Freelancer Marketplaces Everywhere!

**benitez17** · March 26th, 2010, 04:04 PM

I would love to own a marketplace for services like eLance because it would allow me to bring in large numbers of service providers to evaluate, I could hire a few without paying anyone else management fees, and of course the fees I could collect on everyone else's work would be nice, so I keep an eye out for these type of sites. Anyway, I came across this one a couple days ago:

http://flippa.com/auctions/88862/Sta...ject-Managment

It has been listed a few times, and the listing before this one was suspended, so I was suspicious, but I asked for an explanation and waited for a response. I got a pretty poor reply, and then I saw that the listing was suspended again, so I just moved on.

I was looking at the listings again today and came across this listing:

http://flippa.com/auctions/89014/PUR...-WITH-FACEBOOK

Some about the description sounded like something I had seen before, so I did a little searching and realized that parts of the description (that are poorly written and the similarities couldn't have been accidental) are almost identical! Also, the seller of the new listing seems to have just joined Flippa today, and he deleted the only 2 comments in the listing, which isn't a good sign. Do you think this new seller just happened to rip off the listing from an auction that was suspended and a seller who has been accused of scamming others in the past and happens to be selling a very similar site, or is it the same person?

I think it's the same person, and he has his poor English grammar to thank for tipping me off. I sent the new seller a PM to see what is going on, so I'll see what he says.

Given that buying websites on Flippa was recently determined to be risk-free, I am shocked to see that something like this could happen.

**benitez17** · March 27th, 2010, 08:22 AM

Update:

These 2 sellers work at the same company, and the seller in the most recent listing claims to be the boss. There are a number of people working at this company that have their own Flippa accounts, though I wasn't able to find out exactly how many there are because I think he realized why I was asking these questions and started backpedaling after a few PMs back and forth.

What do you guys think about this? Should there be a limit on the number of accounts that a business can have? It seems like an obvious loophole, but there's not a lot that can be done about Flippa members teaming up in general.

**Clinton** · March 27th, 2010, 09:28 AM

Seems like a nice little arrangement for shill bidding, helping each other out on auctions or even just creating multiple Flippa IDs - simply claim that it's a company and there's more than one person working there

The two auctions are for STARTUPSFACTORY. COM and PUREOUTSOURCING. COM. I had a look at WHOIS. They tried to make the registrations look different but both sites use the same name servers, same hosting and same C class IP. But there is only one human name mentioned.

Setting a limit on the number of account a business has is difficult to enforce. Scammers who specialise in the sale of Flippa froth can easily work around that. The single player posing as a company to get multiple accounts will move to a new MO where he uses two or three physical addresses (which are never verified) and multiple telephone numbers (which are verified but easily faked).

There isn't really any way around just being ruthless with deleting accounts on discovering a scam.

I don't expect Flippa to provide us with details about why auctions were suspended, but from the above it would appear they are very reluctant to take any serious action even when there are multiple violations by an account.

**benitez17** · March 27th, 2010, 10:38 AM

I really don't have any good solutions for this problem.

Checking the whois listing for auctions is a good idea in general when doing due diligence, but I don't see an easy way for Flippa to check whois records for each listing against all of their past listings and then cross check them against all of their accounts because of the large amount of data, and that doesn't even take privately registered domains into account.