Its been a while that I m active in domaining and each day that passes I become wiser and less enthusiastic about it mostly because of the high scam rate that exists among “domaining” industry.
Domaining can offer some of the best thrills that someone can experience when for example he gets to sell a domain 20x more that he originally bought or register it. These kind of emotions are dominating mostly young domainers(not in age) making them vulnerable in scam schemes like the one I m going to post below about GoDaddy and Sedo MarketPlace.
Domains can be bought in various marketplaces or forums such as Sedo, Snapnames, Namejet, Godaddy, Namepros, Dnforum, Flippa and more. There you can search for domains using criteria as traffic, domain age, keywords and more making it easier to find the best domain to invest your hard earned money with.
Traffic is one of the most famous criteria used for selecting a domain from a marketplace so this also has become one of the best tactics for scammers to take advantage of by inflating traffic stats with methods that are already covered by other blogs here and here and here.
Its so common to see such scam that I found two of them in just 10 minutes of research, first one was found on GoDaddy Marketplace where some .mobi domains are listed for sale having 100K’s traffic. Domains are:
- i-realestate.mobi
Traffic: 200694
Price: $25,000
- approvedcredit.mobi
Traffic: 186589
Price: $25,000 - instantapproval.mobi
Traffic: 149113
Price: $25,000 - i-investmentbanking.mobi
Traffic: 134403
Price: $25,000
Its very obvious that traffic stats for those domains are inflated and can potentially lead to a sale.
Newbies can be easily get tricked by such tactics while at the same time domaining is attracting more scamming activity since Domain MarketPlaces such as Godaddy are not transparent.
If GoDaddy can’t verify traffic listed on their marketplace domains then they shouldn’t let anyone insert traffic stats from the beginning.
My second example is dedicated to our beloved Sedo and its notorious domain marketplace. Every now and then I scan their domain lists in order to find interesting domains to buy so I thought I could easily find a domain scammer over there and I was right. After just one query using traffic criteria I stumbled on domain joutuve.es that sedo reports traffic of 43k’s per month.
Impressive isn’t it?
If you take 1 minute and think about it you can easily realize that this domain can’t justify this amount of traffic, it looks like a youtube typo but there is now way so many people could type j instead of y and v instead of b at the same time.
That made me curious finding where traffic came from so I started scanning all possible youtube .es typo’s.
Just 10 minutes later I found out one of the best youtube typo domains: yotube.es which I typed in only to find out it redirects to joutuve.es!!!!
BINGO!!!!!
Our lovely domainer(?)-scammer is using this great typo domain to inflate traffic stats for another poor quality typo domain so he can sell it to anyone innocent enough not to his homework.
Again Sedo, like GoDaddy, should verify domain traffic and ban any user that inflates it with bots or redirects.
I even opened a ticket with sedo(November 20th 2010) stating all this asking them to delist this domain from their marketplace because of the redirect inflating method domain owner is using to inflate traffic stats.
The next day(November 21th 2010) Sedo send me the following reply :
thank you for the information!
We will notify the client and take appropriate actions against this.
As you may have discovered yourselves they are still letting this scammer get away with it since yotube.es still redirects to joutuve.es while joutuve.es still shows inflated traffic stats.
Well done Sedo, what a great service you provide and how great is your support.
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Bill Mauldin on 
Kid Roland on 
Hey Makis,
Thx a lot for your thorough Post. I learned something today.
First off, I didn’t know that GoDaddy lets you Post your own traffic results…LOL
and The Sedo info that you reported to them, great catch.
Unfortunately your warning to Sedo most likely doesn’t mean anything to them. They just sold sex.com for 13 million so I truly believe they could give a $hit about anything less than $xxx,xxx sales anymore.
We need an alternative MarketPlace that cares about all sales.
This was some great info because I have been searching for domains based off of those (inflated) reported traffic results.
Thanks,
Vito
My pleasure Vito.
Its amazing how easily some can scam or get scammed in domain world.
I hate playing the police but whenever I see something that looks like a scam I always try to let others know so they wont get fooled.
I m dissapointed with Sedo but there is nothing else to do than move on and use them for what they offer and that is domain escrow services.
Sex.com may be the big sale but my experience shows in order to keep a business running you must keep most of your customers happy and its obvious that many of us aren’t.
Great post as usual!
I am not one for actually leaving comments, however after reading your post I feel you maybe able to help me.
I am searching for an old domain name to help get faster rankings for a new website we are launching. The problem is that I am not sure exactly where to purchase a good old domain name.
Do you have any advice?