exactly why we started this project 2 years ago. We have been working hard since then. In less than 3-4 months, consumers in all Nordic countries will be able to choose a temporary phone number for an advertisement in leading classified services. The contracts are there, we are working on technical fine tuning and integration issues.

It has taken us 2 years to come here. Now we can’t wait for the day where everyone will feel safe in handing out a phone number for a voice contact. We are so close. If you also can’t wait, ask for an Invite to Freespee beta at www.freespee.se, www.freespee.no or www.freespee.dk.

Since the web has become more and more transparent, integrity is becoming a big issue. Today anyone that knows your telephone number can find your home address, who you’re living with and so on.

Yesterday the Swedish webmagazine TechWorld (idg.se) had an article on how to secure your integrity on Google. The article focused on your integrity while using Google. At Freespee we believe that integrity is a big issue not only when it comes to services like Google, but when it comes to your daily usage of the internet. At Freespee we provide a service that helps you secure your integrity online. Please read more about Freespee and why you should use Freespee!