Obviously, you guys already know that I make money online and from my blogs through advertisements. From time to time, I get direct advertisers contacting me about placing banner or text link ads on my blogs with a fee we have agreed on. And just yesterday, I got another email which raised suspicions that it could all just be a scam. It’s from a representative of a certain Jino Agency who claims the ad is for Lacoste. Her name’s Killian Blanchard. Here’s a screenshot of the email:

It made me suspicious because, first off, it’s for our food blog. Why would Lacoste be interested in placing an advertisement on a blog that’s completely unrelated to fashion? I continued on to see what will happen, already wary that it’s another one of those phishing scams. They said they have different ad banner sizes and would like to know the rates we offer for each.

By this time, I already checked their site – www.jinoagency.com.  I’m a web designer so I know that their site was pretty easy to come up with.

The site’s language is in French so I had no idea what the contents were. I was hoping to see a list of accounts or brands they handle, but found none. I was hoping to translate their site to English using Chrome’s integrated translate feature, but it wasn’t an option.

So, I ended up using Yahoo! Babel Fish which worked like a charm. The translation may not be perfect, but it’s obvious that their contents don’t sound like they come from an actual PR or advertising company.

I continued on to send them my rates to see if they would accept it. The thing is, I gave them very high ad monthly rates (scroll down for the screenshot of how much they’re willing to pay for a month!). Surprisingly, they liked my prices. So, they continued on sending me instructions on how to publish the advertisement.

As it turns out, I need to login to their site with the info they provided and then install a plugin on our blog. The only time I installed a plugin was for a reputable third party ad network and I only have it up and running on THIS blog. I’m just not comfortable installing any script or plugin on any of my high traffic blogs, most especially our food blog.

What I did next was to search Google for any post about them. I only found one link, but it was filled with all the necessary information that would conclude it was indeed a scam – Devious Scam Aimed at Bloggers.

The author and a couple of the comment posters on this certain blog post were very suspicious too of this ad placement. Having been very careful with putting malicious scripts on my blogs, I always make sure to check the code of any plug-in I install on my WordPress blogs and I do my research first. This time, I guess it more than paid off. And I know how important it is for me to share this to everyone just in case they got the same email and were hoping to earn a decent amount of money from these scammers.

Apparently, based on the comments, they won’t pay you afterwards. The codes may seem harmless now, but malicious plugins can give access to your WordPress blog or site to unauthorized people. So, you have to be VERY careful with what plugins you install.

Here’s a screenshot of the site they asked me to log into:

And the instructions on how to install the plugin:

Did they contact you too? If yes, please share your experience. And please, be careful. There are a lot of online scammers out there now and they get more creative everytime.

I’ll be posting more about dealing with direct advertisers here next time. Stay tuned!

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UPDATE: A fellow blogger mentioned about Mana Agency, a company one of the comment posters on the blog post I mentioned earlier revealing this as a scam too. Well, look at their website… doesn’t it look so fricking familiar?

It’s almost Christmas eve here in the Philippines and I would like to greet ALL of my visitors and subscribers…

Have a BLESSED NEW YEAR!

Can’t wait to know what’s in store for me in 2010.

Happy Earning in 2010!

I just installed Windows Live Writer and used it to post on my other blog. If you’re a blogger like me, having Windows Live Writer is definitely a MUST, especially when you’re on Blogger.

Anyway, I’ll write more details about that later. I’ll be publishing this post now to see how it will look on this blog.

It makes me sick to see people copying my entries here WITHOUT asking me for permission AND WITHOUT even trying to edit the info to make their posts personalized. But, no, they copy EVERYTHING and simply paste it on their blogs/websites.

This one, though, yeah, they mentioned my blog at the bottom of the post but it wasn’t even a link to my site. And it’s too freaking small you won’t even see it after you’ve read everything on the page.

Here’s a screenshot of the site:

They COPIED and pasted my blog posts about FriendFinder Affiliate to try to get traffic to their site. I guess they can’t write their own guide so they copied mine.

This is the second site that I found that copied my guides EXACTLY. Is it THAT hard to write your OWN posts about making money online?!?! I mean, c’mon. How hard can it be if you really know what you’re talking about? Oh, I guess they don’t. LOLz.

They even copied my post about my PPLinx payment. They were that lame to not even think that people will actually know that the payment proof wasn’t theirs ‘coz it had my blog’s URL all over it. Damn.

I bet they copied the rest of their articles from some other blog or website. Sheesh.

Should I be thankful that they’re bringing traffic to my blog? ‘Coz I’m not happy about this at all. But, now, it’s just funny to see these sites copying my contents. Really. ‘Coz they didn’t even care to change it up even a li’l bit. *sigh*

While I was looking at my live blog traffic from Feedjit, I saw a visitor coming from this website that I never even heard of. So, out of curiosity, I checked out the site. And, voila! Look at what I found:

(Click on the images to zoom in)

They were too lazy to even try to make it look like it wasn’t copied from anywhere. They didn’t even bother to check their spelling or grammar. It was too time-consuming for them, I guess, so they decided to just copy my articles and paste it. Then, they post this disclaimer to try to clear themselves for copying my contents.

This is just plain rude. If you found an interesting or informative blog post or article and you want to use it on your blog, the respectful way to do it is write an introduction THEN post a link to the original poster’s article.

This really irritated me, especially when I saw all those small images/thumbnails of the PTC sites’ logos that I made myself. THEY COPIED ALL OF THEM and saved it like theirs. They didn’t just copy my contents, they even used the images like they were theirs. And they said in the disclaimer that they took SOME materials from my blog. No, damn it, you didn’t take SOME. You took 99% of your contents FROM MY BLOG! Sheesh!

There’s a way to find out if there are copies of your articles or blog posts circulating the web without your knowledge. Google has a tool to do just that so DON’T FREAKING COPY OTHERS’ CONTENTS. BE ORIGINAL!

If you REALLY want to use someone else’s images or contents on your blog or website, please have the DECENCY to ask permission from the owners or original posters FIRST before you even post them on your site. And, PLEASE, credit them properly when you’ve already posted them.

Now, going back to this website, I tried to send them a message through their contact form but it wasn’t working. This was supposed to be my message for them:

It’s okay if you only copied portions of my blog articles/posts but almost all of your contents here were taken from my blog.
Copying and pasting from other blogs is plain rude. And your posting a link at your About Us page is not enough, especially when you didn’t even mention my blog’s name/title.
The respectful way in doing this is to write an introduction and just link them back to the original poster’s contents.
Please remove all the contents here that you copied from my blog. You don’t have the permission to copy and paste it just like you did. And you even copied the table format of my PTC sites list. *sigh*
I’ve worked hard to write the articles on my blog and to copy and paste my contents like you did is SO rude I can’t take it.
I am looking forward to your immediate action regarding this.

I received an error when I tried to send it so I resorted to filing an Abuse Report to 110mb.com, which is actually a FREE web hosting service.

I’ll post an update once I get a reply from them.

*sigh* Pirates!

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UPDATES:
11/27/2009:
5:31am: It seems that the site has been taken down. Earlier, I had an email exchange with 110mb’s CSR. According to them, the abuser agreed to comply and give me credits on his website. You know what he did? He did not edit the posts but he placed a link at the very bottom of every post that they got from me. And the link said CREDITS AND SOURCE with highlights. If you were visiting their site, you wouldn’t even notice that link or you might even simply ignore it. I know I will.

Anyway, after seeing that and realizing that the CSR seemed to be satisfied with what the abuser was telling them, I finally gave up and sent them one last email. I told them that the abuser claims that they want to guide or help people in making money online BUT all their texts came from MY OWN experience that I wrote about on my blog posts here. They are now making people believe that they were the ones who actually had a good eye on which PTC sites are scams, etc. And, I also told the CSR what the main purpose of that site was. It was filled with Google Adsense ads and we’re not supposed to place Adsense on any blog that talks about programs that pay people to click on ads. That’s against their policies. So, I told them that this abuser was only after getting clicks on their Google Adsense ads.

Not sure if it was the abuser who took down the site or it was 110mb. I know this guy will continue doing this so I’ll be keeping an eye on this.

Oh, and if you haven’t noticed, all the little images of PTC sites’ logos are now with my site’s URL. I’ve gotten numerous people asking me how I did that and I simply offered to give them the images since they were kind enough to ask me. So, if you want to use those images elsewhere but don’t know how to edit them, simply leave your request on this post.

11/25/2009:
9:06pm: Whoa. After just a few minutes of sending my Abuse Report to 110mb.com, Paul from customer service replied to me saying that they already forwarded my report to the abuser. I’ll get back to Paul if the abuser doesn’t do anything to fix this. 110mb.com‘s fast customer service is amazing. I hope that the abuser will take action quickly, too.