The Just Searching Six Figure Scam By Samantha Milner

Today’s Post is a guest post by Samantha Milner who has her own internet marketing Blog at: http://www.myeasyonlinepay.com.

The truth about scams is that you never believe that you will be a victim of them and when you are it seems like the worst thing in the world that could possibly happen to you. I was the victim of a major scam during the summer of 2005 and now that I am happy in business I feel like I have hit that time to tell all.

So here is my story about my experience with the Just Search scam that started in August 2005 and led to lots of long term problems with my online business and could have very easily finished me for good….

Here is my Just Search Review

It all started by receiving an email from someone that worked for Just Search Limited when they were based in Cheshire in the United Kingdom. It was just a simple normal email asking me to telephone them which I did because at the time I was in the middle of putting my business on the internet for the first time. I was paying for pay per click (PPC) with Google and was happy as an eBay Powerseller at the time making a lot of money just from eBay itself.

I wanted to transfer my business onto the internet because I felt that eBay was getting too expensive and I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket as people would say.

So when you have this charming sales man on the other end of the telephone promising that his company could very easily get you on the front page of Google within 30 days for a whole range of keywords I was over the moon. Even though I was established online at the time I had no idea what search engine optimization (SEO) actually meant or how it was achieved.

By what the sales guy told me I would receive my money back within 60 days from what I would receive in traffic compared to what I was paying for with pay per click.

Therefore I paid for certain keywords straight away with my credit card and then my friend that wanted to get into the business paid the remainder on his debit card. We paid a full sum including vat of £11.750 for about 10 different keywords that each had about 300 hits a day. Which for SEO would be worth a lot to me.

Then I waited and waited and waited….

Three months went by and they hadn’t done anything at all then they added their branding details to my website and then put a few links on my homepage. From experience now I can tell you that all they actually did for me is give themselves a free backlink and do a few link exchanges.

When I started to complain they told me that I hadn’t been putting in enough effort myself and that I should be doing other things.

This list of other things included every SEO method know to man – so they weren’t doing a lot just collecting your cash and then moving on to the next person. Which is really crazy I couldn’t believe they hadn’t been reported for their actions.

It was at this point that me and my friend noticed a high amount of fraud on our bank accounts, all my websites had been replaced with their payment links and we then had telephone calls from them via a mobile phone threatening us if we took action.

Then a massive amount of my income was taken away from me because my eBay account had been suspended for fraud and severe violations. Then I had a closer look at my account and I could see exactly why. I hadn’t left feedback for a lot of my customers so the dodgy sales guy at Just Search had provided them for me.

Here is what he put:

I found out later that he had passed on my eBay details to someone else for money and they had then sold lots of dvds without actually delivering any at all.

Soon I wasn’t able to open any of my website and all the username and passwords had been changed. A month after this me and my friend had received over £25,000 fraud on the cards that we had used to pay Just Search.

We had it returned to us straight away by our banks but the damage had already been done. My eBay business didn’t exist anymore and I had lost all my websites and we were thousands of pounds out of pocket.

Contact at seized with Just Search because whenever we rang up they just slammed the phone down on us so we were forced to take action through the courts. Firstly I received all my monies back straight away because I had paid with credit card yet my friend wasn’t so lucky.

He was forced to go to court to retrieve all his money plus damages and thankfully it is all over.

You do learn a lesson when things like this happen for example you realise how much trust you put in a team of outsourcers when you give them your username and password. When they originally contacted me alarm bells should have been ringing because if they were that successful why were they wasting their time on the little guy?

Then there was the issue that they weren’t high up in the search engines and if this was their specific job why wasn’t they?

It was because of this incident that I went website flipping for a couple of years because I didn’t want to put myself in that position again and had lost trust in having my own long term websites and didn’t return to my own websites until 2007.

They also told me the names of big companies that had taken on their package but during the court case it turned out that they didn’t even have them on their books.

The other downside is that Just Search never once said sorry for what an appalling job they did of looking after me and my business. They could have very easily of sunk me for good but I was strong enough to stand up to them. Even when they sent me threatening letters from dodgy solicitors.

If you are the victim of fraud you have to stand up for yourself otherwise you too will be a victim. They are worthless people that do not know how to make a living online in an honest way. This is the same reason why I mentor people online for free because I want them to know exactly how to make money so that they won’t fall for the tricks of Just Search and similar fraudsters that plague the internet on a daily basis.

Thanks for reading

Samantha
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