Are people on Flippa CRAZY???

So why do you think the site is selling for that much?

SEO isn't the only thing that makes a site succeed. There are many other sources of traffic.

This THREAD make me sick with grief. $5000 is the tip of the iceberg.

I was one of those buyers who wanted to buy semi-built ready to go sites. I learned the hard way to do it yourself.

Flippa is not crazy because its mostly criminal. I am willing to testify that the FLIPPA market is CORRUPT.

Don't waste your time and especially your money on FLIPPA. The owners and managers of FLIPPA charge big fees but offer no buyer support and more importantly have made themselves a vehicle for fraud as they do NOT police their own forum.

I know. Because I have bought two WP sites there within a day or two last February. There have been many problems that would lead to criminal and civil charges if those responsible ever show up in Florida.

Lets start with the fact they sold us WP sites where they did NOT have a developers license and we are ineligible to upgrade the theme and have received threatening letters from the theme owners... The "developers" promised to monetize the sites with my accounts. They added the codes to fake plugins so it appeared on the desktop.

The affiliate and tracking codes were placed in obvious places but we later discovered they were not true links and both sites had buried php code in the site templates that sent all monetized traffic to the developers accounts. One developer also put in a backdoor using the vulnerability that was just corrected in WP 3.2.1 which gave them access to NOT only the corrupted site but all of our sites on the shared server. They and their friends accessed all of our sites and redirected the ad links through their accounts.

We did not discover it until our accounts with adsense, clikbank and others suddenly showed declining revenue while the sites showed increasing traffic. We switched servers and IP addresses at hostgator and the hackers announced their presence by taking the sites offline and planting a new homepage with their flag.

We tracked the code and access back to the Flippa sellers/developers. We contacted Flippa with absolutely NO reply. Flippa does NOT respond to our inquires or demands to investigate. They also would NOT allow us to remove our recommends for the corrupt developers or post warnings. You are NOT able to edit your posts on Flippa.

Neither developers respond to inquires but both continue to use Flippa. Our recommendations are still posted for both.

We spent less than $2500 for both domains but they cost us tens of thousands of dollars as we had to take more than 30 domains offline for a month.

FLIPPA IS CORRUPT AND NOT TO BE TRUSTED. THEY OFFER NO SUPPORT. MORE IMPORTANTLY: They do not police their users and have NO mechanism for allowing other users to police their own.

FLIPPA = BUYER BEWARE. THATS MY OPINION AND I AM STICKING TO IT.

Thank you for your post.

All good advice, interesting Real Estate analogy, and almost exactly what I did.

Here in Florida, we have suffered through the worse of the Real Estate crash. We are dealing with Chinese Drywall, bankrupt developers and contractors, intransigent bankers, misdirected new Federal and State Regulations, false mortgage modification promoters and falling values. There is little or no orderly market liquidation of problem properties so now the banks are holding them off the market en mass which is manipulating the supply and demand and artificially holding prices high. Today the Real Estate Market and the regulatory government systems struggle to handle the immense volume of problem properties and owners because the market and system became bloated, clogged, morally and ethically corrupt over the years.

How do I know? I have 30 years in Turnaround Management, most recently in Florida Real Estate.

However, FLIPPA is not an OPEN market. It is owned, managed and manipulated privately. They could impose rules, sanctions and ethics in a matter of seconds... if they wanted to. But they are corrupt now and getting fat off the fraud that passes through the system.

There is no way to protect yourself if the gatekeepers protect the thieves over the citizens. Sooner or later they will have to take control or it will blow up on them and they will kill the golden goose.

The point of my posts is you cannot really protect yourself in Flippa. There is no trust. You are rolling the dice but its not just a 100% risk as I learned because the cost on FLIPPA was cheap compared to the damage caused after the fact. For every dollar spent on FLIPPA we lost an estimated $20 (2000%) more after the fact. That's enough to get the attention of law enforcement and litigation attorneys.

The promise and potential of a marketplace like that envisioned by FLIPPA is great. I like the marketplace. There are good developers, buyers and sellers but unfortunately FLIPPA management is NOT nurturing a safe, stable marketplace.

That my opinion and I paid for it.