It usually is!
As usual, I’m always on the look out for a bit of a business opportunity and when one appears I give it serious thought, so last week when I spotted a website for sale for £995 I asked for further details.
The website in question was an information site in many ways, with Google Adsense Ads, Amazon links and Clickbank links… Sounds just the sort of thing I’m interested in and when I found out it had been making close to £2000 in the last six Months that really grabbed my interest!
I’m the sort of person that likes to mitigate as much risk as possible, and having just read Theo Paphitis biography this week I was determined to make sure this was the right deal for me! A few questions later and the seller had produced me a nice little spreadsheet that suggested he had only ever spent £200 on advertising… £2000 in six months, I’m very interested – so I asked him for some proof of those numbers.
At this time the price dropped to £695, great! I enquired about escrow and asked for the proofs I required… The seller agreed to escrow payments and provided me with a Word document of his bank statement – how very trusting.
I went a little further and did some research on the domain name, it appeared to only have been registered a month ago! The explanation for this was that he had just renewed it… I hate to say it but owning a hosting company the alarm bells started to ring!
I’ve asked for screenshots of Google/Amazon or access to the account (I’d accept doing it over VNC or Netmeeting) it’s not forthcoming, I’ve gone back to the bank statement this morning and noticed it includes very few other transactions than the one I’m interested in (does this guy spend no money?). The seller can’t produce statistics on visitors for me…
It’s a shame as I was genuinely interested, and would have been interested if it was making a lot less too…
(Oh and it’s £500 now!)
See – it is a good job I brought you up to be suspicious!!!!! Well done!!
.-= Kate´s last blog ..A Garden Makeover! =-.
Sounded too good to be true and it looks like it was. Must get lots of people are gullable though.
It’s amazing just how many con-artists are out there. We got our fingers badly burned by one of these domain-sitting companies. We accidentally allowed one of our domains to expire, and they immediately bought it, and then tried to sell it back to us for £1000!!
I agree Terry, it’s weedling them out that’s the issue!
I run a hosting company and we pester clients who haven’t renewed to prevent things like that happening!
Sounds like a poor attempt at website flipping, only the site wasn’t great and you found out!
It’s almost to the point of not being able to believe anything anybody says. Asking for proof is the only way to go. The guy was pretty tricky giving you a word document of his bank statement. WOW.
Sometimes we just have to walk away, and it looks like you knew exactly what you were doing. It was time to walk away for you, but maybe something else will come along. 🙂
.-= Lisa Udy´s last blog ..Great Things To Know About Utah =-.
We got our fingers badly burned by one of these domain-sitting companies. It’s amazing just how many con-artists are out there.