Scammed on Flippa

Arg, so I got scammed pretty bad on Flippa. I lost $2k. Here's the story...

I saw a fairly decent site and the seller said he was buying traffic for his site from an ad agency which sends traffic from social networks. He was then monetizing the site through another ad agency which pays CPM as opposed to CPC. So getting high amounts of social networking traffic makes sense to create the revenue. I also had a few other sites in that niche too (which made me more excited about this site), so I was thinking this will be amazing. I would be able to increase my profit on my other sites as well if I got access to this magical advertising agency he was using.

Anyways, the Escrow Inspection period was set to one day. And I told the seller that I will reject the site if I don't see traffic within the 24 hour period. So he set it up and got a bit of traffic fed over to my site so I was content. Then the inspection period ended and it was hard to get a hold of the seller and the traffic stopped. After many attempts of trying to get a hold of him, he was busy setting up and preparing for EID (An Islamic Celebration). So I was like, fair enough. I'll message him again when its done.

Now, when EID had finished, he completely stopped responding to me along and I never got access to the advertising agency either (which I don't believe even exists anymore).

The sad part is that he had all the proof. He had video & picture proof up on Flippa and traffic proof. He even sent a high amount of traffic while the site was in my possession (and it was indeed social networking traffic which is what I expected). I even had his Skype contact, and spoke with him voice to voice over Skype about the site.

I contacted Flippa and Escrow. And they can't do anything. Escrow already released the funds and this dude made $2k unethically. He also sold two other sites to this one other individual. I got his contact information from the WHOIS and he got scammed too.

I'm kinda pissed, not only at the seller but myself too because this is the first time I actually lowered my guard a little bit on Flippa (by allowing him to have such a short inspection period). And everything did seem legit.

Fuckin scammers like this really piss me off, dig deeper and find out all the details you can on this guy then post on every ripoffreport(dot)com type site you can find with his name in the page title so if anybody else in the future searches his name the first page will be swamped with your story and warning others to steer clear of this piece of shit......i.e......destroy his online reputation..........maybe let him know what you're going to do if it doesn't make good with you.....

but whatever you do don't back down too easy man, you gotta fight back...

Some lessons come hard. Education is expensive, lack thereof even more so. Sounds like you learned something so all is not lost. You also have a website to develop. Best of luck.

Very sorry you lost your hard earned money OP. I'm sure this scammer will be doing the same thing to others.

Since you have his contact info, you should follow everything he tries to sell and report or post his scam in every place that you can. In other words, do whatever you can to ruin his reputation. Might not get your money back but you might get a little satisfaction out of ruining his rep.

To be honest, you can easily fake a tons of traffic from 'social' networks on your website, just go to popular websites for traffic exchange, change the referrer to facebook, twitter or whatever and send traffic, I'm pretty sure it's very cheap as well. I, myself, have seen a LOT of scams on Flippa before, so if I were in your position, I wouldn't have paid so easily without being 100% sure that it's legit. Anyway, I'm sorry for your loss, I hope the fucker gets what he deserves.

Bad luck on this. Flippa can be a great source for good sites, but the amount of cr*p and, as you found out, scamming that's there makes it difficult to do business there...

it's very Disappointing, now days flippa is marked as scammers hub.

popcrdom29 said:

Since you have his contact info, you should follow everything he tries to sell and report or post his scam in every place that you can. In other words, do whatever you can to ruin his reputation. Might not get your money back but you might get a little satisfaction out of ruining his rep.

Click to expand...

I second burning his reputation...

Hate the kind of guys who scam you for your money. It's also sad that they have to sell websites even though they have no idea how to properly create and manage them.

Sorry to hear about this. I am not a fan of Flippa anymore either. A few years ago I bought a site that was supposedly making a steady $600 per month and after two months of owning it I went from $600 to around $30 a month. So I got ripped off as well. Live and learn, won't do that again.

Although you used Escrow service, you got scammed....

This case became valuable experience and lesson for you.

Di.ck move's a lot of you, sure lesson learned but no need to keep saying it. Poor guy just lost 2K which I'm sure he worked his butt off for.

In my early days I spent alot of time on flippa but now I try to avoid it as much as possible. I cant even recall a single legit transaction......lol

How much was the website making? Because if he said the website was making more than $250/month, you could have protect yourself by reading what are the usual prices and what are the scamming patterns on Flippa ( and not only)

Never sell your real sites on flippa. FEinternational looks good option.