To make a long story short....

My brother was getting ready to purchase a site that had "high traffic". The stats looked good, and the owner was very happy to provide screenshots of them. However he would not provide the "referrers" or give any information about where the traffic came from. My brother requested that information after doing some research (link pop / search engines / etc.) and finding no obvious source for the visitors.

Well, after my brother's questions apparently became too much for the owner to deal with, his mother (he was apparently 15 ;) ) finally wrote back and explained that her son had been paying $2 a month to a traffic service since the beginning of the year, but she didn't know until now that his intentions were to use the traffic to represent a successfully established site to sell for an inflated price. So this "high traffic" web site would have soon become a no/low traffic bust.

So be careful before you buy. Check for links, check the search engines and ask questions. Many of the traffic services accept paypal, which means that anyone of any age can use them. I know this has been mentioned before, but this recent event made me think it was worth noting again.

:peace:

thanks for the alert....
Certainly there are so many people out there ready to cheat you... Difficult World! ;)

That's just sad...

:smash:
:bawling:

Its a shame these services exist and that people are still dupped (sp?) by them.

Why are you blaming the web promotion service? It's the site owner who's scamming the buyers by trying to make it look like the traffic was natural and not purchased.

What other purpose do the fake site traffic services perform besides a means of providing faulty stats to up the site value?

Who said anything about FAKE site traffic services, anywhere? You can purchase REAL traffic and try to sell a site as if the traffic were natural, knowing well that it stops as soon as you stop paying. He never said the traffic wasn't real, just that the guy wouldn't provide stats showing where it was coming from.

In other words, you could pull the same scam selling a site with any traffic source - auto surfs, exit exchanges, even PPC if you think you could scam someone out of enough money since your site has all this traffic.

ok you just argued my point further. By fake traffic I don't mean that real people aren't sitting in front of their browser, I mean that its being sent in a pop-up or something like that. People aren't legitimatly interested in the site enough that they followed it from a link or a search engine or just typed it in.

You just supported my argument that the only purpose they serve are to up your stats to scam people out of money when selling the site.

... popup advertising is not fake and is a multi million dollar industry for more than just scamming site buyers ...

yes I understand but there's a different between popping up an advertisement and popping up a site. A popup advertisement should strike the user's attention and then if I are interested in the product they will visit the site and a sale is made. In this way the price of a site could be tracked by past sales records.

When a site is popped up on an exit exhange site or something like that it is not with the intention to sell something (or most of the time it isn't, I suppose occasionally there is a legitimate ad shown); usually the intention is to log the hit and not care if the user closes the window before you have time to say "Holy Fake traffic batman" ;)

Sorry to hear that T. You never know, he may have his PS2 taken off him for a week following this little incident. Good to know the mother was on top of things though.