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Advertisement Banner Scam – Beware of Free Money

December 4, 2011

December 4, 2011

Image courtesy Lacoste

Money is never free. Not even from your parents. So if some ad agency wants to pay you a large sum to put their banner on your website, for no apparently good reason, be wary. It is a scam.

There is a scammer (or a few of them working together) to try to gain access to the internals of your blog. Here is my experience over the last two days. I have validated by googling that a whole bunch of bloggers were targeted.

For the benefit of future targets, I am going to paste the emails verbatim so that they can find this post and escape the scam, should they choose to search with the right terms from the emails. The emails are self explanatory, so I will keep may commentary to a minimum.

I just want to point out that after I got the last email, I did some research and found that you can do a ‘whois’ on the emailer’s domain as a precaution. I also found that they may be targeting .info tlds (I assume some of these webmasters may be cheapos – and thereby more gullible.) Depending on the name on the email people assume that a “he” or a “she” sent the email. But it was a team effort on the part of the scammers. They only started doing this in the last 5 weeks, and their approach has been evolving. For example, a few weeks ago, the victims asked who the advertiser was, and they said Lacoste. Now their initial email itself says the advertiser is Lacoste. They always represent an “agency”. They are always in France. There are various websites for the “agency” that are all pointing to the same content.

First Email

from:  Martin Lefevre mlefevre@ritaagency.com
reply-to:  mlefevre@ritaagency.com
to:  John Varghese
date:  Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:45 PM
subject:  Contact via John Varghese.com : We would like to buy banner space on your site johnvarghese.info.

To: Webmaster

From:
Martin Lefevre
mlefevre@ritaagency.com

Message:
Hi,

We are looking for new advertisement platforms and we are interested
in your site johnvarghese.info.
Is it possible to place banner on your site on a fee basis?

Best regards,
Martin Lefevre

Sent from (ip address): 69.172.131.212
(colo-69-172-130-212.pilosoft.com)
Date/Time: November 30, 2011 7:45 am
Coming from (referer): http://www.johnvarghese.com/contact/
Using (user agent): Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64)
AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2

Second Email

from:  John Varghese
to:  mlefevre@ritaagency.com
date:  Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 9:46 PM
subject:  Re: Contact via John Varghese.com : We would like to buy banner space on your site johnvarghese.info.
mailed-by:  gmail.com

Hi Martin

Sorry for the late response. Sure I am also interested. What do you propose?
Thanks
John

Third Email

from:  Martin Lefevre mlefevre@ritaagency.com
to:  John Varghese
date:  Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:11 AM
subject:  Re: Contact via John Varghese.com : We would like to buy banner space on your site johnvarghese.info.
mailed-by:  ritaagency.com

Hello,

Thanks for reply to our proposal!

I represent Rita Agency. At the moment we are preparing an advertising campaign for Lacoste Company (it is a French company producing clothes, footwear, perfumery etc.) We already have designed banners for the campaign, they are the following sizes: 160×600, 240×400, 300×250, 336×280, 468×60, 728×90.
What can be your price for one banner (banner should appear at ALL pages of your site) of abovementioned sizes (please specify the place for the banner – top, bottom, left, right)? Please mention a normal link for banner, without javascript code and set prices in US dollars per month.

Best regards,

Fourth Email

from:  John Varghese
to:  Martin Lefevre <mlefevre@ritaagency.com>
date:  Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:32 PM
subject:  Re: Contact via John Varghese.com : We would like to buy banner space on your site johnvarghese.info.
mailed-by:  gmail.com

Hi Martin

How long will the campaign run?
Here is my proposal.
Size        Position Cost per month in USD
160×600     Right    $960
240×400     Right    $960
300×250     Bottom   $750
336×280     Bottom   $940
468×60      Bottom   $280
728×90      Bottom   $650
For any of the ads you can use the a link in the following format.
<a href=”http://www.YourCampaignUrl.com/specifi_file.html” target=”_top”><img border=”0″ src=”http://img.YourCampaignUrl.com/160x600_01.png” /></a>
We can look into the details of the link in the next step.
Please let me know what you think. I look forward to doing business with you.
Thanks

Fifth Email

from:  Martin Lefevre mlefevre@ritaagency.com
to: John Varghese
date:  Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 12:52 AM
subject:  Re: Contact via John Varghese.com : We would like to buy banner space on your site johnvarghese.info.
mailed-by:  ritaagency.com

Hi!

Thanks for reply to our proposal!We set the contract on one month, it will be extended automatically every month until you brake it.

We like your price.We would like to place 160×600 banner.

To pass to the banner control system follow the link http://webmaster.ritaagency.com
To enter use the following data:

login: johnvarghese.info
password: GBuj8o26O

You should install and activate the plugin in order to display advertisement. Before making payment, advertiser must approve location of the banner. The banner will be shown on your site when you add special code to your web- address (for example:http://johnvarghese.info/?adv_test=1). It means, that visitors will see the banner only if it is approved and payment made.

To get installation instruction for your site type pass to: http://docs.ritaagency.com/wp_install
To activate your site you have to enter the code: NLB-898-CY4

What way of payment is suitable for you?

Adrenaline Rush

Whoa! They just accepted my ridiculous demand for almost $1000 per month for a banner ad! I don’t even have a thousand visitors to my blog in a year, let alone a month or a day. Of course on the day I wrote the comment on the NY Times for the Zynga article I had over 700 page views. But that was a one time event. The typical going rate for ad revenue is between $1.5 to $2.0 per 1000 impressions. Naturally, this triggered of warning bells in my gut. A quick google search revealed that this was a scam. They have various websites with the exact same content.

Lessons learned

When a potential business partner comes to you with an great offer with broken English, it is not because they don’t know good English. It is because they want to appeal to the greedy and cunning person in you. They want you to feel superior and smarter because your language skills are better. If you fall for that, you are just being gullible. You can notice this trick in all craigslist scams as well.

Unless you have done business with someone before, if they don’t negotiate your offer, they are fake and don’t intend to pay.

Never let anyone give you a plug in that does not already have a good reputation on wordpress.org. This is because we rarely read the code, and updates could be malevolent.

If they don’t give you a phone number, they don’t deserve you business.

A tip to save time: As soon as you receive an unsolicited business offer, google the contents of the email with the word “scam”.

Help

In order to help others, please add comments with links to other blog articles that warn about this scam. I’ll do some of that myself.

Permanent link to this article: http://www.johnvarghese.com/advertisement-banner-scam-beware-of-free-money/

15 comments

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  1. JohnVarghese

    December 4, 2011 at 12:22 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    http://www.Logiclounge.com was approached by “Larko Agency” with the same email. See here. http://logiclounge.com/2011/08/19/beware-of-larko-agency-banner-scam-wordpress-scam/

  2. SLeeAndTopher

    December 14, 2011 at 6:47 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    I was also targeted with this banner ad scam. I sent an email to Lacoste and am awaiting their reply.

  3. SLeeAndTopher

    December 14, 2011 at 6:50 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    I was also targeted with this banner ad scam: http://www.sleeandtopher.com/2011/12/warning-bloggers-beware-of-blog-banner-ad-scam-with-adv-plugin/. I sent an email to Lacoste and am awaiting their reply.

    1. JohnVarghese

      December 14, 2011 at 10:33 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

      @SLeeAndTopher Thanks for the excellent post on your blog. I wonder what Martin will say if someone were to respond to their last email and ask questions like:

      1. How many of you are there trying to scam bloggers?

      2. How many bloggers have installed the plugin?

      3. How do you plan to benefit from this?

      4. How much funding have you received for this scam?

      1. SLeeAndTopher

        December 14, 2011 at 9:28 pm (UTC -8) Link to this comment

        @JohnVarghese@SLeeAndTopher

  4. JohnVarghese

    December 14, 2011 at 10:06 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    @SLeeAndTopher @jmatthicks Hi Lee. I got a notification that you have commented here. And I see your comment also in livefyre referring to your awesome blog post http://www.sleeandtopher.com/2011/12/warning-bloggers-beware-of-blog-banner-ad-scam-with-adv-plugin/ describing this scam. But I am not able to see your comment on this blog post. I checked the site admin moderator options and saw nothing to prevent your comment from showing up here. Thoughts? Matt is not resolving either.

  5. JohnVarghese

    December 14, 2011 at 10:18 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    jmatthicks Thanks Jeremy (Matt) :) . Now I see @SLeeAndTopher ‘s comment. I also see in the blog post itself “3 comments 3 people listening”. But on my home page http://www.johnvarghese.com I see “4 comments”. Also what did you change to fix this? Did I have some setting wrong?

  6. CephiGardner

    April 25, 2012 at 2:26 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    I received the exact same email. I asked them to send me the details and received the 2nd email. Thanks for the public service announcement ;)

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    October 15, 2012 at 8:11 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment

    Thanks Jeremy

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