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Sponsoredreviews.com Scam?
By admin | May 6, 2007
Update: SponsoredReviews have decided to take the hit and are paying the bloggers that did the reviews! I just got my $65 on paypal
Thanks guys.-update:an email sent out shortly after I finished this post.
Dear Blogger,
It has come to our attention that fraudulent purchases have been made through our system. You were approached by an advertiser to write a review for one of the following Domains (removed)
Unfortunately, these purchases were made with stolen credit cards and we have no choice but to return the money to the credit card holder and delete the order in our system. This means that we are unable to pay you for the review that you completed, and ask that you remove it from your site(s).
We apologize for this inconvenience and for the time you spent writing the review. We assure you that we are taking measures to prevent this from happening in the future. This sort of fraud is rare and difficult to catch through standard fraud prevention schemes.
We appreciate your understanding and your continued support. Please submit a support ticket if you have any questions
-update: They transferred the amount I earned before these three reviews right after I complained about this situation. I didn’t ask for that. The site said the payment was scheduled for 05-05-07. Sending me previously earned money a bit sooner doesn’t make me feel better sponsoredreviews.com!-
Sponsoredreviews.com had recently upgraded my blog ranking and their system advised me I should ask between $20 and $100 per review. I did as I was advised and asked $100 for a certain review and got accepted. I wrote and published the review. All the criteria for the post were met and I believe the amount of words the customer got was twice the amount they actually had asked for.
The same day I tried for two more reviews which offered a max of $75 and I went for the full price and got both accepted. Thrilled and thinking of the money I was going to make with a couple of reviews I did a little research on the sites which had bought the reviews, to give them value for their money. I then found some remarkable similarities between them.
- The domains were all registered in mid-april 2007, just a few days apart.
- They all used the same DNS servers: ns1.streamlinedns.co.uk / ns2.streamlinedns.co.uk
- Two were with the same registar in Australia and used (different) dodgey sounding Yahoo email addresses.
The sites also seemed to have the same kind of formula and content. Surely someone as sponsoredreviews.com should have noticed this and flagged the customer(s)? I just can’t imagine they do not screen their customers before offering bloggers assignments.
So what happened next? I had done my $100,00 review, that got accepted by their system and showed up with a status of finished. My payment details section had the $65,00 (you get paid 65% of what they ask the customer) I was promised for the review included in the total so I was a happy blogger.
Thinking I’d start on the other two reviews, I went back to my sponsoredreviews.com startpage to check the requirements and saw that they were removed from my pending list. A quick look at my review history shows that the two $75 reviews had a note:”Credit Card Declined”. My $100,00 review said “Finished” though.
So what’s going on? These guys didn’t pay their creditcard bills on time? Glad I looked before I spent another 30 minutes writing a review…
Ah well, I miss out on the two $75 reviews but atleast I got my $100 assignment done right? Wrong. After a refresh that too was taken out of my recently completed orders list.
Now I would like to know who the hell is going to pay me? Sponsoredreviews.com offered me the opportunity to do these reviews. That’s what they do; Take the hassle out of the advertising on a blog process. Their system gave me this job, it checked the result and approved it. And then removes it from the records as if it never happened.
I’m glad I took the screenshots when I did. Too bad I couldn’t get the one where my payment details were listed with the “before” and “after” screenshot with $65 missing.
Now I’ve wasted plenty of my valuable time on them for nothing (twice if you count this post too). Who do you guys think should be paying me? eyemiss.com - hidrotips.com - 9sem.com or sponsoredreviews.com?
And if anyone from sponsoredreviews.com is reading this; I suggest you screen your advertising customers before you make bloggers work for nothing to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future.
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Topics: reviews, money, criminal, personal |
November 30th, 1999 at 12:00 am
May 6th, 2007 at 2:35 am
[…] By Bob | May 6, 2007 -update: This was a sponsoredreview but it turned out the owners of the site are creditcard thieves- […]
May 6th, 2007 at 3:45 am
I ran into the same issue. Two reviews that had been accepted were then removed. I just got an email from SponsoredReviews saying the credit cards were actually stolen. Can’t really blame SponsoredReviews for that one. It sucks but that’s the breaks when dealing in the online world these days.
May 6th, 2007 at 3:54 am
SEO blog (hope that’s not your real name
) I disagree.
I think this is one of the reasons these middleman companies exist, to make sure you don’t get scammed. This should have been flagged before they accepted the customer.
May 6th, 2007 at 4:50 am
Hi bob, I have the same problem as you. I get accept 3 offers as you mention with $100 each. But I a bit lucky, think of write those review later then an email from Sponsored reviews pop up in my mail box. 300(195) usd just fly away from us. Sad!
May 6th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Bob,
It is very unfortunate what happened. We are all victims here.
The opportunities seemed legitimate, not just to us, but to the bloggers such as yourself who wrote the reviews.
The credit card was also legitimate and had not been reported stolen and all address/CVS verifications passed.
What other checks can we perform?
This was fraud at a fairly sophisticated level and the craziest part about it was that there is no reward for the dumbass who purchased the reviews. What did they think would happen once the credit card was reported stolen? Obviously the reviews are going to be taken down. Which reminds me, you should not link to these guys, that only encourages them.
We are taking steps to help prevent these problems in the future. I do not want to list them here since it would only educate the people we are trying to stop, but there are certain signs that we hope to spot in the future.
We appreciate the support of the blogger community.
May 6th, 2007 at 7:28 am
After having a few bids STILL pending (what is it, two weeks I think by now) I was so psyched when a few of these advertisers accepted my bid to review them fairly quickly.
When I logged in again later in the day to start, I noticed they were categorized in the bottom of the page citing the credit card issue. AARGGH!
I guess the cards must have been stolen and used pretty quickly which would explain how they were able to at least get that far. If it were worth my time I’d write a seriously bad review for the sites that did this scam, but it would only serve to help them with link traffic.
May 6th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Wow, I hadn’t even thought about people getting scammed like that. Sorry about that.
I’ve been very curious about those money making schemes. I guess it was just a matter of time before someone started to abuse it. But you are right, PPP should have some screening process, just as they screen bloggers.
May 6th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Welcome to my world - I lost 300 articles and $300 to Helium. With the web you can’t count the cash ’til it’s in your account. Sad but true. Much love and empathy! - Allsux
May 6th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Jarod, thanks for reading. I understand that these things can happen and I’m glad you guys are trying your best to prevent this from happening in the future.
Perhaps placing customers in a “sandbox” for a few days and have them pay a symbolic amount like $10 in advance, which will be credited back to them as soon as them buy a review?
May 6th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
[…] Update: Seems by buddy Bob over at BobMeetsWorld.Com had the same issue unfortunately he had already completed his review. Here is what he has to say on the subject. “Sponsoredreviews.com Scam?“. […]
May 6th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Jarod, I want to thank you as well. I have yet to learn the behind-the-scenes efforts of what it takes to verify credit cards, but I’m sure you guys were on the ball and just came across some bad luck.
Now if we can just get your valid advertisers to decide on bids a little quicker.
May 6th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Bob,
Thanks for breaking this story, at least in my opinion, since I read your post right after reading my email and firing off a post of my own. Scary how that seems to keep happening.. Anyway, I really hate to see this happen not just because I also lost out on a nice chunk of money for the reviews I would have posted, but also because it damages the reputation of SponsoredReviews and all other pay per review sites. They will really have to publicize the actions they take to combat such fraud in the future if they hope to regain blogger’s trust that a $100 review will actually end up paying.
Jarod,
If you are reading these comments (and I hope you are) then thanks for commenting on this post. Again the more public the actions SponsoredReviews takes to show they are preventing this the better. The sandbox idea is a good one, or a probation period where they have to pay for “x” number of reviews in advance “x” number of days before they are shown as ops.
May 6th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Susan,
We are taking action on a few fronts. One of those actions is blocking certain countries from using our system. It is unfortunate but most fraud comes from a few suspect countries.
Unfortunately the idea of a sandbox would not be very helpful unless it was for several weeks. Most credit card holders do not recognize this type of fraud until they get their CC bill. If it wasn’t for us spotting the unusual activity and reporting it to the CC companies, these unfortunate people might not have known it even happened.
It is also clear to us that certain types of websites are high risk. After further review of the sites the advertiser was trying to promote, it is clear that there are certain kinds of sites that might be used in these incidents. We will be on the lookout for those sites and urge bloggers to be on the lookout for them too.
There are several other procedures we will be putting in place, but we will not be making them public. The less the crooks know the better.
May 7th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Bob, I agree the middlemen are supposed to provide a bit more support and in this case I think they did. Some may have wasted their time writing the reviews but imagine the amount of time and hassle it would be if you had accepted payment from a fraudulent credit card or a stolen card and had to do a charge back etc.
Jarrod, one thing I would suggest to improve your service would be some sort of feedback for pending reviews. As someone already mentioned here the reviews can be pending for weeks and we as publishers have no way of knowing if the advertisers have even looked at them. That really bothers me. Also some feedback as to why they decline the bid would be nice as well.
May 7th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
I support SEO Blog’s suggestions wholeheartedly. Perhaps giving them a time period in which they have to respond would be useful.
My fear is that when you have all these pending approvals we as publishers run the risk of being slammed if they all happen to be approved in a short time frame, so we then have to work double-time to meet our deadlines.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t see a way for a publisher to withdraw a bid. If that doesn’t exist, could there be?
YES, let me know why I’ve been declined. If it’s the price, let them counter offer.
May 7th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
SeoBlog/Mark,
We have several solutions that we are working on in regards to the pending bids. One of those solutions is expire them after a certain time period (more then likely 3 weeks). Doing so is a double edged sword though, since we have seen advertisers approve bids after several weeks, but this should hurry them along a bit.
There are a few reasons why advertisers are not buying right away. One of those reasons is the shear number of bids they receive. They do not have the budget to buy them all at once, and do not want to decline them, so that they have the option to purchase them down the road.
As for the suggestion that we allow them to give a reason for the decline, we are looking into that as well. Although we are not sure if the advertisers will take the time to give 200 bloggers reasons, but perhaps some sort of bulk reject reason.
———–
Let me get back to the topic at hand. After two days of non-stop work on the system we have completed the upgrades that will insure that this sort of thing will not happen again.
If by some chance it was to happen again it will be transparent to the bloggers, as we will pay out for the review regardless. Yes, it is our responsibility as a company to protect our bloggers from these incidents.
We are in the process of crediting the few bloggers who did complete the review, and sending out a payment shortly.
Yes, we are going to eat this one. You can be damn sure that the next credit card thief I run across is going to get my foot up their ass, maybe both of them
May 7th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Jarrod, it’s fantastic news to hear you guys are going to pay the bloggers who were unfortunate enough to have taken these opportunities.
Also, I’m impressed with the involvement and hard work on sponsoredreviews’s side of things. I will be posting my appraisals tomorrow on this subject. And thanks for keeping us updated!
May 7th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Jarrod, thanks so much for keeping us informed. We know you’re under a lot of pressure to keep everyone as happy as possible. I think that all things considered, you responded admirably to this situation.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Thx guys.
May 8th, 2007 at 12:03 am
May 8th, 2007 at 12:04 am
I thought of another way to say thanks: http://www.meandmydrum.com/2007/05/07/sponsoredreviews-stands-up-for-publishers/
May 8th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
May 9th, 2007 at 8:56 am
[…] Bob | May 9, 2007 A few days after sponsoredreviews.com got scammed by customers with stolen credit cards they decided to pay the bloggers that posted the articles anyway. I think […]