Playing with an email scammer to see how they work
Jun/092
Like everyone else with an email i get loads of scam emails saying i have got an inheritence or won the lottery.
I like to study everything on the internet so i thought i would reply to see what happens.
Below is the start of the email chain and i will keep adding to it if it continues.
From: collins ropars [mailto:c.hropars7@msn.com]
Sent: 18 June 2009 18:28
To: c.hropars@msn.com
Subject: please reply
Hello,
I have emailed you earlier without a response. In my first email I mentioned about my late client whose relatives I cannot get in touch with. I am compelled to do this because I would not want the bank to push my clients funds into the bank treasury as unclaimed inheritance.
This mail is written and intended to solicit your assistance to be presented as NEXT OF KIN to my Late Client since you are a foreigner and only a foreigner can lay claims on this inheritance. The Governing Body of the Bank has contacted me on this matter and I am yet to provide the Next of Kin to lay claims to the Fund. Under a clear and legitimate agreement with you, I shall seek your consent to be presented as the next of Kin so that my late Clients’ Fund will not be Confiscated by the Bank and pushed into the bank treasury as unclaimed bills.
For the sake of Transparency on this matter, you are free to make immediate contact for further clarification and explanation on this matter. I will need you also to reconfirm your full name and contact telephone number to ascertain the fact that I am dealing with the right person.
Thank you very much for your anticipated acceptance while we expect your prompt response to this matter as the urgency demands.
Yours faithfully.
Collins Ropars
London - United kingdom
+447024082564
________________________________________
From: earl@earlofgrey.com
To: c.hropars@msn.com
Subject: RE: please reply
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:44:19 +0200
Hi Collins
I am very sorry i missed your first email.
How do we move forward with this?
Earl
________________________________________
From: collins ropars [mailto:c.hropars@msn.com]
Sent: 18 June 2009 19:50
To: earl@earlofgrey.com
Subject: Further Clarification
Greetings in the name of God and Thanks for your urgent response to my email, as I told you in previous mail, my deceased client have been on my firm’s legal retainer ship service from the 24th September, 2001. In his assessment form he did not introduce any family living with him at that time in the United Kingdom, Only a part of his business and his origin. My firm has been representing him and his business in legal and allied matters up till the time of his death.
I want to let you understand that this is a deal, my client may not really be your relation but bear the same surname with you but what is important is for you to show interest and provide me with your information then I will present you as the next of kin with proper proof and back up. I am a man of honour and would never put my family name to shame because of money so you should know that I have verified all procedure and information even before contacting you to work with me on this project.
I have written a letter to the Bank informing them that a relative of my late client has inquired about his estate and it’s ready to make claims on them and the bank has no problem with that so long as I present the person with proof and legal backing.
I would prepare an agreement / memorandum of understanding between us so that we would be sure of what we are doing and for the security of the money even in the future. God knows I trust you wholly and entirely but I am only trying to make sure that our partnership is legal and that we will get what we deserve at the end of the transaction amicably.
To enable me commence the agreement and legalization thereafter, I will appreciate you reconfirm your info as follows:
Full Name, Contact address Direct Contact Telephone number, Occupation and age. Also specify an exact time when i could call to speak with you.
Once I get this info, I will speak with you and then commence the legalization of the paperwork. Feel free to call me on my number below for further clarification.
I look forward to a speedy co-operation from your side.
NB: You should know that 5M Pounds is a lot of money so a transaction of this magnitude should be kept top secret, my wife does not even know about this, Therefore, you must keep this transaction to yourself alone. You never really know who your enemy is.
Sincerely,
Attorney Collins Ropars
Maxwell & Ropars Associates.
500 Prescott Road, Old Swan,
Liverpool, L13 3DB
England.
Tel: +44 -7024082564
Fax: +44 -7006035114
________________________________________
From: earl@earlofgrey.com
To: c.hropars@msn.com
Subject: RE: Further Clarification
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:07:45 +0200
Hi Collins
This is all looking very good.
I do trust you like you trust me and i am looking forwards to helping you.
My full name is Earl Grey
Contact Address.
The Mansion
Mansion Street
Gibraltar
GBZ1
Phone number 00447050028346
Occupation: Head Tea taster
Age 35
Please phone anytime.
Earl
________________________________________
From: collins ropars [mailto:c.hropars@msn.com]
Sent: 22 June 2009 14:21
To: earl@earlofgrey.com
Subject: Memorandum of Understanding?? SIGNED
Dear Mr. Earl,
We have to work like one family with one mind and one spirit to achieve this transaction. I have given my whole life on this project and I have all it will take to make this successful. You don’t have to worry. Five million British Pounds is a lot of money and this has been giving me sleepless nights. I am really trying to make sure that I keep this transaction to myself as you can’t say for sure who is an enemy. My wife does not even know as it’s the best measure to avoid panic. I hope you understand what I mean and I hope you do also keep this to yourself. Security is the first measure to our success. I am in receipt of your info and I am beginning to build my trust in you. Always consult me before making any decision detriment to this project as two heads are better than one. This is a one in a life time opportunity and we should do everything humanly possible to protect the interests of our families even after this transaction has been consummated. Thank God you are God fearing and have a family like me too so I can say this meeting is ordained by God Almighty.
This is matter of trust, sincerity and understanding. Attached is the agreement/MOU binding us together, Print it out, Read through it, carefully point out your observation and comment on them if you find any but if it is acceptable by you, endorse your column and next to my signature on each of the pages. Thereafter, fax a copy back to me and keep one to yourself. I expect that you call me as soon as you receive this email if you need more clarification.
Once I get the signed MOU from you, I will immediately forward the application draft and all information you need to know about the deceased and the claim. God be with us.
–
Attorney Collins Ropars
Maxwell & Ropars Associates.
500 Prescott Road, Old Swan,
Liverpool, L13 3DB
England.
Tel: +44 -7024082564
Fax: +44 -7006035114
________________________________________
From: earl@earlofgrey.com
To: c.hropars@msn.com
Subject: RE: Memorandum of Understanding?? SIGNED
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:09:01 +0200
Hi Collins
The document will not let me sign it.
It is locked in word.
Shall i print it out and post it?
What is the address i should post it to?
Thanks, Earl Grey
Head Tea Taster for Twinings
________________________________________
From: collins ropars [mailto:c.hropars@msn.com]
Sent: 22 June 2009 15:21
To: earl@earlofgrey.com
Subject: RE: Memorandum of Understanding?? SIGNED
Yes i locked it. if ok by you, you print out sign and fax back. You can send to me by post but i’ll prefer you fax as it is more faster and convinent.
Thank you.
–
Attorney Collins Ropars
Maxwell & Ropars Associates.
500 Prescott Road, Old Swan,
Liverpool, L13 3DB
England.
Tel: +44 -7024082564
Fax: +44 -7006035114
________________________________________
From: earl@earlofgrey.com
To: c.hropars@msn.com
Subject: RE: Memorandum of Understanding?? SIGNED
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:44:19 +0200
Hi Colllins
I don’t have a fax machine so i will post it.
It will only take a few days.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Earl
________________________________________
From: collins ropars [mailto:c.hropars@msn.com]
Sent: 22 June 2009 19:17
To: earl@earlofgrey.com
Subject: RE: Memorandum of Understanding?? SIGNED
You can send through email attachment also.
—————————————————
From: earl@earlofgrey.com
To: c.hropars@msn.com
Subject: RE: Memorandum of Understanding?? SIGNED
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:28:45 +0200
Hi Collins
I can’t send by attachment
Can you unlock the other document so i can just add a signature and send back by email?
Thanks
Earl Grey
Head tea taster at Tetley.
———————————————–
–
Attorney Collins Ropars
Maxwell & Ropars Associates.
500 Prescott Road, Old Swan,
Liverpool, L13 3DB
England.
Tel: +44 -7024082564
Fax: +44 -7006035114
Mr. Grey, I am not happy with your attitude towards this transaction. Now, i see you are not capable to handle this transaction from your side, You had better get a fax machine and scanner as you will be signing more documents to perfect this transaction.
I have put in all my efforts in this transaction and do not want any setbacks at all. You cannot expect to gulp in 50% of £5m Pounds as Manna from Heaven. You had better buckle up or i have no option than to find another person.
You had better let me know your stand.
–
Attorney Collins Ropars
Maxwell & Ropars Associates.
500 Prescott Road, Old Swan,
Liverpool, L13 3DB
England.
Tel: +44 -7024082564
Fax: +44 -7006035114
Is your twitter to wordpress plugin exposing your password in clear text?
Jun/092
If you are using one of the more popular ones!
Probably Yes!
Maybe you should switch directory browsing off and write some htaccess rules.
WTF? Twittered that your site was down instead of phoning you.
Jun/092
What the fuck is going on when someone twitters that your site is down or has an error?
Only 6 months ago if you had a problem with one of your sites and someone noticed it they would ping you on messanger, email you or phone you.
One of my money sites was down the other day and someone noticed but instead of just shooting me a message on one of my 5 messaging clients or sending me an email or even phoning me they decided to twitter it to me instead.
I havent got time to be messing on twitter all the time so i didnt see it for 2 days.
Looks like twitter is turning people into complete fuckwits without the abilty to react in private.
Everything is an opportunity to put a message out to the 4000 followers that you got by posting crappy links and playing the follow/unfollow game.
Is this the web 3.0 generation?
Hope not, because the internet will suck for a few years if it is.
SEO? Whats that? a 20 second pitch if someone asks you your job
Jun/091
You meet someone with a business and a website and they ask “What do you do?”
When you are new to seo or excited you can get tied up trying to explain many different ways and go into detail trying to make them understand.
Create and reherse a simple pitch.
Q. What do you do?
A. I make it so when you search on google its my websites (or my customers websites) that are the no.1 result.
Q. How do you do that?
A. I am good at seeing what others dont and making the website more popular than the rest.
You can also add your little sales pitch.
“Its a pretty nasty business because it tends to drive the competition out of business when you have made sure their is no room for them on Google”.
Can get some interesting reactions and generally you can get some business or a referral out of it.
Are you the decision maker in your business?
May/093
If you are and your business is not going to plan its probably your fault.
If your business is going well its more than likely you or the decision maker are making the right decisions.
I have been in the web business for around 5 years working for myself, with partners and as a consultant.
The successes and failures we make were down to nothing but good or bad decisions.
My worst failure was investing money into a business where i wasn’t going to be the decision maker.
The decision maker was and is still incompetent so i may as well have thrown that money in the fire.
The recession is helping businesses fail and people are struggling pretty much worldwide but i don’t believe its the recession but more the recession was the tipping point.
If a business was a success before the recession and they are failing now its because the decisions or lack of decisions in a good economic climate had less positive or negative impact now the climate is cold and harder.
The decision you made today to read reddit, digg, slashdot or your chosen time killer may have cost you big.
If you had made the decision not to waste an hour or several in some cases on those sites and taken care of something that you decided to put off till later you could have been in a better financial position.
What decisions have you made today to help your business?
Did you check your 404 logs of your sites to see if you are missing any potential traffic?
Did you decide the best way to help your business was to read loads of regurgitated rubbish on peoples blogs?*
Obviously if you are reading my garbage blog you took that decision 
Did you take some massive action and do something that will create massive results?
Did you sit whining that you haven’t got a coder to help you or a designer to make your sites look nice?
If you work for a company.
Did your bosses make a decision that made you screw your face up like you just smelt the worst fart ever?
And then did you plan what you are going to do when you get home from work to make a positive change on your business and life?
I made the decision to blog because i have more time now and i feel like i have some business and web building experience i can share.
I made the decision to take a one hour break on the beach to clear my head and think about the next move i can take for massive action.
Today was the day i decided to start sending newsletters to some mailing lists i have been building.
Hopefully that decision will help some of the recipients make positive decisions to make more money or get whatever they want out of life.
I always remember that it was Zig Ziglar who said “If you help enough other people get what they want, you’ll get what you want.”
New bill could make your blog a weapon
May/093
Recently i have been locking all my money sites down very tightly.
I now have many ssl certificates, offshore servers, distributed dns and have a competent linux guy locking things down all the time.
I probably have about $3million or more in web property and i am starting to get very paranoid for myself and my users.
Every day i see some new bill or law proposed and they really make my cringe.
Executive Property Search
Mar/090
I was looking for a new place to live and wondered if i could find an executive property search.
It seems that all the real estate sites are terrible.
Please ignore this post about executive property search because i am just testing something.
Thanks for reading my executive property search and goodbye.
Disruptive Seo Services in Andalucia Spain
Mar/092
I moved to spain a few years ago to work on a few projects with some big brand casino`s working out Gibraltar.
There were several reasons for my move and one was to get away from cold england.
The main reason i closed my uk office and moved was because i was working on my own in the UK and it just didnt suit me.
I was always torn between staying a `one man band`, hiring a few people or becoming a big company and decided things were best staying on my own.
Most of my income in the UK was affiliate traffic and i had a few clients but i never really got too many customers because i couldnt handle a lot and never really needed the income.
Fast forward a few years and i find myself in Spain surrounded by a small team of multi lingual seos, developers and content writers.
We have a small but nice office in a very expensive and comfortable complex that has the best ever coffee shop next door.
What to do now?
A team of very good SEO`s and Developers in Spain must mean we can corner the SEO market.
A lot of the businesses out here in Southern Spain have been paying very expensive and very bad seo companys to SEO, Design and host thier site but they are now paying the price of just staying with the same underperforming SEO`s.
We started being disruptive by giving excelent results from traffic and conversions.
One of our very first customers was paying 250 euros a month just for a bad cms and 250 euros a year for hosting.
They were also paying 1200 euros a month for an SEO.
The seo they were paying 1200 a month to was possibly one of the worst i have ever seen and if he did actually decided to do anything on their site he did it badly.
The first thing we did was get rid of the expensive and bad cms to replace it with a static site.
The static site gave us much more control of the content and on page SEO.
We hosted it in a different country to change the way the search engines treat it and we redesigned the site to textbook standards for conversions.
Traffic not only went up to 10x the levels it was at with the old seo but due to a new site built to convert it went from 2 leads a month to as many as 10 a day (each lead can earn potentially net them $10`000).
As stores selling the same products as they did were closing all round spain the company i was doing the SEO work for was having a booming time because we were taking all the traffic.
Guess what happened in the first month of their increase from 2 leads to 300 a month?
Referrals to potential SEO customers!.
Lots and lots of referrals and most of these people were paying thousands for SEO that produced almost nothing.
The question is why were they now trying to get the results they had ignored for as long as 5 years with the same seo person/company?
Recession!
Recession is a glorious time for a skilled seo/conversion company that can deliver what they promise.
A good SEO company can bring the traffic that their competitiors are currently getting and help a company survive a recession and come through it smiling.
I wouldnt say that these SEO companys in Marbella and Spain are resonsible for the failure of companys they do work for because it is purely the responsiblity of the company owner to source the right person.
But the bad are non existant SEO they do will be partly to blame.
When i decided to do disruptive seo services in spain i thought i would have to steal customers away from other companys and be very agressive.
In reality i am having to switch off my phone sometimes just to get some peace and quiet from all the calls for my SEO services.
Have you ever tried to take over a market in a very disruptive way?
Reputation management and cleaning up bad search engine listings
Feb/092
This post is an outline of what i did with regards to one of the people that contacted me for reputation management.
Consider this Case Study 1 of a series of posts and i will keep posting different case studies every few weeks.
Over the last year or so i have had many people contact me to remove bad search engine listing and do some reputation management.
People ask me because they know i am good at it but i like to think they also ask me to remove them because i wont judge them and i just get on with the job in hand.
This is a topic that will get hotter as the social media and Facebook generation grow out of posting their every move on the internet and realise just how dangerous the information they provide is.
Just by scanning some twitter accounts and profiling a few random people you can see a time bomb ticking for them, especially when they link to all their profiles on social network sites.
Case Study 1.
Some of the most interesting reputation management projects i had was when one of the world richest people asked me to clean up the listing he had that detailed his “after work hobbies” and he wanted them to show his business interests and his charity work instead.
When i looked up his name he came impressively high in the top 1000 richest people.
He didn’t contact me personally but i did get to speak to him while i was doing some research part way through the project which was quite exciting.
After several discussions and lots of studying i worked out it was very possible to remove some of the listings and push the rest down the seeps by creating some sites about the positive parts of his life and business.
The first thing we did was created 20 content sites on domains between 10 and 14 years old which we picked up at auction.
We put static highly seo`d html pages on the front of the sites and blogs in folders as well to add lots of content quickly.
With the amount of financial power we had it took 3 full time writers and $40`000 of domains to clear the top 20 of the bad listings and replace them with positive listings.
The top 20 listing took us 11 weeks to clear up due to the power of the domains we bought as well as the quality and mainly quantity of content we were adding every few hours.
Once we had control of the top 20 listing the immediate pressure was off and we had to now start to remove and clean up anything futher down the listings.
The start of the removal was to just contact the people through their emails, messaging clients and through some social networks.
I used as many of my contacts as possible and if they knew the person that owned the site i asked for a favour and got them to contact the site owner for removal.
Many of the people that had written about the “after work activities” had no special feelings about their post and they werent getting much traffic for the keywords anyway so they were happy to delete the posts.
One or two of the lower down listing still looked bad and these were real jerk bloggers or forum owners that considered their readers liked thier integrity so they refused to remove them.
Strategy 1: Push down the listing
Strategy 2: Softly softly approach asking people nicely.
Strategy 3. Offer to advertise on the site in return for the removal of the blog or forum post.
Suddenly the people who refused to remove the posts because of their integrity decided they had very flexible morals and started trying to negotiate on price.
One of the forum owners wanted $3000 to remove a single post from a forum which was just rediculous.
Simple! find a moderator in the forum and offer them $200.
Worked a treat and the forum posts started disappearing very quickly when the cash was flowing.
Most of the results are cleared up and there are just a few blogger blogs now and the odd scraper sites that will just hopefully fade away with time.
Blogger is quite hard to clean bad posts off because there is often no way of contacting the owner and google wont remove them unless they have illegal content.
I could have got rid of all the scraper sites by contacting hosting companies but they rank so low in the listings and with the redirect to ppc that aren’t worth the trouble.
Thankfully we didn’t have to work on Strategy 4 because that’s when things start to get nasty.
You will get to see strategy 4 in Case Study 2 so don’t forget to add the feed to your reader.
Has anyone else ever done any reputation management for yourself or clients and were you successful?