A scam to steal your Adsense income

**Clinton** · May 22nd, 2012, 11:02 AM

Flippa's drawing attention to a recent video posted on the weekend by a siteflipper exposing how some sellers of sites can continue to get a share of the buyer's Adsense income long after the site has been sold.

Actually, this scam has been around for a while and was covered first, I believe, in 2010 here followed later that year by a WF thread. This is how it works:

The seller installs a plugin (All in one Adsense and YPN) that handles Adsense revenue sharing prior to sale. This is, in itself, not suspicious. Many blogs allow guest posters and others to share the Adsense earning and that acts as an incentive for people to write content. Hubpages, DigitalPoint and others do it as well. So he could have been using a rev share model on his site prior to selling. However, what happens with the scam is that on transfering the site to you the seller sets his share of the Adsense revenue to zero. Unknown to you there are other parts of the php code that override this setting and continue to siphon off a share of your earnings. You continue to run the site completely oblivious to the fact that a percentage of all your future earnings is going to the seller.

I suppose this is a nice way for sellers to build what all those guru-followers like to drool about - passive income.

There are a lot of sharks around who have found far too many ways of scamming newbies (and a lot of vested interests driving newbies to jump into site buying). It's a sad state of affairs and not at all how the market used to be when I started buying sites

**Dreemer** · July 3rd, 2012, 2:22 PM

That's beyond incredible, I'd consider myself pretty savvy about domaining but that would have flew under my radar. The closest comparable issue I have come across is when you want to sell and the buyer asks can his adsense code/id be used on your site for a few days prior to completion, to "validate earnings". No, was my immediate response and frankly it wasn't even the most unreasonable request. However it occurred to me that if the buyer had no intention to complete, and was doing this on 20 or 30 succesful sites at a time, he could potentially make a tidy little second income.

**Brassneck** · July 3rd, 2012, 5:18 PM

I once used a Wordpress theme which kept overwriting my adsense code. It took ages to work out why I wasn't getting as many views /clicks in my adsense stats as I was expecting from other traffic stats. All part of the learning experience.

Stephen.

**Kay** · July 4th, 2012, 3:04 AM

I once used a Wordpress theme which kept overwriting my adsense code. It took ages to work out why I wasn't getting as many views /clicks in my adsense stats as I was expecting from other traffic stats.

This is interesting. Can you please expand on the story, especially for the non-techies (like me) who'd like to know more? Maybe it's easiest if I ask you a few questions.

Did you buy the theme or was it free?

Was the theme faulty or do you think it was a deliberate act by the person who developed the theme?

How did you discover that the theme was overwriting your AS code?

Assuming you're still using WP themes, how do you check that this situation won't happen again before you implement the theme?

Any advice please for others who use WP themes so we don't also run into the same problem as you had?

Thanks in advance.

**ChrisGuthrie** · July 17th, 2012, 12:30 PM

Beyond looking for this plugin, wouldn't this be something that you could notice by tracking your page views per month along with the number of ad impressions? I suppose if they made the share low enough you might not pick it up though.

**Clinton** · July 17th, 2012, 12:39 PM

That's true. I suppose owners of smaller sites don't check their Adsense stats and don't track figures in that level of detail. This is the kind of scam that hits you in the face when you discover the subterfuge, but not something most webmasters are likely to notice in the normal monitoring of their accounts. Nice to see you, Chris.

**ChrisGuthrie** · July 17th, 2012, 12:46 PM

Yah it's certainly good to know though because that means it's probably worth investigating any types of new plugins that allow easy insertion of Adsense. Just simply checking the code for a 16 digit pub ID via the plugin files seems like a quick fix for this. If you see another pub ID in the code (and you're not a coder) then that can at least signal some potential concerns or warrant installation of a new ad management plugin.