RealFansNow.com – Registered on October 22nd – Just Sold for $5,000

How does that domain sound to you? Real Fans Now? The name was registered on October 22nd, of this year – yes that’s about two weeks ago, and the buyer has already flipped it for $5,000. Doesn’t sound like your typical flip – well it isn’t.

This domain actually sold on Flippa – you can take a look at the listing below:

flippa sale(Click to see full image and stats)

As you can see someone registered the domain and has claimed that in under two weeks they have generated a profit of $3,000. They are even up-front in saying that it would take at $25/day on Google AdWords in order to see this revenue.

This is a domain sale that you’ll probably never hear of. It won’t be reported in DNJournal or found in NameBio but sales like these are happening all the time. Now the question here is how could this all be possible?

In most cases newly registered sites that are claiming huge revenue are a SCAM. The way the scammer gets away with it is by saying that you have to spend $25/day on AdWords. Someone who invests in the site starts using AdWords and after spending $500, do they keep going or do they stop, get scared?

The thing is, the person selling this site is making a very wild claim. They are so good at optimizing AdWords that in under two weeks they made $3,000 in profit! That’s a big deal, if someone can do that they could become a millionaire very very quickly.

However my theory is that this is not what happened. Instead this is a scam that buys the seller time by forcing the buyer to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on AdWords campaigns. If the buyer complains to the seller they can just claim that the buyer isn’t configuring their AdWords campaigns properly, or they might not respond at all. It is sad to see this happen but surprising that someone would think that in under two weeks someone could easily do this.

To keep buyers interested the seller continues to rattle-off sales in the comment section. This bad boy got five bids until someone hit the “Buy it Now” button. That’s right, in two weeks this person bought a domain, sold a story and walked-away with $5,000. This is a sale you won’t hear about, it isn’t reported anywhere and it’s happening every day.

I mean would you really buy a site with these stats? Would you buy this story?

(Click image to see full size)

If any of you are buying developed websites – anywhere – Flippa, eBay, other Domainers, etc. Make sure to verify the stats and look-out for obvious scams. I highly recommend that people use DNWStats – an awesome service run by Andrew from DNW that allows you to actually verify revenue stats.

As more and more Domainers move towards development avoiding scams like these will become increasingly important. Pay attention and use common sense, if it sounds too good to be true it usually is. I’d love to meet the guy who hit the “Buy it Now” button and thought, “Now that was a good investment!”

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton