CAUTION: Auctions Geared to Scam Newbies at Flippa

Registration Date 14th Nov, 2010

They are all on sub domains. lol

Well, the guy does disclose that these blogs are not the ones he has made money on.

As for the noob who may have bought this - well their mama should have told them to know what they are buying before they buy it.

And think positive! Maybe is was bought by someone who knows what they are doing.

(I never would have bought it in a million years)

Flippa has tons of junk listings. Since the first one is offering blogs that are not even made yet, the listing violates Flippa TOS. You have to list a site, not a service and there has to be a real domain for the site. I reported that auction. The second one probably also is a violation of TOS.

But yeah, buyer beware on Flippa. There's a lot of dodgy listings. No quality control whatsoever. You got the money you got the listing.

Well if it was Guaranteed couldn't you just request your money back when things didn't work out? I wonder if you get a phone call if your PayPal account has an $11,000+ dispute lol.

Anyway. These things are total crap, but someone should see this a mile away--especially those with just a little experience. Sometimes its just too good to be true, as is the case here.

I think it is deceptive that he has a video showing his adsense earnings from his other blogs - not the ones he is trying to sell in the auction.

But, on the other hand that works out to only $14.5 per blog on that second one. That doesn't seem like a lot. And he is guaranteeing that you will make $1 per day per blog after 45 days so, that would be $800 a day which seems like a good deal when you look at it that way.

So what you are saying is that you don't believe he will give the buyer their money back if the blogs don't make $1 a day, right?

https://flippa.com/auctions/113179/P...ale-No-Reserve
Ouch.

For anyone to honestly think that autoblogging is the way to go and then to throw such a large sum of money at them completely sums up the whole situation imo.

There is no way that i would consider buying something like that, even if the earnings were from those blogs, would be better investing into one major focused site.

Flippa is starting to have issues with quality of data, the first thing i do is refine my search to sites that have had revenue of $1+ or 100+ visitors a month, it usually weeds out 90% of the searches on the spot. But newbies won't know how to do this, perhaps flippa should make it default?

Well, if someone puts up a site or group of sites and they sell for $10,000, then it is valued at (at least) $10,000 because a willing buyer agreed to the price.

It doesn't matter what you think, or anyone at WF thinks. If people don't know how to value websites/domains properly, then they shouldn't be buying sites/domains.

If you don't know how to properly evaluate auto-blogs, then one has no business buying them.

Tom

I see a lot of autoblogs recently at flippa and the prices are insane...

Don't people have to prove their income streams before they will sell? Personally I would expect to get access to their logins to their affiliate programs so I can see the exact sales figures. I wouldn't accept screenshots.

Like I mentioned, this one violates Flippa TOS. It is selling a service, not a website. You have to have a valid domain and an existing website. This listing did not. I reported it and it is gone. The other one may have also violated Flippa TOS but some sucker just put out big bucks for that one already.

For a dot info domain is it really worth that price?

Scary to think a few months ago I probably would of fell for it.

Thanks for the info!

yes, i noticed this auction also, its really weird why there are people willing to bid until over 10k...with all site buildt on subdomains....though it will be a different story if all are on different domains.

I have a lot of sympathy for the person who bought the 800 auto-blogs for $11,000. I am sure most of us have fallen the promise of easy pickings. Just look at 99% of the internet marketing sales letters that are all around the internet.

Because there is so much rubbish on Flippa I haven't bought anything there for months. It took me simply too much time to find out if it is true what the seller wrote and if I thought it was a good one the bidding went skyhigh or the site was suddenly sold outside the bidding proces. So no more Flippa for me.

You can see it in the comments of the auction that it's a clear scam. Scammers will allways try to hide things and be aggrassive to those that dare to give a word of criticism.
At the end when he got a little desperate to sell quickly he made outrageous promises (Facebook account with 50 000 friends, 2 Twitter account with thousands of followers).
I learned to never put myself under pressure and then make a decision. When some internet marketer tells you to urgently buy now, then you should just take some time to relax and think clearly.

People buying that have a fear of missing out. You should take action but never be driven by a fear of missing out.

I think it's horrible that even well known internet marketers lie to people by saying on their $37 product are just 20 places left. If you come back after a month it's still the same. Well they are not ripping off a single person with $ 11 000, but they are ripping lots of people off for smaller ammounts - no difference.

Can you believe it?

I just wasted 10 valuable minutes out of my schedule to read every single one of the post on this thread.

I understand this is wrong but i would rather spend my time writing a follow up for my new site than wasting my time talking about this.

That second example is particularly egregious. I don't recall ever seeing a brand new site of any kind earning absolutely zero income selling on Flippa for that much!

He is very deceptive in his sales copy, and I imagine that many people must have skimmed over the important parts, such as the part where he categorically states that the subdomain sites have not made a dime yet! He also goes on to boldly guarantee that the 800 subdomains will each be making $1 per day in 45 days.

I can't believe someone fell for this, and I feel that with his 365 day moneyback guarantee it's only a matter of time before a refund is requested.

Paul

What's even worse on Flippa is these craptacular domain scalping auctions with this headline:

"Godaddy says TheBestDomainYouCouldEverHave.com is worth an overpriced amount of money where I have TheBestDomainYouCouldEverHave.net for much less!"

Or something along those lines.

I've noticed in recent weeks that the word 'potential' figures in a lot more Flippa titles lately than it used to do. There was a bit of a phase where it seemed to be frowned on and wasn't used so much, but it looks like it's made a comeback. Around three weeks ago I was seeing it so much that I even wondered if it had been advised by some site-flipping product that's on the go somewhere.

It's kind of sad that 'potential' sells, given the cyber-slop that's labelled with much of it (usually in conjunction with an inflated asking price). I suspect that a lot of it is purchased by people who don't know the first thing about buying websites and are buying hopes and dreams instead.

Another thing I've noticed is how many budget sites (often sold for as little as $70 or less) are being listed as including the WP-Robot plugin, despite the fact that the developer licensed version of the plugin prohibits it from being sold with sites that fetch less than $140. The buyers of these sites are being ripped off blind - if a crucial update to the plugin is released (as it was in the case of the recent changes to the Amazon 'comments' feed) these buyers will discover that the plugin they 'own' - and an integral part of their site - is unlicensed and therefore unsupported. Lovely. Not.

Hi all.

Some great comments and a few things worth covering off here (as you'd expect from a thread with 40 replies!).

Firstly, in terms of the original auctions: we work hard to block any scams on Flippa. There are a number of questionable listings that don't see the light of day and we jumped on both of those listed above as soon as they were brought to our attention. The first was already sold however the second we were in time to terminate.

Flippa doesn't manually approve each listing before it goes live - not something that can effectively be scaled to cover the 150 or so new listings we have each day. Having said this, we do have automated validations and checks which we are constantly tweaking to ensure the quality of the listings on Flippa. We also find the "report it" link at the footer of every listing to be an effective means for anyone to flag their concerns about a listing - one of many benefits of having such an active buyer/seller community!

The manual approval of website listings may seem fairly straight-forward, especially for offending listings such as the two flagged originally above. However, this is not something we're really looking into given the inconsistencies this often generates at the edges (look at our review-model competitors for examples of this). Instead, our view is that buyers should be the ultimate determiners of what value means to them (given their skills, interests, budget, goals etc). We strive to do what we can to ensure buyers remain informed and educated on the opportunities and pitfalls in purchasing websites (something we are gladly aided in by bloggers and forums such as this one).

In terms of website listing search, the large variety of websites on Flippa means users rely heavily on our search, guided navigation, refinement and sorting tools to find the sites they are after. We constantly invest in improving these tools and agree we there is opportunity for improvement here (we'll be seeing improvements in the next few months).

Finally, we share commenters' concerns on the rise and rise of the use of "potential" revenue or traffic claims. While sellers are well within their right to flag quakified potential revenue as a basis for site value, these figures often have significant execution risk and buyers need to ensure they build this into their bid price. As much as this is flagged across all business buying blogs, forums and texts, it is something worth calling out for us on our blog.

There are suckers born everyday! I tried Flippa for 10 different autoblogs and made about $500 total. It cost about $100 to register the domain names, $200 to list the auctions on Flippa and about 10 hours of work to create the blogs. Definately a waste of time and effort!

To your success!
Bruce