Monday, April 19, 2004

Too Good To Be True?

At work, I received an e-mail on Saturday and a fax on Monday offering the library a free copy of Amnesty International's Annual Country Report for this year and future years. As the AI publications would be a useful addition to our library and the price is right, I was ready to add our name to the list--until I started looking a little closer at the contact info with the offer and ended up wondering where the information was really going to or coming from.

The most consistent information came from the "Student Volunteer" whose name & info was on the offer.
A student supposedly from State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury.
The associated phone numbers carried Old Westbury area codes and the fax number is on the website of the SUNY-Old Westbury business college.
However, the e-mail used is a hotmail account.

The organization making the offer--Global Importune, Inc.--is based in Philadelphia.
The mailing address is a post office box in Port Huron, MI.
The phone numbers had area codes for Ontario, Canada.
I didn't find any website or additional information about the organization on the web.

"Global Importune is a nonprofit human rights organization based in Philadelphia. Our mission is to promote and defend human rights of all people. One of the ways we do this is by providing human rights resource material at no cost to libraries like yours, so that members of the community may become more aware of the struggle for human rights that people face daily in other countries."

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