An example of Flippa scam!

The way I have been able to spot scammers is history, history, history. It so easy to generate bot and other hallow traffic. Just go to the fiverr website and you can buy 2000 unique organic hits through targeted keywords google for $5. (and it looks completely legitimate in Google Analytics)

In my experience the best thing you can do is get a long history of performance and only buy from established sellers.

Once I was looking to buy a site on flippa and encountered a simple scam. It was a niche jobs site and I was very close to bidding on it. The site had several months of increasing adsense revenue and the seller claimed that all traffic arrived through organic search and long-tail search traffic with no expenses for advertising. But when I searched for links to the site, I found that it had paid links on various bigger job listing websites. These job listing websites cost anywhere from 30 bucks to over 100 bucks a month to run an ad. The paid-link costs were much higher than what the site was bringing in from adsense.

So the scammer had made a site and immediately bought links to bring in traffic. He monitized that traffic through adsense. Then, each month he would buy additional and better paid links to make it look like the site's profits from adsense were increasing every month with a nicely upward sloping profit curve, but it was all fake profits because the site had large advertising expenses. The site ended up selling for over a thousand bucks I think. At the time I estimated that he probably made at least 50% profit from the sale based on my guess for how much the paid links had cost.

Well,

Everything can be faked... easily.

There is no protection against scam right now. Only experience can protect buyer (or seller!).

I just saw Paypal site. Full blown Paypal site, 100% functionality... just like original. SSL, certificates, everything you imagine... it took just two days to get it ready...

Guys...

Give me one week and I will bring you functional Yahoo (or Facebook... whatever you wish...)

Ahh... and regarding traffic...

This is probably the easiest to get done...

With right knowledge you can get EVERY detail ready and just like real (Including browser and OS... whatever)

Indeed, lot of things can be faked. There are bots making up the search traffic to boost the site visits. However, if a site has keywords listed in 1st page ranking, it is not that easy to fake and probably worth a lot more.

Always gotta do your research..lots of scammers out there.

Someone should set up a PROFESSIONAL website selling business that validates the data manually and produces it's own stats for the site instead of having to TRUST the seller. Basically, anyone wanting to sell their site for over $1000, has to host the auction site's script for at least 8 weeks before they can list their site for sale.
Also, I can think of many ways to protect buyers (and sellers) that flippa isn't doing.

I can't see Flippa being around for much longer. Too many people associate the word 'Flippa' with the word 'Scam' and that is never a good brand identity to have if you want any level of longevity. It is a shame because as a concept, it did have the potential to grow into being one of the major web brands and the people behind Flippa are not the scammers themselves, they are equally victims of the scams. In fact, if I owned Flippa myself, I would make some serious changes to attempt to eliminate any scams, even if it meant losing 60% of my profits in the short term to achieve this. As there's a money trail, it would be quite easy to track down most of the scammers, not all of them, but most. After all, people need a real world bank to withdraw from PayPal and Escrow and in todays day and age, it's very hard to set up a fake bank account. So Flippa should make their customers aware of serious consequences if they attempt to scam anyone.
Of course, it's impossible to stop all scams because this is the internet but it's not out of the question to seriously reduce the number of scams. Just look at eBay as an example, they still have scammers on there but NOWHERE near as many as there used to be. I think this was mostly due to their system of user reputation.
Flippa still might escape death if they make these changes but if they continue as they are without any changes, Flippa will be dead within a year in my opinion. If they do make changes to reduce the scams, they should also consider re-branding too, to disassociate themselves from the word 'scam'

Anyway, thats just my opinion for what it's worth. (Not much! haha)

Wouldn't it be HILARIOUS if one day Flippa list's itself on it's own site. That would be funny. Sad, but still funny.

rreeve said:

Someone should set up a PROFESSIONAL website selling business that validates the data manually and produces it's own stats for the site instead of having to TRUST the seller. Basically, anyone wanting to sell their site for over $1000, has to host the auction site's script for at least 8 weeks before they can list their site for sale.
Also, I can think of many ways to protect buyers (and sellers) that flippa isn't doing.

Click to expand...

Sadly, there is very little money in this so no-one who would actually be capable of pulling it off is going to do it. If I retired tomorrow and would have enough reserves to support me for the rest of my life then I probably would, just to help the industry a little, but otherwise - no dice.

There is an incredibly low number of decent online businesses listed for sale each month, and the number is even lower when looking at the low end (sub-$50k), which is the target for a marketplace as above that, sellers typically deal with brokers.

Even if 50 decent $20k properties came up for sale each month (not going to happen), all of those properties were listed at that new marketplace (not going to happen) and the marketplace would charge a 5% success fee, it would only gross $50,000 a month - deduct payment processing costs, ongoing development costs and staff costs (which are going to be extremely high as the marketplace is moderated) and you'll end up with a marketplace that's making a loss.

Here is one big clue about fake sales between Owners/sellers

imagine if the seller and the buyer are the same person, will it make any sense???

actually i have tracked a famous warrior(woman profile) who was doing just that for years,

she was selling method on "how to extract gold from Flippa" ; she was making a killing with the sales on warriors forums + affilaites promotion. after tracking the beast , i found out that in fact it was a man who had several products on "how to make a fortune on flippa"

so they invest like a couple thousands in fake sales of websites with no traffic; then they make six figures sales with the "flippa magic pill" products

these is a common practice in "internet marketing" as you find so much fake information product that just sell these magic pills