Ask HN: "Scammed" by a website seller on Flippa

Are you buying traffic / promoting the same way he was? (was it ever effective?)

Have you changed anything with the site?

I've browsed Flippa a good amount, though I've never been inclined to make a purchase.

Honestly, the reason I wouldn't have purchased this is because there's only one month of proof (if the proof is even real, although that would be a PITA to fake). He probably told you just by that fact that it isn't a sustainable business. (You can't say it makes $600/m if it maybe made $600 in one month)

Lesson learned. I haven't actually sold/bought through flippa but anything substantial I would always do through Escrow and confirm numbers.

Thanks for sharing - I guess this will be useful to many who will visit this thread in times to come.

The seller said on the auction:

> I also don't have the time to manage affiliates and implement marketing strategies for this site anymore.

I'd have treated this as warning sign #1. This explains probably why

> it always took the seller forever to answer my emails and finally transfer the site

> Is there anything else I can do beside swallowing up the loss and try to promote the site anyway?

The site does look to be well-designed and SEOed - if you have a handle on the deliverables, I'd suggest promoting it.

As a last case scenario, you can at least try to cut your losses by putting it back on the auction (mentioning all the facts) and see what it can fetch.

HTH

I wouldn't feel bad. I sometimes conduct DD on behalf of third parties for legal cases so I've seen a lot of scams and this one is (assuming it isn't genuine) surprisingly well put together for something on the lower end of the scale.

Reading the listing you can usually get a sense of problems, but there were only a few places that my BS alarm was triggered (one being that the seller claimed he made an average of $9 per day from Adsense ads that he set up just the other day. The screen shot for Adsense shows 19K impressions in three days, which seems a little off based on 2,242 Page Views Per month, with 1 Adsense block in place.)

There's no hard and fast rule to prevent things like this, but if you were to do it again, I'd advise

1) Either asking for access, or a video walkthrough of the adsense and paypal account as this is more difficult to fake.

2) Do a common sense check based on the numbers. Look at the traffic they are likely to receive from Organic Search (SEM Rush), look at the product and see if it's been sold elsewhere and look at the conversion rate you would need to achieve to justify the revenue figures quoted. As a rule of thumb, if product A costs $10 and the adword CPC is $1, I'll know that other advertisers need a conversion rate of 10% to break even. If your calculations shows this site needs more than that to produce the quoted figures approach with extreme caution.

Hope this helps

Justin