I would assume everyone reading this has at some point wished they had access to their competitors traffic and earnings stats. There are many reasons to want to know this – just this week I wanted to see the traffic a site in position 1 in Google was getting, so I could decide whether I wanted to invest time and money in overtaking him. I knew roughly that it would cost me £2000 to take his first place position from him and I needed to know if it was worth doing.

This method takes some planning and a little work, but the beauty of it is you only need to do most of this once, then you can repeatedly use the method over and over with only 5 minutes work each time.

This method does involve some lying and bending the truth, but if its good for the people running our country then I have no problems doing it too…

Of course if you email from your own business email address and ask for your competitors stats then he is going to tell you to go away (or something to those words!).

So firstly we need to set ourselves up as a 3rd party. I like to pretend to be a website broker, but a solicitor or marketing company works great also. You can take shortcuts, but every shortcut you take increases the chance of the plan failing. Bear in mind my point above in that you only need to do the hard work once, so in my opinion it is worth doing properly.

Firstly you should set up a quick website like this one. Use domain privacy! If you don’t then you are doomed to failure from the start. Moniker and Godaddy both offer domain privacy services. Once your website looks official, you need to create email addresses/phone numbers. I assume you know how to set up an email address at your domain, so lets look at phone numbers. Its extremely easy to set up a landline phone number that redirects to you via Skype, or you can use a company like Mail Boxes Etc to field incoming calls. Don’t just list a mobile phone number – it won’t look professional enough and will give the game away.

Don’t worry about the address – you will need to list one but you won’t need to receive anything in the post so you can use a made up one if you like.

Once this is done its time to make first contact with our victims. The trick here is make the victim think a large payday is around the corner. Its no secret why scams like the “you’ve won 65 millions” emails keep circulating – as soon as people see £ signs all rational thinking goes out of the window. I like to open with something like this (italics are my notes):

Hello,

My name is Sarah Jones (female names get a higher response rate!) and I work for fake company. We are currently looking to buy sites in your niche on behalf of one of the top 5 worldwide sportswear companies (Make them think you are acting on behalf of a major company, we need to get them thinking “big payday”).

I have been looking at your site today and I see you are ranking top 5 in Google for Blue Widgets (this should be a genuine thing they rank for, so they know it is a human writing an email and not spam). I also loved your article on Green Widgets – this is perfectly aligned with a new product launch our client intends to carry out this summer. (again, write about something on their site so they think you have spent time examining it.)

Would you be interested in selling whatever.com? We have already acquired several static sites in your niche but we are particularly interested in a blog such as yours. (Again, get them thinking there is big money in this).

If this is something you would like to consider, we would need a few preliminary statistics from you – primarily your number of uniques/pageviews and earnings figures. At this stage we would only require stats from the last month – we can then show them to our client and if they are happy we can sign NDA’s, reveal our clients identity and begin negotiations. My direct office line is listed below if you wish to speak to me regarding this.

Regards,

fake name
fake website
fake phone number

In reality, if I am considering entering a niche all I need is the last months stats. They will be happy to send these as they think it is just the beginnings of negotations. Unless the niche is Christmas decorations or Fireworks 1 months stats are more than enough! Don’t get greedy – the more you ask for, the more likely you will be uncovered. Of course once they give you something they can’t take it back – feel free to keep asking for more and more information in further emails until you have everything you require.

Heres some stats I picked up from a site ranking in number 1 for a keyword I am about to compete for. I’ve had this blog post written since last Wednesday, I was just waiting on these numbers coming in to publish it. I will always try and illustrate my posts with real life examples, or at least as close as I can get.

So now I have a good clear view of what the number 1 ranking site is getting in traffic. I also have full access to the exact traffic from all of his keywords. This is extremely important – I can see he got 200 visitors on Saturday but if I intend to compete largely on one keyword its useless to me if 180 of those came from long tail searches. In this site 85% of traffic is coming from a single phrase – which is absolutely perfect for my purpose. I’ve just shown the last weeks traffic above since his traffic has been consistent for the last month anyway.

Now lets take a look at a sample of the earnings: (click image to enlarge)

Again I’ve just taken a pic of a small selection to show as an example. This site is making on average $100 a day in yearly subscriptions. It takes in $36,500 a year in income – this is almost all profit since there is no physical product being shipped.

Even worst case if I outrank him on his main keyword only, 85% of his traffic and earnings is going to diverted straight to my bank account – over $30,000 per year.

I was extremely surprised at how much he was earning. He is converting traffic at a much higher rate than I thought he could.

There would have been longer ways to test this – you can use an Adwords campaign to test conversion rates, and you can use Adwords Estimator, Compete or Semrush to estimate traffic. But these are all only estimates – absolutely nothing beats factual data direct from the source.

With all the information I have to hand now, I realise if I buy the exact match domain from Sedo for £1000 and spend £2000 (estimate) on backlinks and content I am going to create a cash cow that takes 5 minutes work per week and gives me thousands of dollars a month in pure profit.

I liken this plan to looking at second hand cars – you will go see many, but a lot of them will have something wrong with them. Some sites might have their traffic spread across too many keywords, some might not be earning in the range you thought, or some might simply have poor traffic in comparison to what you anticipated. But the beauty is that once you are set up to extract information in this manner, you can send dozens of information requests extremely quickly – you only need to get one goldmine like I have shown above to make this worthwhile.

One final tip – I would concentrate on niches where you either already own an exact match domain, or you know that there is one available for sale. In this economy pretty much every domain that is parked is for sale – if there is no site on the .net, .org, .com or .co.uk you are good to go

I hope some of the people reading this can put it to good use. What do you think? Acceptable? Unethical? Good idea? Or am I going to hell?

Groupola.com, the bulk buying discount website, created a publicity stunt this week offering iPhone4’s for £99 – more than £400 off the retail price.

This was the message they were sending out:

The ultimate Groupola summer special: £99 instead of £499 for a sim-free iPhone4 handset

To secure an iPhone 4 for you click on this link on the 2 July
REMEMBER This link will only activate on the 2 July 2010 at 9.30am.
The offer is subject to stock availability and is likely to go very fast. Make sure you are one of the first people to visit Groupola.com this Friday.

With iPhone4’s constantly sold out, and in massive demand, there is simply no group discount to be had. Any website running an offer like this is swallowing a £400 loss on each phone. Groupola have refused to answer questions on how many phones they actually had for sale, so how much it cost them to run this publicity stunt is unknown.

The only way you could get the link to visit when the phones went on sale was to subscribe to their email list. I am assuming this would have generated a massive amount of email signups.

When the deal opened this morning, their website immediately crashed. You are going to need an extremely good server setup to send an email to hundreds of thousands of people at one time, basically telling them “Visit this link RIGHT NOW or you will miss out on getting the hottest phone ever for 20% of its real value” and be able to keep the site live.

The bad feedback has already started. There are hundreds of negative comments on the official Facebook page of Groupola:

Ammarah Ahmad Honestly Groupola.
I’ve been trying since 9.29am.
And as with everyone else, still no luck.
How about you ensure that this deal is actually available instead of advertising your fake ass scams?

Tom Philpotts @Groupola you should have made sure that your servers were able to cope. That was a massive error on your part, now you have many unhappy people who will not use your site. I think just by giving the people the chance that would have been satisfied with that.

Eddie Milner https://secure.consumerdirect.gov.uk/reportascam.aspx

Charlie ‘Dave’ Stevens I can’t complain to consumer direct, as the groupola website won’t load to get their address

Pasquale Biscardi shame on you ! still not saying how many iphones they had…. they need more time to make it up……

Debbie Miller So now they claim they have sold out. yeah right. never had them in the first place.

Matt Game Wasted our time, thanks a lot.

Maggie Bruce GROUPOLA! PLEASE PROVIDE A WORKING UNSUBSCRIBE LINK NOW _ I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU IN THE FUTURE AT ALL

As I write this, its only 10.30am UK time, and the above are just a tiny selection of the negative comments left on the Facebook page.

The deal is certainly picking up some good backlinks though. The Guardian ran the “story” here, much to the annoyance of their readers, who have left comments such as:

Jameswales There are already so many scammy “win an iPhone/iPad” competitions out there. Why does the Guardian believe this one is worthy of a news story. You should be ashamed to be running this.

Chrisbeach Lost a lot of respect for the Guardian’s Money section after reading this “article”

Fifeman58 How to get a free ad in the Guardian

1. Buy an iPhone for £499
2. Advertise it for £99
3. Get free publicity in the Guardian and a slew of email subscribers – total cost £400.

I thought I had stumbled onto the Daily Express or Daily Mail site for a nanosecond!

Hiphoppopotamus Holy fucking shit. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

It’s like one of those flashing ‘you are our 1 millionth customer – click for a free laptop!’ banner ads, only in credulous newspaper item form.

I’ll make 2 iPhones (for that is probably what they mean by ‘limited’) available for £99 if it buys me an article on a formerly respected national newspaper’s website.

I’d be interested in knowing exactly how many phones they had available at the price. But that’s something that an actual fucking journalist would try to find out, isn’t it?

I’m done with this toilet of a website. Hippo out.

Whoever it was in the Groupola team that managed to get that fluff piece article published in The Guardian certainly deserves a pay rise I don’t think its unreasonable to describe it as nothing more than a glorified advert. It certainly didn’t go down well with The Guardian readers, that’s for sure.

RealBusiness.co.uk have also reported on this, with an article titled Groupola: iPhone deal backfires. From their article:

Groupola’s website has crashed under the strain of web traffic, and rumours are circulating on Twitter that the whole deal may have been a con.

While we’re not suggesting this is the case, Groupola and Mark Pearson are certainly now feeling the wrath of the Twittersphere.

Here’s a representative sample of comments on Groupola:

“You shouldn’t run these deals if you can’t hack it!” - @iamsimonallen

“Spoke to @groupola over the phone, seems all the iphones have been sold. Surprising as no one can get through” – @Dean_Malik

“Everybody knows it was a CON. Watch your followers DWINDLE. CHEATS.” – @Gaspodesm8

“After today’s email harvesting scam, I pledge to cancel my @groupola membership & unsub.” - lee_baines

Update: Groupola have now released a statement:

Groupola is currently experiencing a number of website issues which means that it appears down to a high number of users. This is because of the sheer volume of people that are trying to access the website to take advantage of the iPhone4 deal.

Between 9 and 9.30am this morning more than five million people have attempted to log on to the site, far more than was anticipated. We can confirm that a number of people have already bought iPhones for £99. We are working hard to get the site back to its optimum and the iPhone4 deal will continue to run until stocks run out.

I find it hard to believe that the stocks have not already ran out, but they don’t want to stop sending traffic to their site I am sure.

So when the dust settles, was this all worth it for Groupola? They’ve got some great backlinks and a massively inflated email subscriber list, but on the other hand they have a temporarily non-loading site, a lot of annoyed customers, and their own Facebook page currently looks like a disaster.

Is the statement “no such thing as bad publicity” no longer true in the age of Twitter, Facebook and blogs? Or do these things in fact make it even more correct?

It’s Official! Site Speed is another SEO Ranking Factor!

It has happened, the speed of your website will have a direct impact on the ranking of your sites (maybe now is a good time to put some money aside for a redesign). It’s true, Google have now announced on their Webmaster Blog that the speed of your site will have an effect on your overall rankings in Google.

Now it appears that Google could be working against some large websites, especially those that have “heavy back ends” and require time to load pages. The smallest business can now make a bit of a comeback against the Brand Update (Vince) with potentially less complicated websites that load quickly.

Of course it makes absolute sense for this to become an SEO factor; people like to sift through sites that work with them, not against them. If you have certain fluidity about your site that allows customers to pass from page to page and easily through a transaction process, customers will be more likely to convert. However if your site runs slowly and it takes minutes for someone to complete a transaction or find a product that they want to read about or potentially buy, they may be put off or get bored with the wait!

Google works for the searcher and therefore the client, not for the websites that it displays. So this is just another update for the people that use Google to find products that they want. By removing or penalising the websites that take time to load then Google is doing them a favour by eliminating the sites that take up the user’s time.

There are a number of ways that this can easily be fixed though, and one simple way is putting more money into your server or hosting business. If you increase the speed of your server then your sites performance will improve as well. This can unfortunately be quite expensive so you need to look at ways of tidying up your website first. Things like Flash and image based websites need to cut down a little more to the basics and indulge in a more simplistic way of working, yet still keeping the attractiveness and beauty of their website design.

Now the overall weight that Site Speed actually has on SEO rankings may not really be all that much, and in all honesty compared with other factors like Link Saturation and on site content, Site Speed will be one of the lower ranking factors. Although this does give more weight to those sites that have been designed to help people convert and to save them time, so the general user should be happy that this has happened!

Marcus is an avid Travel SEO blogger working for a Safari holidays Tour operator, and enjoys sharing his knowledge around the world.

A while back, Patrick Gavin announced that he had bought the domainsearchengineoptimization.net and was going to rank it 1st place in Google for search engine optimization within a year.  He picked up a lot of publicity from the fact that he paid $62,500 for the domain.

At the time I made the comment on SEO Book:

The only way you could rank for that term quickly would be to take on tonnes of clients and use footer links in all of their sites, massive nepotistic linking or massive link buying. I don’t see him taking on seo clients, and option 2 & 3 are pretty much ruled out due to the fact he’s making a public spectacle of the attempt to rank.
…
The only chance I give him is if he is planning to 301 his personal site to the new one, since it already ranks first page.

It seems he went the route of  the only chance of success I was giving him, by 301′ing PatrickGavin.com to SearchEngineOptimization.net. This of course lead to his original site dropping out of the results completely (it was originally ranking 7th).

Publicly announcing you are going to rank first for that term, then attempting to do it by 301′ing an existing established site into a $60k domain was always filled with danger.  He was setting his stall out for Google to make an example of him, and it looks like they done it as he has been forced to undo the 301 due to a complete lack of rankings.  Now his site simply says

SearchEngineOptimization.net has gone offline. We will be back soon!

Was anyone expecting much Google love to the man publicly announcing his plans with this, given that he built, ran and sold the largest public text link sales network?

Matt Cutts divulges yet more “Information”, this time about 301’s!

Well, well, well, you could never guess who has appeared back on the scene with yet more information to help indulge us with. That’s right; Mr Cutts (also called many other names, most not repeatable on this Blog) has come back to tell us all that we are doing something wrong….. Again!

According to the Spam specialist at Google’s headquarters there are several problems with using 301 redirects. Basically he has said that the excessive use of 301 redirects will result in the loss of Pagerank on your site. All of this coming from the Search Engine who announced a few months ago that Pagerank would soon be abolished. There was a panic towards the end of last year about how Pagerank would soon be removed from Google’s toolbar to help prevent spamming and redirecting sites. This clearly has not happened and Mr Cutts is back to telling us information that has no merit.

All of us use 301 redirects and in most cases big web-sites use them to absolute excess. All of these sites that use 301’s still rank very high in the SERPS and also retain their Pagerank. What are we going to do with the stuff that Mr Cutts throws at us, most people throw his comments in the trash, but what if what he is saying is a warning?

There is of course the off chance that MC (Matt Cutts) is sending a gentle warning to those that are trying to sculpt Pagerank. His argument is that your website should be built properly in the first place so 301’s would not be necessary (a bit harsh for small business owners). Everyday we find something that we need to change on our sites, or want to edit, and what if a 301 is what we need. The redirects need to be used by travel agents or hotels, if a hotel is no longer on offer you don’t want people turning up at a 404 page, you want to send them to another more relevant one.

Now I don’t know about you but I think Mr Cutts needs to think about this all a little more.

Bio:

Marcus Travels the world but is very much stuck in the Blogging and SEO world, Australian holidays are a great passion of his, along with Travel blogging.

Reading the background to this, I am amazed and surprised how far this went – and how much money it cost. So I am blogging about it here to hopefully do my part to raise awareness of it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The scumbag Jason Gambert tried to register “SEO” as a trademark, with the intention of holding legitimate companies to ransom over their use of it.

Admittedly I am British and do not know the ins and outs of USA law, but it seems disgraceful that someone can try and register what is obviously a generic word or phrase, then try and extort money from businesses to use it.

Luckily for everyone else in the SEO industry, one brave lady called Rhea Drysdale decided to fight him in court.  If you are not aware of Rhea, she runs Outspoken Media, an internet marketing company.

Thankfully the fight has now ended with Rhea the victor, but leaving her with $17,000 of legal bills to pay.  You can read the full story (and maybe consider donating a few bucks towards those costs) over at her blog.

Why Visitors Come First in SEO

SEO isn’t a blinkered process. Or at least it certainly shouldn’t be. There’s no textbook answer for every problem. You can’t just optimise a site based on your assumed words and phrases either. A website is there to appeal to targeted visitors; therefore, it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that you first have to target those visitors.

As a website owner or a search engine marketer you sometimes have to bow to a higher power. In any instance, the highest possible power is always your next potential customer. Therefore there are a number of things that you have to ask yourself when it comes to optimising a site; these include:

What are my visitors actually searching for?

It’s all well and good having your own specialist terms to describe your business, but if searchers have something else in mind, you’ll find yourself barking up the wrong tree. In SEO terms, that means a distinct lack of traffic, regardless of decent rankings.

For this reason, doing in-depth keyword research from the outset is a must. If your jargon isn’t going to pick up traffic, then don’t use it (or at least avoid optimising for it). Make it easy for your visitors to find you, even if that does mean going against your gut instinct.

What do my visitors actually want to see?

The written language is subjective. One person’s Shakespearian masterpiece is another’s confusing nonsense. Not all your visitors will be as knowledgeable as you are about the products and services you offer. By using phrases they don’t understand, you could be alienating them from the outset.

Therefore you need to write in a manner that can be universally understood. Don’t complicate your language or structure for the sake of it. If complicated terms are necessary, then provide straightforward explanations nearby. Content is there to provide search engines with context and visitors with comfort. People need to be reassured online that you can be trusted. To do this they need clear information and straightforward instructions – ‘Click here to buy’.

How often should I be using keywords?

Keywords are the poisoned chalice of SEO. In the past, rankings were almost entirely decided by a high keyword density. Not anymore. Search engines can gauge the context of a page from just a few keywords and synonyms. By going overboard you will disrupt the flow of your content, making it difficult for visitors to understand.

When writing content for a website, your primary objective is to make it both readable and emotive for visitors. Remove the shackles of SEO momentarily and write naturally with just a cautionary eye on your keywords. The frequency with which you use these terms might just be a few percent, just get one in early and allow the others to slip in where needed on each page.

How can I get visitors to convert?

A call to action is a valuable part of any page. It provides a clear instruction for visitors to follow, should they wish to contact you or make a purchase. The clearer this is, the better your chances of converting. Sometimes this is done through a simple ‘Call this number for more information’ or ‘click here to buy’; on other occasions you can use text links to guide them through your site to the money pages.

Anchored text links are perfect for SEO. They give more context to the page and also show the visitor what to expect. If you want people to visit your money pages, you have to make it as clear and simple as possible. Don’t populate your page with confusing or contradictory links. Just use them where needed and ensure that they are in-keeping with the rest of the page, particularly when used in the body copy itself.

What more can I do to optimise?

Search engine optimisation doesn’t have a cut-off point. There is never going to be a stage where there is no work left to be done. Even if a page is converting, it can always do better. Keywords need to be regularly researched to ensure that the site is in line with current search trends. Content can always be refreshed to make it more user-friendly and search engine friendly. If some pages didn’t have your full attention at the outset, revisit them and make improvements.

What more can I do for my visitors?

Well, even if your site appears to be complete, there can still be small issues that could be deterring visitors. Split testing is a good way to highlight any such flaws. This simple process diverts half your traffic to one version of a page and the other half to a revised option. Using analytics you can then see which version converted better. This way you can test changes without ever having to entirely restructure your site; therefore you won’t be affecting usability for your visitors.

Ultimately, SEO is about improving search engine performance. But this should never be done to the detriment of usability. Visitors are the lifeblood for any site. Ignoring them in the pursuit for rankings would be self-defeating. Conversions outweigh rankings every time, but you do need visibility.

Therefore you have to follow SEO best practices to get yourself positioned on the search engines. But make sure that the site has plenty to offer when visitors do find you. Be open to change and don’t be afraid to test, even if everything seems fine. It’s a continuous process of refinement and improvement, so don’t be perturbed if things change at a glacial pace.

Author Bio

Steve Logan is a Copywriter for leading Hampshire SEO Company Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert SEO services, PPC management and of course website copywriting services.

In the world of SEO we all know that Link building is the key feature in getting trust and increasing positions in Google.  Using the same anchor text shows to Google that the links we have built to a page require a certain level of power to past through this term and combined with the relevance of text on this page.  So now that we already know that this is the best form of practice to gain links to a page, is there another way that we can build links to this page but keep on informing Google that a keyword we want to target can be used in different ways. 

This may sound a little confusing at the moment, so allow me to clear it all up for you.  Many people (If that’s what you can call SEO’s) believe that varying anchor text like “France holidays, Holidays in France, Holidays to France” all represent the same term.  However when you search for these terms you will more than likely find your site ranking in different positions.  So how can these terms all mean the same thing if where you appear in Google for each of these terms varies?  In truth the answer is relatively simple; the competition for each of these terms is much stronger and more aggressive for select search terms. 

At this point in time however, we have not truly established if there is a difference between terms like these (only that some sites go after others more aggressively).  In essence they do mean the same thing, so Google must be able to associate them with each other.  Several terms with fillers like “in, on, to” do not really mean anything unless they are connected to other text, and when used with other text, most of the time mean the same thing.  Google however is very good at spotting Spam (some believe not) and can track anchor text in Links.  If a pattern starts to occur, sometimes our websites can be punished for this, so using varied anchors could show Google that your page is generating more natural back links.   

When SEO’s Link build they concentrate time and power on one term, this could in time become a mistake.  Links like these are very easy to track, if they are all the same they are usually being created by the same person (although this may not apply to Brand names, but that is a different matter).  Using different terms suggests that others could be linking to your website (just as many people would normally link to your site using the standard URL format). 

Well I guess this one is a little less dramatic than having our Google.co.uk search results forced into American spellings. (Hobo Web post on that here, Online Sales rant here and our post on when they rolled it back).

We decided to list our site on business.com (listing page here). Seems they have ever so helpfully decided to change our listing title from optimiSation to optimiZation – even although the correct version is in our url.

We are a UK Company, we offer optimisation, not optimization. I don’t think its fair for someone else to change the spelling for us.

Maybe its just an oversight. If someone from business.com sees this and wants to clarify whether this is policy or not, I will be happy to update with their thoughts.

As I am sure a lot of you will know, a lot of the lower end link building market is dominated by Indian webmasters.  Last week Paypal started sending this email to people who had sent money to Indian webmasters  marked as “personal payment” or “gift”.

Your payment of $XX.XX has been returned to you. If you sent the payment with a bank account, the funds will be returned to your PayPal balance. If you paid with a credit card, the amount will be credited back to your card.

We returned the payment to you because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may resend the payment to the seller by following these steps on the PayPal website: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment, such as a gift to a friend or family member, then we request that you find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,

PayPal

The reason for this is simple – if you send someone a “gift” through Paypal, there is no fees for the receiver. If you send a payment for goods or services, Paypal takes a small fee – that’s obviously how they make their money.

Up till now you could of course send payments for goods or services as a “gift”, allowing the the seller to receive their money without paying the rightful fee. Of course this involves a certain amount of trust – you can’t send $100 as a gift then do a chargeback because the seller never sent you something – the money was a gift after all.

It seems hundreds/thousands of Indian webmasters have taken this too far and ruined it for everyone. Paypal have had enough and brought in a blanket ban, no more gift payments to or from an Indian registered Paypal account.

Its not hard to see why. There is no realistic way that any Delhi account holder can say that $1000 that came from 5 different uk seo companies were all gifts and not payments for services

One Indian news website said:

Millions of Indian Freelancers, who rely on online money-transfer service, PayPal, has urged the government and media to step in and take up their issue at the highest level. Freelancers such as Web Developers, Web Designers, Coders, Writers and SEOs are worst-affected.

The freelancers are outraged that PayPal is causing them high inconvenience and loss of money because of this unilateral decision to stop all personal/gift payments to and from India without any notice.

This statement is bordering on ridiculous.  How can they say in the first paragraph that all the people affected are web designers and seo’s, then in the 2nd paragraph say that they are “outraged” that they can’t continue to steal Paypals fees by sending the funds as gifts?  A bit cheeky to complain about “loss of money” when they have been getting away with defrauding Paypal for so long…

Feel free to leave your feedback, positive or negative, in the comments.