Adsense account disabled

Congratulations on those who got my adsense account disabled; you were right about one thing - google won't tell me why it was disabled so I've got no way of stopping your 'invalid clicks'.

Adsense, ad-rings and ad-scams

After my article 'Adwords and Adsense' I received a few emails from people who were making a lot of money (or so they claimed) from being in a click ring with 100,000 other members. They all used false email addresses so I couldn't reply to them individually so I'll have to do it here.

Don't you people all realise that you are stealing?? I'm a person who used adwords to advertise my web site and I can tell you that you are STEALING my money! There is no other way to describe it as it is theft, pure and simple.

From the tone of the emails I don't think they really care though, as long as they get their money; I for one hope that google find out who is in this 'click ring' and ban the lot of you, do you really think it's that hard to work out who is in it from the inside? And please don't try to convince me that 'google will never discover us because we are too smart for them' - Bulldust - you only need one google person to infiltrate to finish it off. The laws of probability says that google has already infiltrated your ring and is busily gathering info.
And 100,000 members? I don't think so, someone would have told google waaaay before you hit that mark.

I actually went through my old adwords account today - did you know that there are some key words that are GUARANTEED to be clicked on? I have the proof!
Nigerian letter scam, 419 scam and Nigerian scam all had a 100% click through rate! How good is that?!?
As I have stated before though, not one person clicked any further than the home page so I'm guessing that it was the Nigerian scammers that actually find these sorts of ads and click on them in order to get them off google; or at least push our advertising expenses through the roof (which they succeeded to do with my account, I had to shut it down).
Never fear though, my account will be back.

Forcing Paypal on ebay users

If you are a ebay user then you might know that we in Australia must now use Paypal for all our ebay transactions, we can't use direct deposit, cash, cheque or money order.

Ebay has thrust this upon us by insisting that "You are four times less likely to have a problem on eBay if you pay with PayPal than all the other payments on the site, like direct deposit," ... but they have made this statement without any back up data. If you made a statement like this for a university paper you would be failed, in a government submission you would be charged with 'wastage of public funds' - you can't make a statement like that and not back it up with evidence.

Here's my proof -
Between 2001 - 2007 I made 4,950 transactions on ebay; out of all those 40% were paid for via Paypal (all overseas buyers used Paypal), 55% direct deposit and 5% for other methods.
Out of all my transactions I had 7 disputes - 4 with Paypal and the other 3 were direct deposit. Let's quickly do the math - there was 4 disputes out of 1,980 Paypal payments (0.0020%) and 3 direct deposit disputes out of 2,722 transactions(0.0011%).
So by my reckoning Paypal has twice the amount of disputes - so now I need to ask where ebay gets its figures from?

Ebay will never provide these figures though for the simple reason that they don't exist. This is simply a money making exercise as ebay now charge you twice (ebay fees and the Paypal fees), and why does ebay need more money? Because the CEO of the company doesn't realise the customer service makes a company and now that ebayers are leaving in droves more fees need to be extracted from those that are staying in order to make the bottom line look good.

I for one look forward to a competitor as this is the only thing that will pull ebay back into line.

Adwords and Adsense

I better start this off with an explanation of what Adwords and Adsense are; Adwords are what you use to advertise your website on google while Adsense is a method of putting google ads onto your website in order to gain revenue.
Judge it correctly and the money you earn via Adsense can pay your Adwords bill and have a bit left over (now you can anyway, when I first started you couldn't combine the two).

When I first started with my websites (Koala comics and The best scams) I used adwords to advertise. I was paying about $4/day (this equates to $120/month, it quickly adds up) in the hope of gaining 50 new readers each day - if one of them turned out to be a paying customer then that would cover my costs, if more than one paid then I would be making a profit; a 2% conversion rate is not too much to ask is it?

So after a month I had spent $230 (2 web sites for one month) but hadn't produced one customer (remember that I had budgeted for about 60 customers at that time) ; I checked my log files to see that nearly all of the people that arrived from adwords didn't get past the home page. This surprised me as an actual issue of the comic is on my web site, surely if people visited my web site knowing that it was a comic book then they would at least read the first page.

I pulled my adwords advertising as it was costing me money and not gaining me any customers (or readers I surmised).

Several months late I started an Adsense campaign on several of my web sites. It was a slow process and I researched on how to improve - during this research I discovered click-fraud.

Click-fraud is when your adword campaign is clicked on for the sole reason of earning money and not caring about the advertiser (ME!!).
I couldn't believe it when I realised that I had been a victim of click fraud - how else do you explain so many 'targeted' visitors not going past my home page?

Luckily google is constantly evolving its software to try and uncover click fraud. As these methods are being discovered the offending accounts are being shut down, but when you read up on the methods that fraudsters are using do they really think that google won't discover them sooner or later?

Click rings are the biggest example of fraud at the moment - which I also notice is where the ring leaders exploit the people who believe that they are doing the exploiting!
The best example of this is the 'paid to surf' programs; this is where you are paid to surf the Internet while being being paid 1-5 cents for each ad you click on. What you don't realise is that each click on the ad can be worth up to $60 to the ring leaders but usually around the 10-30 cent mark.

As webmaster of www.thebestscams.com I am daily sent emails from people who wish to know if something is a scam or not; these 'paid to surf the web' programs are ultimately fraudulent as they rip off advertisers.

So why are these programs and click fraud 'fraudulent'? Some may argue that there are no laws covering these processes - what about common decency of not stealing? There is no country on this planet that allows stealing, so why is it 'accepted' by some on the Internet?
Make no mistake, it is theft, these people steal money from the advertisers (I'm an advertiser and not happy). And it is theft because I paid for a visitor to visit my site, not some click bot to click on my ads and not even look at it.

If click fraud continues then there will be less advertisers; unfortunately the end result of this is that the only web sites that will be allowed to continue with adwords are large companies - so all your fraudsters should think about it, are you willing to destroy the industry for all the small and medium size businesses and leave the rich to get richer??
I really don't know why I wrote the previous sentence, the one thing I have learnt about fraudsters is that they have no sympathy for anyone, especially not their victims, and if there is a quick dollar to be made then they will take it no matter what the short term or long term repercussions.

Different payment methods not allowed on ebay

If ebay ever realise that they are not making enough money then they can simply sell the stuff that they are smoking - it has to be good stuff.

I'm referring to the new rule that you cannot have different payment methods for different countries. Why the heck not? I can think of several reasons why it must be allowed.

The first problem is cheques, I allowed Australians to pay me via cheques as there were no fees involved; but if a cheque arrived from overseas then I returned it with a brief note explaining why I cannot accept it.
That reason is simple, it costs a fortune!!
My mother used to run a magazine subscription service where she took credit cards from readers all over Australia and New Zealand. One day a cheque arrived from a New Zealander for $80 (a normal subscription fee), my mother decided to cash this cheque and it took 3 weeks to clear (local cheques take 3 days to clear), but that wasn't what nearly caused my mum to have a heart attack - that was caused by the $50 international clearing fee (she lost heavily on this transaction but we all learnt from it). She has never accepted another International cheque.

By the way - international money orders are just as bad, it takes weeks to clear and has huge fees associated with it. I have no problem accepting local money orders though as it costs me nothing.

Next option is Direct Debit, this is really hard to do for International buyers and in most cases buyers will look elsewhere for their item. Most of my sales were in the $2 - $20 range so a buyer wasn't about to pay a $20 fee to transfer money overseas. Side note - to transfer money overseas from Australia you need to go to the bank unless you have set up your account for this.

The other option is Paypal (which ebay is forcing all Australians to use as of May 2008 - Big Brother here we come).
Now Paypal charge around 2.5% per transaction, this goes on top of ebay charges of around 2-4% (prices have changed since I was trading full time on ebay). So using Paypal effectively doubles my fees so I really don't want to use it unless I have to.

When I sold on ebay I offered several methods of payment. Australians (40%) could pay via Money order, cheque or direct deposit (most of my regulars paid via this method). For international buyers (60%) they could only pay via Paypal. This method worked fine and kept my expenses down.
This is no longer acceptable according to ebay's new terms. My question is simple - Ebay has always claimed that they are simply a 'market facilitator' who doesn't get involved in transactions, so why are they now? And to what extent will they be getting involved? Ebay has opened a can of worms with this which means the real question is - can they handle it?

If saving a dollar here and there sounds pedantic then I need to point out that I was doing around 400 transactions each week - so each extra dollar charged by Paypal or ebay equated to a $400 loss each week.

17 scams aimed at ebay users

Did you know that there are seventeen scams aimed at ebay users?

I know that from personal experience as I used to sell collectible card games for two years on ebay. The amount of fraud emails I received was astounding, around three to four each day!

The problem with ebay scams is that the ‘enemy’ is all around. Scammers were the easiest to spot, some buyers were trying to trick me, other sellers were trying to harass me but the worst was ebay and their constant changing of the rules. Heck, even Paypal is not your friend when you read the fine print of their contract.

So what is the best way to guard against scams? Knowledge. I do run a website at www.thebestscams.com which goes through the main ebay scams (and a lot of other scams) while James Elliott wrote a book that goes into scams into a lot more detail.

For now lets concentrate on the 17 ebay scams.

First we must look at Phishing emails, this is when people send you emails that seem to come from a legitimate source. In this example a phishing email would seem to come from ebay themselves while it’s actually coming from scammers.

If you click on this email you will be taken to a web site that LOOKS like the real ebay site but it isn’t. The best advice I can give here is DO NOT CLICK on a link in an email, type www.ebay.com into your web browser.

Scammers will try hard to get your account details, especially if you have a score over one hundred. I have seen a scammer make over thirty thousand dollars in one weekend with an ebay account that had over one thousand feedback points on it.

Scams by other ebay buyers include shill bidding, retracted bids, postage cost rip offs, change of address, fake refunds, feedback extortion, early offers, allegations of price fixing and ‘items damaged in the mail’.

I remember the first time I explained ‘feedback extortion’ to a group of people and the two ladies in the group laughed at me, they couldn’t believe that it would actually happen. I said that it’s happened to me twice. They were both about to go on ebay so they did listen to what I had to say.

Scams by other ebay sellers include auction interference, linking to web sites off ebay, fake price guides, trading assistant scams and false allegations.

The current ebay system is so far behind scam reports that if an account has 3 warnings against it then the account is automatically suspended! Sounds good in theory but you must remember that scammers have hundreds of accounts working at any one time, with these they can lodge a ten complaints against a legitimate ebay seller instantly and have them suspended for up to two weeks.

The irony is that the seller, who is now suspended for two weeks, has paid lots of fees to ebay while the scammers never pay fees.

Other scams include fake wire transfers, the Powerseller scam (I fell for this!), second chance offers, drop shippers and distributors.

If you don’t know what any of these scams are then I would advise you to look them up on the Internet (www.thebestscams.com for a full rundown of them all) before you start trading on ebay.