Companies in WY (Wyoming)

If you've been a follower of my blogs and website for the last few years then you will surely have seen where I've listed the various unsolicited sales contacts I've received and rejected for one reason or another. From republishing my book to getting a movie deal. Its the same stuff that I'm sure many of you have received at some point after publishing one or more books.

In those posts, I take great care to detail the nature of the interaction, any relevant details about the offer, and whatever findings I may have discovered when researching the company. I tend to look at things like common social media profiles, company website, domain whois information, and their Better Business Bureau (bbb.org) profile, if they have one. Some of the groups that contact me are relatively new and don't have a profile yet. Others have been around for a while and I find unflattering profiles on the BBB website. But there are some that do not exist on the BBB website despite having supposedly existed for years.

How can a company exist for a long period of time and have no BBB profile?

They are registered as a company in the state of Wyoming, that's how!

But what does being based in Wyoming have to do with absence of a BBB profile?

Wyoming is the one of four states in the U.S. that allows for anonymous corporate filings. This means that the company can exist without any public declaration of board members, contact info, or really anything. This level of "privacy" makes it impossible for the BBB to track these companies, register complaints, or really do any level of review or remediation.

Theses groups can potentially hide behind this anonymity to make any efforts by authors to seek non-legal resolutions to their issues and complaints more difficult. Plus, it also makes finding out about other people's experiences with them that more difficult since the BBB is probably one the most trusted sources for company reviews not sponsored by the company in question itself.

Of all the groups I've documented on the website (here), there are three that I have found that are in Wyoming. Those three are:

1. URlinkpublishing, a.k.a. URlink Print & Media
2. Writers Apex
3. The Moving Word

Of those three, URlink Print & Media and Writers Apex are two of the most prolific unsolicited contacts that I've had since 2024. It seems no matter how many times I ask or tell them to stop contacting me that they continue to contact me.

URlink has contacted me 11 times between  Sept. 2021 and May 2024. Of those 11 contacts I have asked to be removed from their contact list 7 times. The fact that I've had so many additional contacts after the initial request has urged me to file complaints about the group. Back in 2021, the BBB did have a profile on this group but it has since disappeared. And because the group is in WY, it is very difficult to file any type of complaint with a monitoring agency like the BBB regarding their continued harassment. I mean, there's still ways to get to them but the BBB is usually the first step...

Writers Apex has contacted me even more times. With URlink those 11 contacts were spread across like 4 or 5 individuals. With Writers Apex, I had 11 contacts from a single person, Kelly White. I have received other contacts from others at Writers Apex but Kelly took the cake for her persistence? Ignorance? Illiteracy? I'm not sure what it was. But much like with the other group, they don't have a profile on the BBB website for me to file a complaint on.

The fact that these companies can operate anonymously and without a profile on the BBB where consumers can file complaints and reviews automatically make me leery of any business that contacts me about my books from those states that allow anonymous corporations.

If Wyoming is one of four, what are the other three states that allow anonymous company registrations?

1. Wyoming (already mentioned)
2. Delaware
3. Nevada
4. New Mexico

I did check through a lot of my old emails that I have received from various groups over the last 5 years. The three listed above were the only three that I found whose email signatures and/or websites listed their company address as being in one of these 4 states. Of course, these 3 companies listed here also account for a large percentage of the contacts I've had.

36% of my contacts have have been out of Wyoming to be exact. I've documented 88 contacts to date and 24 of them have come from just those 3 companies.

They're doing what they can to hide themselves to make it more difficult for authors to learn things about them outside of the narrative they want to tell but to someone like me, that is more telling than anything they can say.

Sure, legit businesses reside in those states. Delaware has long been home to a number of corporate filings for the very reason it lets companies file anonymously. But when it comes to these groups and there is already so much uncertainty, suspicions, and stigma around similar groups being something less than reputable, it does not behoove someone like me to trust you after you've already worked so hard to make sure nobody knows anything about you. What kind of message does that send if you market yourself as a social media marketing group, a book publicist, a book sales marketer, or whatever when nobody is allowed to know anything about you? How can you be effective at your job as a marketer if your anonymous? They aren't selling services to market as me but to run their own campaigns through their channels but how can they have channels when they are already flying under the radar?

If I want to spend money on ads nobody will see, I can do that on my own already!!!