Buying sites that are making money already.

I will tell you straight up, that 80-90% or maybe even more of the sites that you see that people claim are profitable are scams in one way or the other. You can find legitimate sites, but finding them is the problem. Another thing is a lot of the time even if the profits are legit the seller is getting out while the getting is good. I scroll through Flippa sites and I can spot the scams left and right. I've personally sold over 100 sites on Flippa and from that I've had several repeat customers that have come to me after they purchased sites from other sellers so that I could help them set the site up and the sites never ened up making the money claimed. I had one guy that bought a site from me for $2,300. About a week later he contacts me after he bought a site from someone else for $65,000. The auction had tons of bids, but the site ended up being a complete scam, last I heard he said he was going to hire a private investigator and try and get his money back. I don't know what ever happened with it. The person that sold him the site was actually a warrior that I used to see running wsos frequently. In fact that's another thing I see frequently is people starting a WSO , making a good amount of money from it for a month or two, then when the sells drop they go and sell the site on Flippa claiming that it was making $8,000 a month and it might have been as a WSO, but once the buyer gets the site it isn't going to be making a small fraction of that. I see that fairly often and other variations of it. I can scroll through fiverr and point out how each seller is scamming or being extremely misleading. Flippa is great and definitely the number one site for flipping sites, but there is a bunch of bs on there and anywhere else you would buy sites. If I could believe all the claims on those auctions I would be buying sites left and right. In fact that would be my entire business model - buy profitable sites and maintain them, I would be a millionaire pretty quick using that model.

If the seller has uploaded an unedited Google Analytics PDF (downloaded straight from their Analytics account), then Flippa shows this attachment as a "Verified Google Analytics PDF". This at least shows, that the traffic coming to the website is legit and thus the potential AdSense revenue can be counted out. Another good way to weed out scammers, is to ask for live proof of stats on Skype. Most of the scammers back out or make excuses, when live proofs are mentioned. Live proof is also not 100% secure because almost everything can be faked or edited.