Affiliate Lounge » scam

insaneGB goes down bad!

Phillip van Coller — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:47:27 +0000

After I posted about insaneGB’s great offer it turned out to be not all that. They made a lot of promises and at the end they didn’t deliver. And I got a lot of interesting FACTS from a cool guy named Wogan May on his post My InsaneGB Experience

Let’s get this going,

their first promise was and still is:

“We are a Free Web Host without forced ads! That means that we will not force any ads directly onto your website like most other free hosting companies. Instead we do offer advertisements placed directly onto our main website, forums and main cPanel pages.”

Why?

Indeed a lot of free hosts go off line and just disappear, but we are different, we are actually here to stay for a long term. We have the funds and the skills to set up a company like this, and we plan on keeping it like it for a long time.

So what do we call this on all their client’s websites?

I call it a link to a forum and an affiliate link to Hostgator, inserted right into the HTML pages of their clients. That means they went on the server, opened their clients’ HTML pages and inserted the links.I think thats a bit of a privacy breach in my opinion.

Later on the the admin (seth) went missing and did not return to the forums much. Issues that was there from the start weren’t getting resolved etc.

insaneGB for Sale?

Wogan May found him on MSN one night and he wanted to auction insaneGB off. The server costs were getting to the point where they couldn’t pay for them, and he claimed he wanted to move on to other things. Weird thing to do when you claim you have the financial backing and this post by the admin:

nope, if the server is full we just add a new one, simple aint it?

I guess it’s not that simple?

Confronting insaneGB

According to Wogan he got hold of Seth and the admin, confronted them about the ads on his website. The admin gave him a hard time about him not knowing what was going on and the costs he had to pay.

They actually also asked Wogan to moderate the forums for them?

Another weird statement in their Privacy Policy:

“From time to time, we make the e-mail addresses of those who access our site available to other reputable organizations whose products or services we think you might find interesting.”

Finally

They decided to post a very interesting message on their homepage:

Dear Customers, We are in the process of rebuilding insaneGB, we already enabled forced ads and downgraded the packages. The reason for this is because some of you did not appreciate what we offered to you and used it to host illegal content breaching our ToS daily. The forced ads are up because we want to get a new server to balance the server loads that have been abused heavily lately. Forced ads are temporarily until further notice. Thank you for understanding.

Wow! On their homepage, what an unprofessional message to convey to your clients and new prospects as clients.

Just proves that not all the free things in life is so Good!

Let’s see if they can come give us some constructive feedback on whats going on…

Credits:
Wogan May
InsaneGB

Lushable.com – Huge Spike down!(-935 RSS)

Phillip van Coller — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:47:31 +0000

After being exposed to their Feedburner scam Lushable.com went down to the same average subscribers of 79 (less than before their big spike – maybe we influenced a couple of readers?) on their blog.

Even though Jason has not admitted to anything this is kind of strange don’t you think? And as you can also see according to the graph the hits basically stayed the same all the way up and down. Hhmmm…

I don’t think we will be seeing more of Jason here, would really like to know if he’s got some explanation of how this happened? Did he maybe have some Forum Competitions where people had to Unsubscribe from his blog?

Lushable.com – Huge scam! No Excuse!

Phillip van Coller — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:52:57 +0000

If you haven’t read the whole story you can get it here:

http://www.affiliatelounge.co.za/articles/offbeat/feedburner-hacked-or-just-plain-cheating/

Well Lushable.com still hasn’t given any real proof. I think he is in a very very tight position and doesn’t really know what to do. Chris from imod.co.za is giving him a very hard time at his post iMod.co.za takes down lushable.com! and man it’s getting intense.

So while we are waiting for Jason to decide to give us some proof or anything else I am running a competition.

2 Lucky winners will win 500ec each by just:

Writing a post on Feedburner Hacked or just plain Cheating!? and linking to that post and to Chris’s post at http://imod.co.za/2008/01/10/lushablecom-lies-to-our-faces-busted/

1st Winner will be announced Sunday and second winner Wednesday. Just use my contact form to send your links.

Let’s let the Blogosphere know about this, unlegit bloggers is bad news. If his not? only he can prove it… Luckily, it’s the web and he can just start over without anyone knowing him.

Have fun!

Feedburner Hacked or just plain Cheating!?

Phillip van Coller — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:23:22 +0000

Yesterday while I was working and chatting with a friend of mine Jean Costa we spoke about a website Lushable.com. They claim to have about 1000+ feed subscribers to their blog according to their FeedCount displayed on their website. This startled me cause they are a fairly new blog that just started in December according to Alexa. Is it possible to get 1000+ subsribers in less than a month? Maybe by placing an add on BCC.com it might be. So I figured out what they did:

Firstly I checked if the feedcount was fake, but it wasn’t… Came directly from Feedburner’s website. Then I used a nifty tool called the Feed Analysis tool from Blogperfume.com. This tool helps you check any Feedburner stats that have their API enabled.

So I ran the report and concluded that it’s true. They have an average of of 1000 subscribers for the past 4 days. But check this spike!:

They went from the 3rd (132 subscriber) to the 4th (509 subscribers) to the 5th (1012 subscribers). In 3 days they got almost 1000% growth! Can you imagine what kind of traffic you need to your blog for that kind of spike in your RSS? You will also see on that graph that they have no views or clicks and a few hits. Weird for a blog with 1000 subscribers he? So I decided to have a look at their Alexa ranking if they indeed had a 100 000 visit spike for those days:

As you can see there was no spike or any major traffic heading their way. Strange… Another special feature on this tool is a history viewer. So I compared it to http://www.adii.co.za’s feed:

No clicks, no views and look at their hits. Naturally your hits is more than your readers like adii’s. They actually have less hits than readers and it’s cause they subscribed themselves! They probably created tons of different accounts and subscribed like crazy animals. According to Blogperfume’s tool this is how their future looks like:

LOL, sounds good he? This is just proof that too many bloggers rely on their Feedcount to get more traffic and visitors. Maybe I am wrong and they got it legitimately?

I think they did it to get advertisers maybe… Here is a pic of their advertise page: (lol it’s funny)

I wonder why they have a ~~xxxxxx~~ everywhere…

How do you think they got it right?

Credits:
Adii - Hope you don’t mind me using you
Blogperfume - For their handy tool
Feedburner – We love you!
Lushable - For making me laugh

Update: Link to RSS Report for Lushable.com