SEM Competition: A Case of Pants Around Ankles

I've written in the past about some of the underhanded, spineless tactics lower forms of SEM life resort to in an effort to compete with my firm; lying about the nature of one's client base is a primary tactic, as I described here.
I refer to it as the Perpetual Motion Machine Trick.

Almost six months later, would you believe the same competitor tried the same exact tactic today? Un...be...leivable.

This is how the Perpetual Motion Machine Trick works:

1)Offer a *free* 3-month test to a big EF advertiser to get his foot in the door (that's the pants around ankles part)
2)Get verbal agreement on the $0 test (that's the easy part)
3)Immediately email several other EF advertisers in the same vertical with a subject that reads "[Competitor] Lands Another Major Mortgage Player This Week" (that's the lying part)
4)In the email say "One of the wins this week was a major online mortgage lender that has been using Efficient Frontier." (that's the follow-on lie that earns you 20,000 years in Dante's Inferno)

This, folks, is the Perpetual Motion Machine trick, aka Leaning Forward a Bit Too Much On Your Skis. The competitor gives one big advertiser a free test, giving others the false impression that his firm is succeeding in the marketplace, which then leads to more tests.

Like the perpetual motion machine, this competitor needs:

1) an initial dose of kinetic energy = a free test + a Jupiter ranking*
2) periodic infusions of kinetic energy = lies

But as with claims of perpetual motion, the proof is in the performance, and the competitor's test went horribly and the advertiser gave them the heave-ho.

As I said in a previous post, SEM competition is fierce, and I love it.