Story of a Scammer Number One

Scammed Into A Corner

It’s a sad thing when an honest guy gets done over by a clever scammer. Unfortunately this happens over the internet with increasing regularity all over the internet marketting world.

Col was doing just fine selling Internet services to many members on the DigitalPoint Forums (aka DP). DP have hundreds of thousands of members, many of them having some sort of online business whether it be an E-Commerce web site, or a blog earning a few cents from Google Adsense. Col’s username at DP is Cheap SEO Services. Although, Col didn’t know a great deal about SEO he had enough knowledge to get by and improve some of his own sites.

It was at this point in time (early 2006) when Col started to look into the possibility of doing some business selling services. Col owned a few blogs and one of them became reasonably popular gaining a Google PR of 4. Col had seen others on DP selling blog posts or reviews about other web sites and/or products and publishing those reviews on their own blog. Col put together an offer and published the service on DP. This became a reasonable amount of revenue for Col and not long after that Col became aware of Wordpress.

Wordpress was much more flexible and was unique in the way it behaved for its owner. Several plugins were available that enabled Col to publish one article across many Wordpress blogs. This became very useful in Col’s business strategy and was not long before Col had hundreds of blogs and many clients were using this service much to Col’s liking.

Other business ideas were being pursued by Col to ensure the level of income was steady. Enough so he left his full time job to operate this online business full time. A lull hit Col and so he started to look into other areas of business. It was at this point in time when Col was approached by a Syrian about a business opportunity. This Syrian (DP username – KingofKings) had no way of getting money to him via Paypal as Paypal did not operate in Syria and many other countries. KingofKings was selling similar services on DP but very few came about because he was limited to another financial institution called Moneybookers. What KingofKings proposed was that he sold the services and Col collected the funds in his Paypal account. Little did Col know that Paypal did not authorize these types of transactions.

This arrangement took place over many months. Col was receiving a small commission for doing this for KingofKings. As much time went by, KingofKings hit Col with another business opportunity. The service was to get people’s web sites ranked on the first page in Google for any given keyword. KingofKings supposedly had a team of employees in an office that he was employing for other tasks. He proposed to use these staff members to do the grunt work for people’s web sites to get ranked on the first page. How this was to happen went like this:

KingofKings wrote up the offer on DP forums but got Col to publish it under his name. Many clients came on board and paid up front the fee for this service to take place in the allotted time. The monies were forwarded to KingofKings via WU. Here’s the catch. The service was fully guaranteed. 100% money back if first page in Google was not reached. KingofKings had a number of his own web sites used as proof of what he could do with this office staff. The time periods were between 4 months and some of them were 8 months, 12 months or 2 years. The time period was dependant on the popularity of the keyword.

This is where it all fell down. KingofKings was not getting the work done. Clients were starting to complain and some were asking for their money back. Col refunded quite a few from his own funds with the promise from KingofKings he would take care of it. Then KingofKings told Col he wanted to take over the business as the time difference between Syria and Australia was too much and it was difficult to correspond between him and Col let alone the clients and Col. Col was concerned about the amount of complaints and also the amount of calls for refunds. KingofKings informed Col that he would take care of al the clients personally and he will find a way of refunding them one way or another from his own funds.

A new thread was made and published at DP about the take-over of the business by KingofKings and that Col had no further business interests in the service. Clients were now dealing directly with KingofKings.

A few weeks later, KingofKings ended being banned from DP for apparently abusing the system and rules. At this point in time he could not be contacted. He was not responding to emails or via his chat messages. He simply vanished. The clients turned to Col and demanded refunds. The tally of clients refunds amounted to well over US$50,000.00. Col did not have the money and stated as such to many clients. Col tried every means to find out where KingofKings was and to try and rectify this terrible situation. All avenues ended up as dead ends. KingofKing’s contact details were fake. There was no trace of him at all. This left Col in an impossible situation. He had no choice. He had to try and pay back every client every cent no matter how long it took.

Col has a business web site with a shortened version of this story available here. Col has seen many people donate their services and money to help pay back all of the clients. A thread at DP has shown Col to be an honest guy trying to make good of a bad situation and has provided proof of the refunds as time has gone. You can find that thread here.

You might ask yourself “how can I help Col?”

That’s easy. His business forum needs more visibility. There is advertising in parts of the forum. His theory is like this: “if more people visit and use the forums, then some of those people will click on the ads relating to those forums. Every cent helps my cause.”

The ways that you can help is by way of backlinks and social networking. Making more people aware of his plight will help fix this problem so Col can get himself out of this massive debt.

As I said before. Col is an honest guy trying to make a buck. Let’s help him get back what was taken from him.