There appears to be a scam, well, several of them because I have seen this before, where you can buy your friends. The facebook like, when it came out a few years ago was often prized, it is a measure of how popular your site is. For a small regional charity with around 250 visits a month, having 30-50 likes is important as this helps to propagate your site among other local people.
However don’t get too focused on it. I keep seeing mails like this one below.
Contact Us
On: Apr 19, 2016 @ 11:23 PM
IP: 45.40.34.110
- Name: Donna
- Contact Number: http://nft.lol/7uzt
- Email Address: wifjgjglyx@gmail.com
- I wish to contact you about:
- Your message: Did you just create your new Facebook page? Do you want your page to look a little more “established”? I found a service that can help you with that. They can send organic and 100% real likes and followers to your social pages and you can try before you buy with their free trial. Their service is completely safe and they send all likes to your page naturally and over time so nobody will suspect that you bought them. Try their service for free here: http://janluetzzler.de/3vm2
This is about paying for Facebook likes. You have no idea where they have come from. “Donna’s” email has come from Buffalo in the USA. Donna could be anyone, and not necessarily in the USA.
Promises of more visitors
I have seen other scam emails with western sounding names that all originate from India. There is a Donna there too, and a Samantha. These claim you are not getting enough visitors and you could get more. Of course we would all like more visitors, however the person sending you the solicitation has no way of knowing how many visitors you have, and whether that number is very low or OK.
However they will gladly take payment to inflate the number of visitors you get. but you will not get any more business, referrals, clients. Many of the new visitors will be computers inflating the visits to your site, so not even real people.
So do be aware that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
SEO for £155 per month
I think I may have documented this elsewhere, but one I did find out about worked like this: The “service provider” was based in London but used a service in India to send out spam mails to you via your website. These always contain the same text and a reference to a page on your website (and therefore automated). They claim to be a 3rd party who knows someone that could get your website on page one of Google. (All of my sites are on page one of Google, if you are not let me know.) The way they claim to do this is through SEO optimisation. This is a legitimate way of doing it. So you reply to “Donna” in India, she/he forwards the mail to someone in London, they contact you with an offer of SEO optimisation at £155 per month. Putting that into perspective for a regional charity in my hosting, most are paying £4/ month for their hosting and are already on page 1 of Google.
If any of you are curious about these spam offers, do forward them to me and I will try to unravel them for you. Don’t however get caught out. I am sure some of the offers are genuine, but most are not.