Tahir - walking a fine line

In the TOS I thought I noticed a warning not to use my full name or other personal details. How does that mesh with exposing scammers? I shouldn't use my full name but I should post all details about scammers? Did my skimming skills miss something in there?

As for my background, I have a BSc from U of W in Manitoba. Worked with a consulting company of a friend of mine. After doing a few projects there, worked in IT support of Revenue Canada in Winnipeg and Edmonton. Left and tried to do a few things on my own and in association with other people. Have had PowerSolutions.ca for a long time.

I think about two years ago I got interested in the whole FB, G+, Twitter type online marketing. I have no idea how but in the beginning got sucked into the vortex that is warriorforum. Shiny Object Syndrome followed and I got stuck in there for a long time meanwhile still trying to do some real business online. It took a long time but eventually I started to notice that I was stuck in exactly what they were describing, that I needed other people to get into, "The Sales Funnel". But I simply could not bring myself to promote the way I was being "trained" to do. Their psychological triggers certainly worked on me long enough. Eventually, I just simply started noticing the patterns of repetitive promotion. A person who just a few weeks ago was a client and being used a case study, was now promoting a product of their own. Because "everyone was messaging them about her sales technique". This SEO system I just bought works great but something different by xyz is just "killing it" with their top ten SERP for 127 keywords on 17 websites. The phucking sevens everywhere.

No doubt some of the training I got was based on real information. Which I started to discover for myself as I started searching for background material to see whether what I was being presented was real or not. I promoted a few things that I thought actually had good information. Bought a bunch of domains, tried a few SEO tricks, adsense, backlinking, etc. I don't actually think that I have promoted anything while making untrue claims of making $4327/month guaranteed. I have travelled through the underbelly sleaze, slime, ooze of Internet Marketing and emerged pretty clean. Just have a far better knowledge of what could be done against me as competition. There has been a great pull to make some money, but I simply could not bring myself to make untrue claims.

What broke me out completely was finding saltydriod.info and how the scamming of the IM gurus could have very real and dreadful consequences for the average person. What was and not possible with software. How badly programmed some of these services were and how they could be improved with simple changes. What was being presented as super and magical were simple database queries from different sources. How privacy laws changed how business had to be conducted online. Simple measures of security and what not. Now I'm just rambling. Simply, I eventually broke out because my background knowledge started asserting itself. I started asking pointed questions which were glossed over, ignored, or I was simply removed. Out of all of that I'm still looking to run successful websites online providing real business services.

In Dec, 2013 I bought a few websites. I'll list the websites to provide context. If that's considered promotion they can be removed from the post.

uxjobs247.com - user experience job board
clickadbux.com + buyprimetraffic.com - PTC site + selling traffic site
followerspin.com - some sort of traffic exchange
inforgraphics.pw - infogrphic templates

Haven't done anything with followerspin.com. Haven't done any promotion of infographics.pw either. Bought it because it's selling an actual product and not providing any "training". buyprimetraffic was a freebie along with clickadbux.com, I'll come back to this shortly. uxjobs247.com is my main effort right now. The person who sold it has a staffing company but didn't know how to promote the site online properly. Now we intend to work together on this website and other similar niches in the future. It is taking the vast majority of my attention and effort right now. I ended up on realscam.com because of clickadbux.

Didn't really have a clue about pay to click industry either when I bought clickadbux. Found a few forums about PTC industry and started participating. It seems that pretty much most PTC sites are expected to go under within months. Even the largest sites that were ok in my perception just a few weeks ago have had downfalls. All the discussions about nerdbux.com and neobux.com brought me here. Have learned a lot in the last few weeks about PTC market. Most of it seems to be about funneling traffic into the affiliate marketing world. With healthy portions of ponzi schemes, outright scamming a side dish. Right now I'm letting it coast while I work on new design, script, and a targeted direction to take it away from the scammy side of advertising. I know I'm straddling a line with this site. But it is providing me the learning experience needed to try a few experiments. Will be taking it in a different direction and see if I can operate as a legitimate advertising option to a targeted niche of users.

The vast majority of my time is spent on the job board website. And all the time I spent playing around with different methods of IM is not finally coming in handy. All the pieces of software bought over the last few years are now coming in handy for research and marketing. Autoresponders, graphics templates, copy writing templates, etc. The sites I found researching real SEO information while trying to figure out if what I was being told was true or not, now come in handy.

I'm coming here to do my own research about scammers. Hopefully, eventually to take part in the conversations here and see if I can help expose others or try to funnel people here vs "IM" forums.

Let's see where this goes.

Welcome to RS.

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Originally Posted by khawaja1971

In the TOS I thought I noticed a warning not to use my full name or other personal details. How does that mesh with exposing scammers? I shouldn't use my full name but I should post all details about scammers? Did my skimming skills miss something in there?
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When you expose online criminals and scams, sooner or later you will be met with personal threats or even death threats (and not only from operators of scams but from brainwashed future victims as well)
While this is not that scary to some people in western world in some places hiring a contract killer to make a problem go away is still a "valid" strategie in a "business plan" of some criminal enterprise.
A lot of posters here use real name, but it is up to you, exposing yourself publicly while taking on online criminals might be not the best idea.

One interesting example in US, i can remember is some pissed criminal ordered narcotic drugs on SilkRoad anonymously to be delivered to Brian Krebs (online journalist fighting cyber crime)
and hinted cops that Brian is in possession of controlled substances.

It is up to you, but when you decide to disclose your personal details and you piss some sociopath , you should be ready to deal with those things.

Does being anonymous and exposing scams gives less credibility to what you say ? maybe a bit, but when you speak with facts which can be verified and establish some good standing record of what you say,
only seriously brainwashed people would discredit your statements.

you will often notice that the scammers whine the loudest about scambuster anonymity while themselves attempting to remain anonymous.

I will keep those points in mind.

I had a dream last night, maybe a nightmare, that someone did a super long review of me / website, like 10k+ words. And through it all I was labeled a scammer! :scared_1:

Then I went back and did a point by point rebuttal to point out assumptions and generalizations.

Then the computer crashed. :computer_smash:

But I see that there's an autosave function so it was a dream for sure. :RpS_smile:

Ok, since i mentioned what might be the outcome of publicly exposing cybercriminals here is an update on Brian Krebs, also hints where he gets his information (russian cybercriminals themselves feed it to him to settle the scores :) )

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Russian criminals routinely feed Mr. Krebs information about their rivals that they obtained through hacks. After one such episode, he began receiving daily calls from a major Russian cybercriminal seeking his files back. Mr. Krebs is writing a book about the ordeal, called "Spam Nation," to be published by Sourcebooks this year.
In the meantime, hackers have been competing in a dangerous game of one-upmanship to see who can pull the worst prank on Mr. Krebs. They often steal his identity. One opened a $20,000 credit line in his name. Admirers have made more than $1,000 in bogus PayPal donations to his blog using hacked accounts. Others have paid his cable bill for three years with stolen credit cards.
The antics can be dangerous. In March, as Mr. Krebs was preparing to have his mother over for dinner, he opened his front door to find a police SWAT team pointing semiautomatic guns in his direction. Only after his wife returned home from the grocery store to find him handcuffed did the police realize Mr. Krebs had been the victim of "swatting." Someone had called the police and falsely reported a murder at their home.
Four months after that, someone sent packets of heroin to Mr. Krebs’s home, then spoofed a call from his neighbor to the police. But Mr. Krebs had already been tipped off to the prank. He was tracking the fraud in a private forum -- where a criminal had posted the shipment’s tracking number *- and had alerted the local police and the F.B.I.

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Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/te...nderbelly.html

Thanks. I do remember reading about him before but not the extent of his issues in blowback.