Scam Sites on Flippa: Headztv.com

I’ve been checking out Flippa.com again this week and found quite the interesting auction.

As I was browsing through sites that had recently been sold, I found one that was a total scam and it went for $3000!

You can see the auction for yourself here.

What I find even more interesting than the scam itself is that the site designer actually tells the potential buyers that the site is designed as a scam.  He’s not even trying to hide the fact!

Here’s how the scam works.

You design a website that claims to show first run movies.  You make the site look authentic as possible by stealing movie poster graphic from some other site and link it to a fake ‘youtube’ type graphic.

When the site visitor clicks play, they are sent to a site that conducts surveys with a note that says something like, “Keeping this site up and running is expensive!  Please fill out this quick survey before viewing the movie.  Thanks!”

The survey company pays the website owner a small amount of money for each completed survey.  When the site visitor finishes the survey they are then sent back to the movie site where they get the message, “This movie is no longer available due to copyright violations.”

Slick, huh?

There isn’t a single movie on the site.  In fact there isn’t any legitimate content at all.

Hence the scam.

The site is called Headztv.com.  Check it out.

My favorite part of the auction was from the site description from the seller.

“The main “inconvenience”, as you may know, is that movies are not allowed to be shared for free throughout the internet. The only way I’ve found to bypass that is to never actually host, stream or provide links to any of the copyrighted material. After the user completes and offer, they will be redirected to an error message saying that the selected material is protected by copyright law.”

Um, yeah.  That’s not inconvenient, that’s the law.

He then gave some great advise and said, “never host, stream or provide links to any of the copyrighted material.”

“You might think that this will ruin your website’s reputation…”

Reputation?!  Hello, it’s a scam and you’re talking about your site reputation?

“…but here’s the deal: to the new visitors, although they may have their doubts, everything looks legit…”

Seriously?  Why does Flippa allow this kind of crap to be auctioned through their site?

“Obviously after a number of failed attempts, that visitor may not come back to your site again, but you would have already made off him more than from the average returning visitor on a usual site like a blog or forum.”

Nice.  And this site actually sold for almost $3,000.

I don’t have any data showing that this scam actually brings in any money.

My guess is that you just can’t make much by having people fill out worthless surveys.

The real person getting scammed in this deal is the sucker who ponied up the $3000 to buy this site.

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Image from Alex E. Proimos