Today I was reading about some SEO tactics, and thinking about buying a better domain for one of my products, Overseer Network Monitor. I found overseer.com parked by a cyber-squatter, so I decided to look up the whois and contact them, seeing if I could work out a deal to buy it from them… I got an auto-response sending me to securedoffers.com, which wanted $19 to ‘connect you with the seller’…

Foolishly, I bought into the scam, and paid the $19 to make a reasonable offer for overseer.com. The Email I got back was demanding $9500 for the site– which is incredibly over-valued. I countered with $1000, and the seller refused to negotiate further. I then found that the overseer.com cyber-squatter was actually the OWNER of securedoffers.com, and therefore simply SCAMMED me out of $19 to Email with him…

When it became acceptable for a business to demand money to let you offer them money is beyond me. I suppose it takes a different sort of person to be a cyber-squatter– why I expected them to be anything more than scammers is beyond me…. I’ve disputed the charge with Paypal, but I highly doubt they’ll do anything… Either way, this blog post, a bad review online, and the Paypal dispute is my way of venting and getting some kind of closure. Even the smartest among us get taken by a scam(such as this one from securedoffers.com) sometimes.