Hi everyone, I'm still pretty new to buying websites online. I could use some guide from any experience website buyers. I bought a site for $500 from SitePoint. That buyer shows screenshots of paypal sales and traffic. Looks genuine. Being green, I paid the money via escrow. After receiving website and domain name. I found out that there was actually no traffic just simply zero! And i thought maybe if I were to use adwords, i might be able to make a sale or two. But looks like no one wants to buy the product script. And finally, did some research on this user call Codeofheaven. only to realized that he was banned here in DP! and I bought a piece of useless site and a useless script. So for those who successfully bought a site and generating the amount of money told from the sellers, how can I protect myself from scammers? Really need some guidance here.
Its a annoying but true fact that scammers are everywhere..all you can do before making any sale purchase is to just check out in major reputed forums like sitepoint, DP etc and also use google search!!
You can take precautions by telling him to post videos or you can login to his teamviewer/logmein and check the stats.. as screenshots can be faked easily
I guess we should conduct extra due dilligence especially when large sums are involved. We should check, double check and triple check everything.
RESEARCH RESEARCH and MORE RESEARCH !! Google the buyer's username, the product/website, the domain !! Research everything, That will save you from being scammed
it is really sad to loose $500. anyway you must do some research before purchasing any thing. You must wait and see about that fully then only you must invest.
If someone is selling a website for $500 and showing screen shots of massive amounts of traffic you better research it. Go to google and type in the domain, if it shows only 1-20 backlinks...how reliable is the offer? Many scammers today are just leeches, they promote theirs scams based off of other people's successful websites. They are lazy people who will never get anywhere in life.
Searching about the seller is must step, i got a email from a guy who wanted to buy a domain from me, and when is searched his company name on google, that guy turned out to be some scammer and there were plenty of threads about his scamming on namepros.
Some escrow companies offer a 5-day insepection period which can prevent things like these happening. Also, virtually all escrow companies will require a signed contract and will have the sellers real name/phone/home address on file.