Adsense account buyer (1.Viewing)

Hey, posting this here to see if anyone has seen this scenario recently.

Last night, I got a whatsapp message to my business phone # (which is listed in whois) from some guy in India. He says "do you own these domains <domain1>.ca <domain2>.ca and <domain3>.ca ??" So I asked "Why?", and he said he's got a buyer wanting an established Adsense account, and any one of the domains. He even offered me another US adsense account to transfer my other domains over to, in addition to cash. They also offered to use Escrow.com.

For reference, these are all domains I developed with simple sites years ago, the common item being that they all have adsense ads on them. Clearly they've had bots scouring websites for google adsense account ids, and were able to identify me as owner of these three sites linked to that ID.

So what I'm wondering here is, what's the scam? I have heard that it is very difficult to get sites approved for adsense these days. So is that really it, they just want that established adsense account with an approved domain (that they can presumably transfer to another domain?? Or is there something more nefarious going on here?

If you have any insights, feel free to post here and/or message me directly. Any thoughts would be much appreciated as I'd like to understand everything going on here.

Attempt to steal your established adsense account?

I had no problems getting an adsense account for dn.ca, it was pretty easy but I stopped using it because there was no way I was going to let members sit through that many ads for the few cents they paid out.

I don't know if it's a scam or not but I can tell you from experience that no good can come out of India, they are the number one scammers. My advice is to ignore it completely.

They tried robbing my 83 year old mom 3 times.

My neighbour got conned into investing in a freehold town home by an Indian. Then the builder, also an Indian told them the condo is now worth 100k less now that its built. He referred them to a real estate lawyer, also an Indian who told them they have to pay $200 per day penalty and should hurry up and pay the 100k pronto before its too late.

I referred them to a local real estate lawyer who immediately pointed out the illegal parts of the contract and got them their money back. So it was Indians referring to Indians, referring to Indians again.

I'm not racist to Indians but I sure as hell won't do business with them unless its cash up front.

PS. I get dozens of requests for domains per month from Indians, not one has ever come to fruition because they see I can't be conned so they give up.

PPS. The 3 biggest con men to ever try and rip off members here were also... you guessed it... from India!

silentg said:

Attempt to steal your established adsense account?

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That doesn't seem to be the scenario since they offered to buy the account and use Escrow.com.

rlm said:

They also offered to use Escrow.com

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Say yes to that and watch, just before the end (once they have your trust) something comes up and they cannot use Escrow.

MapleDots said:

I had no problems getting an adsense account for dn.ca, it was pretty easy but I stopped using it because there was no way I was going to let members sit through that many ads for the few cents they paid out.

I don't know if it's a scam or not but I can tell you from experience that no good can come out of India, they are the number one scammers. My advice is to ignore it completely.

They tried robbing my 83 year old mom 3 times.

My neighbour got conned into investing in a freehold town home by an Indian. Then the builder, also an Indian told them the condo is now worth 100k less now that its built. He referred them to a real estate lawyer, also an Indian who told them they have to pay $200 per day penalty and should hurry up and pay the 100k pronto before its too late.

I referred them to a local real estate lawyer who immediately pointed out the illegal parts of the contract and got them their money back. So it was Indians referring to Indians, referring to Indians again.

I'm not racist to Indians but I sure as hell won't do business with them unless its cash up front.

PS. I get dozens of requests for domains per month from Indians, not one has ever come to fruition because they see I can't be conned so they give up.

PPS. The 3 biggest con men to ever try and rip off members here were also... you guessed it... from India!

Click to expand...

Some classic scams there, but the average person with common sense should be safe from those. I think many of those scams target elderly and other immigrants who also don't know much about the system here, or will be too afraid to raise a stink. And we all know that the Canadian Gov't and Canadian banking does very fucking little about stopping fraud and once you're money is gone, its gone, no recourse. And even the odd time someone gets caught, I don't think there is any recourse either. I have family working at Scotiabank and know that even Scotia is getting scammed by kiting and are losing millions in single cases before they're even discovered. So yes, I hear you, and I agree that anything from India or many other countries should get the spidey-senses tingling and for good reason.

But this doesn't seem to be like that, it feels like they're not trying to scam me, but maybe they're trying to scam google or at least circumvent normal procedures for account approval giving them some sort of advantage.

I'm wondering if there's some sort of economic advantage to buying an old account, such as more trust and thus easier to get additional sites automatically approved, higher commission rates, something to do with the account being Canadian based, tax withholdings, etc... Or maybe there's an advantage to breaking up one big adsense account with mulitple websites into smaller chunks each with their own adsense accounts so they can funnel payments to multiple sources, or to divest certain properties more easily.

I have no idea what the scam is, but I have a strong belief that it's some type of scam.

Brad

Go to Google AdSense, click on 'Ads,' and then click on 'By ad unit.' Do you see 'Search Engine' as an option? It should be on the far right.

Odds are they're a middle-man and going to sell it on to someone looking to promote high-risk like IPTV or casino.

MapleDots said:

Say yes to that and watch, just before the end (once they have your trust) something comes up and they cannot use Escrow.

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Well obviously I'm not dumb enough to fall for that. Nor am I seriously considering the offer because I actually want to keep my account. So assuming they were willing to use Escrow.com and follow through, I just want to know what the advantage is to them. I am also naturally suspicious and curious, as a domainer you have to constantly be thinking about "why do you want this? what do you know that I don't ???"

Maybe they know some financial loophole I should be aware of myself. Or maybe they ARE trying to funnel revenues through this account inappropriately and I don't want me, you or anyone else to inadvertetly aid and abet them. And if it is an outright scam, I'd like to call it out and post it here so that everyone here can be aware of it. If they found me, they're likely to find more of you too.

So if there's no real insight here to be found, I'll play their game a little bit to see if I can fish out more details. I may even be blunt and say something like "If this is a scam, I'm just going to waste your time and not fall for it so please just F-off now. If this is a legit offer, this is an adsense account I don't use much and I might be willing to consider selling it, however, I will only consider it under one condition. You must first clearly explain WHY you want my account, and what precisely is the advantage to you having my account as opposed to you just creating a new account. Then and only then can I make an informed decision."

I don't believe this is an outright scam. It seems that there are many people who do buy adsense accounts who know how to arbitrage them, buying cheaper traffic from other sources, then making more from adsense than they spend. I'm guessing there is some risk of Google shutting down the account, but that they easily recoup their investment and then some. I will speculate that this is where the need to constantly be buying more adsense accounts comes from. I've also seen people say that they may need accounts for testing the limits of what google will tolerate without risking their primary accounts.

My concern for selling an account would be that somehow my information linked to the original account may not be removed and thus possibly making it more difficult for me to create new accounts in the future myself. I guess that's where I would be mostly concerned, to get on google's bad side. Secondarily, I wouldn't want to help inadvertently facilitate some sort of money laundering or tax evasion situation either. That being said, I bet google is very on top of those situations.

I used to do some arbitrage in the other direction, buying ads from google and directing them to landers with yahoo ads. And for the timeframe it worked, it was like printing money. Unfortunately a certain Canadian ruined it by abusing that little arbitrage opportunity to the point where Google had to close that hole. And when I say abused it, I mean fucking abused it, like on 10,000+ domains whereas I was under 10. I don't believe it is anyone here on DN, they probably made so much money from it that they could retire happily ever after on the spot when google shut it down with their adwords landing page quality scores. I guess I was the fool for preferring to stay low key and not ruin a good thing by becoming too blatant and obvious about it.

A nice bonus was that I was buying so much advertising it allowed me to A-B test various domain names used in those google ads. I proved to myself the enormous value of a great domain name in that your advertising dollars are MUCH more effective, primarily due to two reasons:

1) People are apt to click a great domain name more frequently than a crappier domain name because it looks more trustworthy. So you get higher CTR's, and Google rewards you (and themselves) by pushing your ad higher than the crappier competitors. For example, if you're willing to pay $1/click and get a 10% CTR, and your competitor is willing to pay $1.25 and gets a 5% CTR, Google makes 60% more from you than your competitor. So compared to your competitors, you get more clicks, have your ads shown above theirs, AND you pay much less per click.

2) People remember a great domain. So even if they didn't click your ad, they'll remember you and type in your domain directly later. I could routinely take one-word .CA domains with zero natural traffic, and get more unique visitors than I paid for. This only makes sense if people are seeing your ad and typing it in rather than clicking. And that effect would last well after stopping advertising - simply because a lot of people remember that domain.

So in any case, this is likely just an ad arbitrage play, and is the kind of scenario I was expecting to find. If I was willing to give up my adsense account, the money they are offering would certainly be worth taking.

rlm said:

Unfortunately a certain Canadian ruined it by abusing that little arbitrage opportunity to the point where Google had to close that hole.

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Fuck!