Hi, I am Uncle Dimitry, CTO of Udimi. I’ve seen many scams trying to snitch to our site and I’d like to share with you only a few methods that scams will use to cheat you on the wild market, so you could be more prepared for that.
This will never happen with you on Udimi, as we have protection for everything listed here, but if you decide for some crazy reason to buy solo ads outside of Udimi, that knowledge may help you.
This article is based on a true story of a scam manny hernandez who we caught right on the spot. 10 years after we still see him operating in the wild market…
I’ll describe the way they do it, step by step.
“Wild Market” is any site that has absolutely zero protection against click and payment fraud: forums, instant messengers, or social networks. The most popular places where scams love to sell fake traffic are fiverr, facebook and sites like xxdollarsoloads where you get “real” clicks for 10 cents per click or even less.
Some scammers operate full-time and earn thousands of dollars a month by cheating innocent buyers. With this level of profit, they have plenty of resources to improve their shady tactics…
Table of Contents
How they inflate your stats?
The only way for you to see the traffic on your site is to use traffic counter, such as Google Analytics or similar. Simply put, this counter is just a small pixel on your site, that adds +1 every time somebody opens it.
When you buy fake traffic, you see a spike on your traffic counter or analytics application. That makes you feel like there are hundreds of real people visiting your site and they will not subscribe and buy you product, right?
No, not right. Zero people visited your site.
So, to generate 1000 fake “visitors” on your site, scam just needs to open your site 1000 times, as simple as that.
This is easily done by a bot network.
What is a bot network?
You have probably heard the term “bot” numerous times. One bot can generate you 1000 clicks in one second, but they all will look the same: same IP address, same country, browser, device, brand, screen size, etc.
Here is an example of a stupid bot:
This stupid bot repeatedly loads your site from the same IP address and doesn’t change its pattern. In 2024, it is very rare to find this kind of simplicity. Scammers use much more sophisticated tactics.
Here is an example of a smart bot:
Well, this one is much smarter: it changes browsers, IP addresses, countries, cities, connection types, it uses “mobile device” as device signature, because buyer requested only mobile traffic. It even uses “residential” IPs to bypass “Datacenter” filter.
Important to understand!
NO traffic counter will save you from bots. There in NONE. And they do not have to do that! Their job is to track the traffic you get, not to filter it.
Filtering can be done only with a laser-defined set of rules that take in account what you are trying to achieve, your niche and traffic specifics.
A traffic counter doesn’t know all of that, and doesn’t have to. We’ve seen people who are trying to accomplish that, like folks from ClickMagick. But all of them are tied by their hands, because if then drop too much, customers will bombard their support, because of discrepancies.
At Udimi we have our own, in-house filter, that was trained on millions of clicks. We have hundreds of rules, and exceptions, on our AI filter. All these rules are based on specifics of solo ads and solo ad traffic, so our filter knows what to do. It’s not a counter, it’s a filter. This way we protect you, our customer, from click fraud.
While you, as Udimi customer, don’t have to worry about everything that goes below this line, I would like to share general knowledge about how they will cheat you outside of Udimi.
Real IPs, but fake traffic
Good scam botnet will use a “residential” IPs I mentioned earlier. What is it? Basically that a real IP from a real device where was installed a proxy app.
This is done completely legally. Your device might have installed a couple of these already.
A user installs some app to their iPhone that shows 600-page “Terms and conditions” text. Somewhere in the middle of it there’s a line that says that you are using this app for free in exchange to the use of your internet connection at their own “purposes”…
This is it. When you go to bed and put your phone on charge, your phone opens a wifi doorway to some nasty and very nasty stuff. Sometimes you can even get police knocking on your front door as you were “helping” hackers to do their stuff.
There are many services out there who give access to large bot networks of residential IPs. They all say that they do that for “protection” and will never allow scammers to use their network, but, for some reason, they have a lot of scams using them.
Real phone numbers, but still fake
Following previous part, our scam can easily get access to real phone numbers to verify own fake facebook accounts.
Here is a heading of one site that sells access to real USA phones.
I am not sure how exactly they do that, but most likely in the same way as they do with residential IPs. They legally get a permission from the user (who didn’t read T&C) to receive SMS codes from strangers to their phones in exchange to app being free.
Everything is automated, users even don’t know what they receive, because these apps just delete sms instantly after arrival. And then sends the verification code to the scam.
Fake identities
For example, our scam’s name is John. He creates 100 – 150 accounts on Facebook under different names. He can easily do that literally in one minute via automation tools or just to buy them from other scams for $50-75. John can even buy old, “warmed-up accounts” with friends, posts, photos, history and connections. It will cost more, about $2 per account. There are many marketplaces for that.
Let’s use the most expensive model and assume that scam spent $300 at this moment.
Time spent: 1 minute.
Money spent: $300
Total spendings: 1 minute and $300
Earnings: $0
Fake proof and testimonials
Using a graphics editor, John also creates fake screenshots from stats and autoresponders. He can even save the time and create fake stats and graphs using AI.
John cross-posts happy testimonials from all his accounts, claiming crazy results and excellent experience. John sends a few emails from one account to another with happy comments, thanking for great traffic, and begging for more clicks. He creates screenshots and adds these testimonials to other fake screenshots.
John creates a free autoresponder account and creates a video of him entering the member area. Then he opens the browser’s console, edits the number of subscribers with a fake big number, and records another video with modified subscribers count.
Using any video editor, John combines two videos. Video with the fake subscriber number overlays the original one. This creates the effect that John logged into his autoresponder to show a large number of subscribers.
Time spent: 10 minutes.
Money: $0
Total spendings: 11 minutes and $300
Earnings: $0
Spread the word
John starts posting his solo ad promos in solo ad testimonials groups, claiming he has just started with a fresh list, but already has a few happy clients.
He posts his (fake) screenshots with proof, adds a (fake) video of the autoresponder. He already has fake comments on his page from his other accounts. Buyers believe this and decide to try and to buy a “package”.
Let’s say John got 5 orders for only 100 clicks. That’s 500 clicks for average CPC of 30 cents. John just earned $150, a half of what he spent.
Now John has to send fake traffic to his buyer’s website, but it has to look real. It is very easy to do using his bot network. Just one click of a button and “clicks” start to flow in to buyer websites.
Time spent: 30 minutes.
Money: $0
Total spendings: 31 minutes and $300
Earnings: $150
Fake optins
After all, clicks have been “delivered”, John has to create visibility that some of his visitors actually signed up on the victim’s website. John visits the site and looks at the signup form. Most likely it’s just a name/email combination.
His app already has a list with first and last names, John inputs values into the app and it creates accounts on the victim’s site, randomly rotating names and emails.
John’s buyer is happy: according to his statistics, he got tons of clicks and about 40% of them have registered on his site. The buyer posts a testimonial for John. This is the first real testimonial for John for his fake traffic. He immediately adds it to his page and gets even more sales.
Time spent: 1 minute.
Money: $0
Total spendings: 32 minutes and $300
Earnings: $150
Even fake sales
If the buyer’s product is cheap, John can even make a purchase or two. If a customer paid $40 – 50, a pair of sales for $7 wouldn’t be a problem for John, his profit will go down $14, but the buyer will be thrilled because he thinks John’s traffic is of high quality. His list buys.
But John is a greedy scam, he will ask for a refund in 20 – 25 days. He will say that “product is not for me” or “I didn’t use it, sorry” and will get a refund. His buyer will not remember that both “customers” were from John because he already bought a few other solos from other people. He doesn’t track what customer belongs to what seller.
Things could become even worse if John participates in black hat credit card fraud forums and uses stolen credit cards to make sales. After owners of these cards will see unauthorized charges, they will initiate chargebacks, and site owners will have to pay chargeback fees on top of the refund. After that PayPal can even decide that the buyer’s site is high risk and close his account altogether.
Time spent: 10 minutes.
Money: $25-50
Total spendings: 42 minutes and $350
Earnings: $150
Few times to repeat
A scam won’t be caught and banned on its first sale. From our statistics, we can see that most scams we have caught on the spot with 100% proof still continue to sell in the wild market.
As you can see from our calculations, the entire operation will pay for itself with only two iterations. Keeping in mind the fact that they operate for years, you can imagine the level of profit they make.
Most of them do this full-time.
Total spendings: 42 minutes and $350
Earnings: $15000 a month
Dealing with smart buyers
Some buyers suspect fraud, but most likely they won’t post anything in public. They will ask questions and John will do his best to convince them the traffic was very good. If he won’t be able to convince the buyer, he will easily give a refund. John spent nothing, but time. It is easy to give a refund and the buyer won’t keep pushing.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.