Request for informtion: PROXY.ORG

The illegal part is handing over data without a court order. These armchair lawyers seem to know a bit about this, we've all seen it play out a dozen times online.

 

If there has been action to intentionally defraud then it is a pretty simple deal.

It amazes me that people still contradict this issue when I have said that Google's data shows a problem with proxy.org and in the face of recent warning letters sent out by Google. Do you think that Google sends out "the sky is falling" email without reason?

Thanks for your encouragement.

Really? Show me. There is no law that says that I have to have a court order to show my logs to anyone. I can have them printed on posters and t-shirts if I want. They are MY logs and I can do with them as I see fit.

Explain yourself.

 

Frogman, you cancelled your paypal payments with baron for the advertising in question. Therefore, baron does not have the money anymore, and therefore you are not entitled to the advertising. Furthermore, given that you see no value in the proxy.org advertising, and you have cancelled the payments, and you are suing him, why do you think he would want to continue promoting your operation?

I had brought up the issue of bots clicking proxy owners ads to take out competitors back in october, when myself and several others were banned from adsense for click fraud that did not in fact occur. I lost $2000. A friend of mine lost $4000. Many others lost out as well.

Google was not willing to even bother to reply to my queries with human written letters. For your part in getting your account reinstated, good for you. I applaud you on your hard work and effort, I'm sure it was not easy.

As for click fraud, I think it is entirely likely that someone who is in the proxy industry is using the list of proxies at proxy.org as their "hit list" for eliminating competitors by getting their adsense accounts banned. Google apparently knows about this and has decided that banning a bunch of proxies that are owned by entirely different unrelated users is the solution. They are obviously able to detect the click fraud, otherwise they would not be banning accounts. Therefore, they should be discarding these invalid clicks and everyone would be in good shape. But as has been mentioned, this is not the fault of baron or proxy.org, no more so than it is the fault of the telephone company publishing a phone book and you get prank or threatening phone calls.

for what it's worth, baron has repeatedly stated that the results of the ads are not guaranteed. The listings of how many hits are getting sent to each proxy is a recent feature he has put in after many repeated requests for the statistics. For reasons of people complaining when their personal results dont match up to the average, he had been very hesitant in putting in the feature. So to say that he is inflating his stats in order to sell more ads, thats rediculous. He didn't even want to post stats in the first place, and if he really wanted to "inflate them", he doesnt have to run a bot to do it, he can just publish a higher number on his website.

For myself, I have advertised repeatedly on proxy.org and seen good results. I have also seen good results with various free methods of promoting my proxies, but for paid advertising options, I have never seen anything work as well as my listings on proxy.org. I find it hard to believe that 90% of the traffic is not human, simply because there are several proxies that I have promoted only via proxy.org listings, and they have shown consistant traffic not just from proxy.org, but over time, the users proxy.org sends me have kept coming back day after day, telling their friends, and building the popularity of my site. If the traffic came from bots, it would not continue to build until the referrers from proxy.org make up a small percentage of my total traffic. That simply would not happen if the traffic was fake, but it does happen, I get real visitors that keep coming back.

 

Here is where you are 100% WRONG.... He has $2050.00 of my money. I canceled the ads because, according to Google over 90% of the traffic coming from proxy.org was machine generated.

This is simply another example of Baron knowing about the issues and continuing to accept ads.

If you brought it up in October then there should have been action in OCTOBER. Six months later and baron has not contacted Google to help preserve the integrity his own business... doe this make sense in the greatest stretch of the imagination?

According to my communication with Google they are aware of what you mentioned and they have filters in place to deal with it. What we are talking about here is a problem WITH proxy.org. Google does not think this is from an outside source.

Thanks. It was not easy. It took a lot of digging and phone calls and emails.

If you were having a benefit dinner and you hired me to bring 100 people to your party and you paid me to bring 100 people to you party, but when I showed up I had 4 people and 96 machine generated, non-human cardboard cut-outs would that be ok with you?

Here are some numbers to roll around in your head:

On proxy.org he says:

Proxy.org is a guide to online privacy and anonymous web surfing and the most comprehensive list of working web-based proxies, updated daily. Ads on Proxy.org reach a large, security-conscious community (over 250,000 unique visitors per month). To place an ad on Proxy.org, please choose the kind of ad you'd like to purchase:


250,000 per month. That is 8,333 per day. Keep that number in mind.

Premium Placements are always bolded. Measured over the past 7 days, Proxy.org sent an average of 1,560 hits per day to each of the 10 Top Ten Listings

OK... 1560 hits per day to 10 listings = 15,600 hits per day. So the top ten gets roughly 2x the amount of his total monthly traffic... interesting....

Tier Two listings are always bolded. Measured over the past 7 days, Proxy.org sent an average of 450 hits per day to each of the 30 Tier Two Listings.

450 hits times 30 listings = 13,500 per day. Hang on. It gets better...

A Bolded Listing will make your proxy stand out amongst all the rest. Measured over the past 7 days, Proxy.org sent an average of 70 hits per day to each of the 713 Bold Listings

70 hits times 713 bold listings = 49,910

GRAND TOTAL: 79,010 DAILY hits to ad pages yet the site only gets 8,333.

Here is where it gets really interesting. The Google guys told me that well over 90% of the traffic coming from proxy.org was "non-human" (their words). Well if we divide the number of hits that he claims his site gets (8,333) into the total sent to the advertisers (49,910) we get: 9.48. It does not take a real rocket surgeon to see that even by his own numbers there is a 94.8% discrepancy. Strange? You tell me, is it coincidence that Google says over 90% is fake and Baron can somehow squeeze out 9.48 times more traffic for the ads than even visit the site?

I know that you are going to say... oh that is impressions and the smaller number is unique hits...

Ok... check your logs and you tell me if EVERY visitor comes back 9.48 times a day, every day.

The numbers don't match. The facts don't match. Baron is hiding from every post that remotely suggests that he is in the wrong.

Come on man... get your head out of the sand here... or continue to send your money to proxy.org... the choice is truly yours.

I installed a simple "Click Here" buffer between the proxy.org ads and the Adsense pages during the investigation with Google. Would you like to know the results? That additional click filtered out over 90% of the traffic from proxy.org. Now, I know that an extra click will impact some users, but for Google to say 90% and then to be able to filter 90% by a simple "Click Here" landing page begs room for concern.

Please evaluate what you wrote above. You have been promoting proxies for quite a while yet you have never seen any listings that produced as well as those from proxy.org.... then when a cilck fraud issue arises you are surprised? If this was naturl traffic do you not think it would behave as natural traffic from any other source?

Something is just not right here....

 

If proxy.org had / has a TOS explaining that they will turn over your data in the case of x, y, or z it wouln't be such a big deal. If they don't then they shouldn't comply with anything but a court order.

As for Google saying there is a problem with traffic from there, big deal. It doesn't mean he has anything to do with it. You've already posted you are suing him, why on earth would he try to assist you in any way?

And the #1 reason why he shouldn't bow down to google, traffic logs can prove nor disprove anything. If Google knows that some of the traffic is non-human, what will traffic logs show them? It will show clicks from infected PC's to proxy sites to ads from Google. Nobody will have any better clue as to who did it, why they did it, or what to do about it. What do you think the traffic logs will show, that John from Japan activated a botnet of 50,000 computers all over the world, turned it on Monday, turned it off Tuesday, and you can find him at 555 East Street? It's ridiculous, if Google won't work with you after you have corrected the problem perhaps you should be pissed at them.

Oh and I do want to add one thing. I see the stats posted from proxy sites often. Looky I made $x,xxx with adsensers! I don't know why but when I put other ads up I get 2 clicks instead of 200 / day. Anybody with a brain looks at that and says hmmm, something is fishy. Blue links, similar text, but one gets a ctr of 100x better. I would venture a guess that adsense accounts on proxies have been pounded by someone for a long long time now. Every proxy site flies them because no other sponsors pay. Years ago when people started putting them up the general concensus was that they sucked royally and compared to warex traffic. Today however you see a tiny little adsense ad on the front page (that rarely gets linked to) making someone plenty of money from hardly any traffic. Quite an accomplishment for proxy traffic! Perhaps proxy owners are just now finding out the truth about their income for the last xx months and don't like it.

Either way, I'll bet you $2 today that you don't win any lawsuit filed against the owner of proxy.org. I'll bet another $2 that if he files a countersuit you will lose it.

If you win in court PM me your paypal address.

Cheers

 

funky,

The funny thing is that during the initial investigation with Google I was the advocate for proxy.org. I had them run and re-run their numbers to try and prove that the traffic was VALID... it is simply not.

 

That is the funniest math I've ever seen. Summed up

250k uniques per month could be 10 million hits per month, 250k unique IP's.

One person can click on more than link per day, and often do on any site.

Edit: 250,000 people coming to look for proxies daily easily explains out clicks being much higher than uniques. I don't remember one site that was in the list, nor would I care which I clicked on to get to a working proxy site.

If he has your $2000 he owes you a refund, regardless of anything else.

 

This is so ridiculous I don't even know where to start...

You are backing into this and your argument makes no sens. You are saying that since they have no published TOS (I assume that you mean privacy policy) they should somehow have a tighter privacy policy than anyone. Where is the logic in that?

Releasing his logs to Google would show that the suspect traffic came from outside his system... it is that plain and simple.

Because until he started ignoring requests and started deleting posts I was his biggest advocate with Google.

You are right... all traffic logs can show is EVERY IP address that visited your server. And we all know that information has ZERO value.

Give me a break!

I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

Are you saying that I did not make as much money as my friends so I am pissed?

Like the guy above said, I was making more money from proxy.org than from any other traffic source. That is why I fought so hard with Google to PROVE the traffic was VALID. I wanted it to be good clicks. I wanted to continue huge returns on my investments.

Well this will obviously be a bet with a neophyte but I will take that bet.

I am a little curious as to what you think the grounds for the counter suit will be....

Cheers.

 

How on earth are traffic logs going to prove something is in or out of the system? Do you even know how click bots work?

 

Apparently not, but I know if I had a $20k a month business that had been accused of click fraud I would do whatever it took to fine the culprit. As is stands proxy.org has done the opposite of helping me, Google or their advertisers.

I am sure that as a result of this that Google will have every proxy.org advertisers under the microscope. Many have already reported seeing their clicks go from .23 to .07... that is a pretty good reason in my book to get on the right side of this deal.

 

very funny this has happened to me already. ouch

 

Good luck with that!
*Sigh* There goes the way to find proxies >.>

 

Another possibility seems to have escaped you. We are all convinced that there is fake traffic. I am, you are. Fake traffic, by its very definition, is fake. It takes nothing for someone sending fake traffic to send whatever referring urls they want. It is no secret that a lot of people in the proxy industry are jealous of and / or don't like baron for a variety of reasons. He has also gotten a warning letter from the dreaded "invalid clicks".

Furthermore, to get listed on proxy.org, you have to allow hotlinking from proxy.org so that his scripts can tell if your site is up or not. Therefore, anyone with half a brain knows that every proxy on the list whitelists proxy.org referrers as being considered valid. It stands to reason that someone with a big bad botnet who is targeting proxy.org users will know this fact and exploit it.

It could very well be that 90% of the traffic google sees as coming from proxy.org simply is not even coming from them in the first place. It would be trivial to fake the headers to make it look like it was coming from proxy.org, and it would be a smart thing to do as well because all the proxies on that list whitelist proxy.org referrers. I could rig something up right now in php that would request your website using any referrers or useragent or cookies i would like, and it would "prove" that fraud was coming from wherever I wanted to say it was coming from.

Just something to think about. I'll be the first to admit I don't have all the facts in this matter. Something very bad for the proxy industry is going on here. However, I've dealt with baron on multiple occasions, and although he has sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, he has always shown to me to operate in a professional manner. It is no surprise he would not kindly respond to your "sky is falling" accusations.

As to you saying he has your money, that is not true. In fact, paypal has your money. Until paypal decides what to do, neither you or baron has the money you paid for advertisements.

 

Defamation? Slander?

did you happen to know, that the things you are saying about proxy.org, even if proven to be true, are considered slander and are illegal? Now, if proven to be true, certainly I find the law stupid that says they are illegal even if they are factual, but yes you can get sued for it, and yes, you can lose that lawsuit. Even if you could get away with saying these things if you could prove they are true.... good luck with that. It's really easy to prove that you said defamatory comments, and very much not easy to prove that they were factual.

 

You are speaking on behalf of Baron, ok. A small note to this. Paypal cannot or will not hold money if the two parties have agreed on something. If seller tells them to refund and the buyer agree they will do the refund.

 

Just a quick update for everyone it seems that Google is fining people for invalid clicks.

At least some people get to keep their accounts this way. So far the highest fine has been over 1k, and the other 2 were for $74x.xx.

Im glad Google is taking a step in the right direction here.

 

I am not baron's messenger, I am just aware of some of the details surrounding this situation. It is agreed that if buyer and seller agreed to a refund, then the funds would get cleared more quickly than would otherwise happen. But even then it would not be immediate.

Either way, why risk it? If someone rejected my payment, and I no longer have the money, I would not run the ads either. Because at the end of it all, paypal may decide to refund the money and then meanwhile I've given them advertising for free.

 

You and me both

 

Damn shame you lost 700 bux though stugs.

Can I ask how much you had total?

 

Sounds more like Google's gone mad. If they know the traffic is from proxy.org then why would they fine the owners of the proxies themselves? Some idiot is running a clickbot that clicks on everyone's proxy and then each proxy owner is fined $1000 or whatever. Perfect..