flippa scams

Hi,

so you all know how there are tons of scammers trolling flippa.. so recently i fell victim to one of them. wasn't even a high value deal, but high enough to annoy me..

I got so pissed that my first reaction was to go out and buy the domain flippascams.com

I am now looking to create a site that will consolidate all the knowledge about how to avoid getting scammed on flippa.

I'm looking for stories, tips, advice, and any other notable piece of information people here can offer, so that real legitimate webmasters who are out there trying to make honest money wont get scammed in the way.

Any help anyone can provide will be highly appreciated!

i hate them .. for every site that you post to sell you have to pay $30 and i never sold any site there but i paid a lot of times

"This blog was created out or pain and frustration.

It was created following a site I had bought that evidently ended up being a total flop and scam.

Now although the price for the site was not too high ? only around $600.

The entire experience was so frustrating that I decided that scamming over filppa must end, or at least minimized as much as possible.

I realized that there are many different scam artists out there, and that trying to cover all the techniques used to scamming innocent people
when buying domains or websites would be an impossible task for one person alone".


Just included the above excerpt from your site, and yes,
I understand your pain and frustration, but I feel I should warn you though,
not to overstep the mark i.e. keep your cool,
because you do not want a legal action taken against you,
akin to slander/libelious statements that has had to be dealt with in nodaddy.com forum

Just a heads up and keep it real.
$600 may not be a lot to some members, but it may be TOO MUCH for others,
if they cannot turn that site around into fair game.

Good Luck.
Don't get mad, get even

Well it would behoove you to do research before taking action. It sounds like you failed to do research before making a purchase and now going to add insult to injury by wasting time on a negative campaign that has been done by so many others. There must be at least 50 negative Flippa blogs out there so I'm not sure what you hope to gain by making another. Again if you did some research you'd find these anti-Flippa blogs and rather than waste your time creating another you can just add your story.

I hate the Flippa scammers but take responsibility for your own actions. What did you miss? Why didn't you do better research? Why did you bid on a scam? Did you investigate the seller's history? How many accounts are linked to him? What was his reputation? How many sites has he sold? What was the site feedback on his sold sites (not transaction feedback)? What was the multiples (profit / selling price)? I could go on and on but frankly you're not off the hook in this transaction as it sounds like you seriously failed to do some due diligence.

Now the bright side is if you paid PP then you can probably recover your money. First file an unauthorized transaction with PP if you're under the 45 days. The seller will be given 3 options to respond to an unauthorized claim; provide tracking number, provide refund, provide proof a refund has been given. He won't be able to provide any of the above with a digital item so you'll recover the payment.

If it's past 45 days then you'll have to take the matter up with your Credit Card if you funded your PP with a CC.

Good luck but I wouldn't waste my time with a blog bashing Flippa. Recover your money and be wiser in the future. Spend your time on something productive and not negative. You'll find that frankly the world doesn't give a damn about your lost or efforts trying to save them from the same mistakes.

Kvmcable is absolutely spot on.

One thing I wanted to add is that even if your motivations are genuine, i.e. instead of campaigning against Flippa in general, you actually want to provide people with information on how to spot and avoid scams, you will soon find that your site will be of very little help to your target audience (first time buyers).

That's because people start looking for sites and information like this AFTER they've been scammed, at which stage it becomes largely pointless as after being burnt once, people are typically far more careful themselves and don't let themselves fall for (obvious) scams in the future. And obvious scams are all that you can possibly help people to spot and avoid.

You could of course promote the hell out of the site and make it popular this way, but there aren't very many ways to monetise a project like this so you wouldn't be able to afford to put any money into marketing.

The not-so-obvious scams, inflated revenue and traffic figures, unsustainable sites, etc. are a whole different story. The reason why I'm in the DD business myself (and the reason why I have clients) is that people don't want to spend months or years learning the proper DD process. And even if they would, in order for you to teach them that, you would first need to become an expert yourself - which I can honestly say is not an easy thing to achieve. I can count the people whom I would trust with doing DD on a site I'm about to acquire on two hands (kvmcable is probably one of them), and I've been in this industry long enough to know pretty much everyone.

There are too many scam sites of flippa, by just looking at their stats and established date you can easily spot some bogus sites.

You wasted your money because you thought that you will "gain" more money and you forgot to examine the details of the sites that you want to buy.

Too many horror stories on flippa.

I usually check flippa sellers feedback ratings before going to buy websites or deal with them not only at flippa but in any market place there can be scammers, that's why we need to be aware of their past activities to make sure that we're not going to fail in to such scam.

If you haven't taken the advise yet. Stop wasting your time and money on recovering your loss. Learn from your mistake and move on.

Just for a laugh, can you sell your site [flippascams.com] on flippa? I'm sure many of us want to know how that goes down.

Flippa used to have a filter that wouldn't allow any domain with the word "flippa" in it. I'm not sure if the filter is still up with all the changes they've made in the last year.

I wouldn't keep that blog up.....because of the several reasons given by kvmcable and bryanon.

There are tons of legitimate business being done on Flippa and though you may see complaints, the major slice of their business is legitimate.

There are pros on this forum who do due diligence for you, they investigate the sites being sold, you obviously didn't do any of that. Flippa is clear about the rules: SALES ARE FINAL, so you're responsible to evaluate the stability and safety of the deals.

Flippa is just a yellow pages for sites, yellow pages can't control all the scumbags selling snake oil, they just list them, or delist them when they find out.... I hope you've learned your expensive lesson(we've all lost $600 one time or another) and you take that site down and do better next time. Just my 2 cents.

PS. Flippa can afford the best lawyers in the country....this may cost you more than the $600 you lost.....

Its very easy , when you buy a site you use just escrow ?
Bigger and harder deal ?
More inspection days in the deal.
You check the site and when you feel comfortable you finilize the transaction.

In selling there are scammers, so you should have checked the sellers history before buying it. Its pointess to think negative about the whole thing. Make sure you wont fall for the same thing again. You lost your money, since you didn't check the details of the sites you wanted to buy.

They are always the sites that sell for $500-2500.

Avoid those like the plague.

Sorry for the loss

maverickk3 said:

Its very easy , when you buy a site you use just escrow ?
Bigger and harder deal ?
More inspection days in the deal.
You check the site and when you feel comfortable you finilize the transaction.

Click to expand...

i bought a website for $15k two years ago and used escrow, 3 day inspection. Everything was great but after releasing money, the site I bought took a dive into complete $0 revenue within first week.

do you know who I blame? Myself.... For believing something that was too good to be true. I knew I was gambling, and I paid for it.

so escrow is relative...

if it's too good to be true it probably is
i guess this is the only advice you need when buying on flippa

Charge backs always work. They really have to let charge backs take its course, and they make billions in fees each year anyways so they only care to an extent with charge backs.

I did one for a listing of mine part way through since I knew it was not gonna sell.

there are lot of scammers on flippa,it's not cool.this is a nice idea,your website will prevent people from getting scammed,tell them if some sites on flippa looks too good to be true,it may not the truth.
And if something really happen,contact flippa directly and payment processor,to open an case,this will always help

Same here.. None of my sites sold over there.. I wasted $30 thrice

Zuuuu said:

i hate them .. for every site that you post to sell you have to pay $30 and i never sold any site there but i paid a lot of times

Click to expand...

I also hate Flippa scammers. So keep up your good work...