The Great Australian Rip off is just another rip off (warning)
The Great Australian Rip off is a carefully socially engineered plea to Australians to hand over their personal details to another thinly veiled price group-buying site – Kyco Australia.
The appeal is to get you to sign an online petition. But Kyco is just like the fox guarding the chickens – its aim is not altruistic. It is to get your details to deliver what it calls ‘Australia’s newest bill negotiator’.
The campaign is as odorous as the 2018 ‘One Big Switch’ energy rip-off. It similarly aimed to aggregate customer spending and demand better energy deals while taking undisclosed commissions from energy providers. The ACCC saw to the end of that.
The Great Australian Rip off uses highly emotive social engineering. It quotes from the ACCC, Choice, and government inquiries to add credibility to the cause.
DO NOT SIGN THE PETITION
The Privacy policy has the first oblique mention of Kyco, and it neglects to mention what Kyco does.
By signing the petition, it collects your personal information. It provides it to third-party service providers such as customer support, web-based marketing, courier and print services, IT, web hosting, data storage, backup and data analysis services.
It can contact you, ask you to complete surveys (shades of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal), and market to you via Google or Facebook profiles.
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN RIP OFF IS JUST A WAY TO BUILD A DATABASE TO SELL TO YOU – NOTHING ALTRUISTIC AT ALL
That emotive appeal is just a front
Ironically it is rallying against price comparison websites. We regard those as the scourge of the consumer world – more on that in another article.
It implies that if the price comparison service is free, the service is you. Kyco calls itself a buying group. But to do any real good, it needs tens of thousands of members, and it does not. In reality, (according to LinkedIn), it was founded in 2021, has 1-10 employees and is based in Fortitude Valley Brisbane. Its previous name was Just Save Pty Ltd.
We invite Kyco to prove us wrong.
