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A Weird SEO Scam (2009)

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As a website owner I get my fair share of junk emails, pump and dump share scams, the odd Nigerian 411 but over the last few months I've been getting these for two of my domains.

date July 2009
subject idea for[darkgames.com]

Dear Website Owner,

65% of people searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you're ranked on first page of Google, MSN, or Yahoo. If I help you obtain as much as 4 times more WEB traffic to your online business by promoting you to the first page of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term "SEO Company." We would like to do the same for your web site so you can come up for your main keywords as well? All of our processes use the most ethical "white hat" Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This special SEO program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month-to-month program
• More traffic guaranteed

Please reply to my email and I would be happy to send you a proposal.
______________________________________________________________________
Sincerely,
Charita Pichardo

501 VERDUGO WAY
WESTLAKE VILLAGE , CA
91362 - USA
______________________________________________________________________
Simply reply with opt out if not interested to hear from us.

These come for this www.dhbolton and darkgames.com, both of which are actually first page google results for "david bolton" and dark games.

So I think the scam is that they look for high ranking websites (which rarely happens by accident, but in my case more to longevity I think, both are over ten years old), then try and get them to pay for unneeded SEO so they can claim that they've boosted them there. Ie money for nothing.

I've noticed that these emails are almost always the same layout with just a different name. Also they never mention a website. But it's kind of weird as not having a website would arouse anyone suspicions. Is that even a real address? I checked on the web and found someone else had posted about it Beware of SEO Scam Emails in June 2009. The email he showed had the same layout and address, but a different name.

Scam Baiting

Just as a wind-up and to see if any reply was forthcoming, I sent off this email:

Dear xxx
I just googled for David Bolton and found my domain listed #2 on Google.com. Thank you for such fast work! How can I ever thank you for this.

Sadly, no reply!

 

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