Be Prepared for the Bad Guys
Posted On: 2008-06-16
Over the years Steve and I have built up a number of websites and blogs with a view to selling them further down the track. Some of them have been sold for some very tidy sums of money while others are still under our control.
Some of those we still hold are now languishing and it's probably been several years since we've touched them while others have been updated regularly and now see some very nice amounts of very focused traffic. But they're still for sale and any time anyone wants to buy one of them all they have to do is contact us and we'll enter into negotiations.
So we weren't all that surprised when an email popped up on Saturday our time from someone who said that they were very interested in buying one of our mainstream blogs that gets a lot of traffic. The writer said that they liked the look of the site and were interested in buying it so could we get back to them with our phone number because they had money to spend on a site like ours and they wanted to talk to us to discuss the sale.
There was nothing very suspicious about the wording, the email address of the sender was one of the less common online email providers but it looked quite genuine to me. However Steve wasn't very comfortable with it for some reason. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was that was bothering him but he just didn't feel right about it.
Those of you who know where Steve comes from will understand why I tend to pay attention when Steve doesn't feel comfortable about something ... and for those of you who don't then I can tell you that Steve spent a lot of years dealing with people who weren't always law-abiding and honest. All those years seem to have helped him build up a sixth sense about what's kosher and what isn't.
So I left it up to Steve to decide what to do and for a while he did nothing. Sometimes he has this way of apparently putting something to one side while he works on other tasks but what he's really doing is just letting his mind turn the over the facts and wait for any alarm bells to ring.
After a couple of hours of doing other things Steve still wasn't comfortable about even responding to the email and he sure wasn't prepared to give them a phone number. So he took another look at the email and then decided to do a search on Google for the particular email address that it had come from. When he did the first thing he spotted was a warning that the email address that had been used to write to us was one that was frequently used by Nigerian scammers.
And they had wanted our phone number? Whoa!!
There's a lesson for all of us in that little experience. Flipping that site would have been very nice, who can't do with some extra money at just about any time ... but never let the thought of that extra cash stop you from being cautious.
We were fortunate because their attempt to contact us came via an email but they could be pushing this particular scam via the phones as well. It just so happens that the phone number shown on the registration for that particular domain is correct but these days we only use it for our Internet connection so they weren't able to call us but things could be different for you.
They could try and contact other webmasters via the phone number associated with the domain registration or they could be trying to contact you via email. Whichever method is used to contact you take care and don't rush into anything no matter how much sender or caller might offer you for your site and how much you might be in need of the money at that particular time.
Of course from time to time you may receive offers to buy some of your sites and they will be legitimate but you really do need to be prepared for the bad guys because sometimes that's who will be on the other end of the phone and once they have their hooks into you it's very hard to escape from them.
Now I'm off to tackle an interesting week. It could be one that will see our business expand in the coming months as a mainstream client is getting closer to taking his very progressive business online in a big way. On the other hand it could just be another week of business as usual but I won't know until I head down to the office to see what's waiting for me.
Let's hope that we all have a great week ahead of us.