I was scammed? Help.

diegogarcia12

Hi.

I bought a website back in August 08 and it was meant to be making £450 a month in profits or so the seller said. He showed me proof of earnings from Clickbank prior to the purchase.

So anyway I bought the site for 8 months profit equivalent thinking it was a good deal but it is only averaging about 2 sales a month, funny that. I am doing everything I can to bring in more sales. I am disappointed and upset and the Seller does not respond to my emails. What is the best advice here? The police will say it is a civil matter I suppose. :rolleyes:

markelock

have you contacted trading standards?

how did you pay for the product?

RadoJo

What were the terms of the purchase?
I'm just wondering whether there might have been an affiliate programme for example, or Adsense programme which was generating traffic and revenue which has not been maintained since the sale, causing the problems you're having? Have you got an analytics programme which spans the life of the site from before you purchased it?

Freddie_Snowbits

I had a man turn up at my door six months ago offering Gold Bars for £500.

Still not seen my Gold Bars

RobertoMoir

diegogarcia12 wrote: »

Hi.

I bought a website back in August 08 and it was meant to be making £450 a month in profits or so the seller said. He showed me proof of earnings from Clickbank prior to the purchase.

So anyway I bought the site for 8 months profit equivalent thinking it was a good deal but it is only averaging about 2 sales a month, funny that. I am doing everything I can to bring in more sales. I am disappointed and upset and the Seller does not respond to my emails. What is the best advice here? The police will say it is a civil matter I suppose. :rolleyes:

The police? What crime do you feel has been committed?

If you purchased a paper shop, say, and the owner told you that it cleared £1000 in profit a week and after you purchased it you only cleared half that, would you still feel a crime had been committed then? If so, what crime would this be, exactly?

Are you certain that the previous owner of the site wasn't doing things differently to you that made all the difference? Were they spamming and you're not? Are you spamming while they were not? If it was a useful service then were they out working the sorts of discussion forums where people who needed this service gather to talk about how they need someone to sell the service to them?

Maybe the market has changed? For example, if it was an online pumpkin delivery service then it might well have been doing brisk trade up until the end of October and has suddenly seen a big decline in orders, and this wouldn't be a "crime" or a "scam" but rather "how seasonal trade works".

diegogarcia12

Roberto, I appreciate where you're coming from but my point is that I am not convinced the figures from BEFORE are ven genuine. I am wondering if the screenshots were faked.

The guy is in America and I signed an agreement / contract although it makes no mention of earnings guarantees - either that they will be X or what will happen if they are short etc. So I am wondering if it's easy to prosecute or take the matter to court. I will be seeking legal advice from next week although I realisticaly expect nothing back!

Also in regards to the RadoJo's question, I was shown stats from AWStats prior to purchase but since I have installed stats software on the website (since I bought it) it ios averaging about 1/4 of the hits he supposedly had! I cannot market it because he won't give me the marketing information as he doesn't reply to my emails... Gah.

maninthestreet

diegogarcia12 wrote: »

Roberto, I appreciate where you're coming from but my point is that I am not convinced the figures from BEFORE are ven genuine. I am wondering if the screenshots were faked.

The guy is in America and I signed an agreement / contract although it makes no mention of earnings guarantees - either that they will be X or what will happen if they are short etc. So I am wondering if it's easy to prosecute or take the matter to court. I will be seeking legal advice from next week although I realisticaly expect nothing back!

Also in regards to the RadoJo's question, I was shown stats from AWStats prior to purchase but since I have installed stats software on the website (since I bought it) it ios averaging about 1/4 of the hits he supposedly had! I cannot market it because he won't give me the marketing information as he doesn't reply to my emails... Gah.

You paid for a website - and that's what you got. The contract makes no reference to any guaranteed earnings. Even if it did, trying to sue the guy through the American courts would be prohibitively expensive.

RobertoMoir

diegogarcia12 wrote: »

Roberto, I appreciate where you're coming from but my point is that I am not convinced the figures from BEFORE are ven genuine. I am wondering if the screenshots were faked. .

They may well have been and I do sympathise, but this is a matter of doing due diligence before taking any store over, real or online. Don't get me wrong, I hope you get a satisfactory solution one way or another, but I think even if a crime of some sort has been committed, you'll have a heck of a lot of trouble getting the police to take you seriously (wouldn't it be a civil matter anyway?) let alone securing a conviction of some kind.

diegogarcia12

I am not sure if it would be a civil matter or not, because it could potentially be fraud and therefore the police would / should follow it up. Is this realistic?

I have noticed that the domain is only 5 months old yet I was told that the earnings went back over a year! Yes I should have checked this per the due diligence but I overlooked that particular part stupidly. I did carry out my own checks etc though, but clearly not enough.

I suppose a cop-out would be that, if I did report this to the police and it got to the stage whereby it goes to court, the Seller could just say that he had the represented sales with another domain. For example a Geocities page that cannot be checked easily!

PasturesNew

Every website is different and we don't know what you were shown or the terms of your agreement. However, £450 to have a website designed wouldn't be a bad rate and you bought something that was up and running. So it's not a bad price.

I run a handful of websites and my main one has literally died since about July. I'm taking in about half what I was up to that point. It's just died. One stream of income from it, that was regular, almost a sale a day, literally stopped about 2 weeks ago (after tailing off), I thought that was it until randomly there were 2 sales yesterday.

There's a downturn. Traffic hasn't decreased. Just income has halved.

Also, all the comments above are valid, what marketing did they do? What are you doing?

BFG_2

Diego,

You've been ripped off and you'll probably never ever see your money again.


Sorry to be blunt, but thats how it appears to me.

Did yuo pay by credit card, because you may have a route to a refund via Section 74 [??].

Alternatively I have a special technology which gets money back from anyone anywhere in the world, if you just send me £199 I guarantee to get your money back...1000% I promise.