This is one in a series of posts reviewing and looking at how some of the SEO companies which use bulk emails/spam with ‘we can help your terrible site’ type emails really can (and actually mostly can’t!) help your site.
Read some simple explanations of some of the SEO terms used on this post…
This is a bit different to my normal SEO spammers. It’s from a company who make their money selling fake followers on social media and fake reviews.
The email came in via the contact form on this site. It was from an ‘Ann Kling’ (I normally remove last names for privacy reasons but as I’m sure this name is 100% fake I’m leaving it in!) who was using a Gmail account with that name in it. The spam email went:
Good Afternoon,
I’m ,
How are you doing regarding your Facebook Page Reviews?
Facebook reviews improve click-through rates. It’s vital to have customers to click your link, as well as a good collection of positive reviews entices website visitors to just do that.
Check what we are capable of doing for you:
https://it-specialists.shop/facebook-page-reviews/
Regards,
So they can’t even put their name in a the contact form when they send spam. Not exactly a good start!
I replied to the email with the following to see if they’d answer some very basic questions…
Hi,
Please can you tell me how this works? How do you get the reviews? Who writes them?
Please can you tell me more about your company?
Thanks
Well, I never heard back from them… I guess they don’t want to admit as to how their business works.
I also reported the domain/site to both its web host (in Russia) and the company they’d used to register the domain (in Panama, although when they registered the domain they said they were in Cyprus!).
And I’m pleased to say that the hosting company has taken the site offline! The domain was registered on the 19th February 2021 and I was spammed on the 27th. So the site was active for less than two weeks.
I’d call it a great success in getting a really yucky spammer shut down!!!
However, sadly, I suspect they’ll be back up and running on another domain very shortly (if they’re not already).
As part of my investigating this ‘company’, I found that they’ve used a number of domains over the last year or two (all shut down); they also seem to like spamming comments on blog post, guest books and basically anywhere they can spam!
The company seems to keep using the name ‘OneTwo Gmbh’ despite their different locations on the web.
The use of ‘GmbH’ makes it look like they’re in Germany (GbmH is the German business version of Ltd). However, I suspect they’re actually based in India, Pakistan or Russia. (There are a couple of legitimate German companies using very similar names – one makes sports arenas!)
I normally ‘review’ the sites of spammers but as this one is no longer online I won’t bother. However, I’ll just say it was TERRIBLE, including fake addresses (in Germany, the UK and USA) and their ‘team’ photo was stolen from a Russian web developer’s Facebook group.
One interesting thing was that they had the ‘no index’ meta tag set meaning that search engines are asked not to index the site. This was done either because they are incompetent or because they don’t actually want the site to be found as it’s doing rather dodgy things!
As well as selling fake reviews on Facebook, which they spammed me for, it also ‘sold’ packages for buying followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube – all of which are against the terms & conditions of those platforms… It also sold reviews on sites like Google and Amazon.
They also claimed to offer SEO packages and even ‘anti-spam’ email packages (which is somewhat ironic!).
The site claimed they’ve been in business for over 10 years. Sadly, they might well have been, by setting-up sites and moving around between them as they’re shut down…
One of the most common URLs they’ve used in the past was one-two.online, which was registered in late 2020 (in Russia), and is currently not working and is in ‘serverHold’ meaning that they’ve either not paid for it or the domain company has stopped it from working for one reason or another…!
Pretty much all of the comment spam I found from them looks to be from late December 2020 onwards, so it seems they’ve been really busy since then…
I found one site that’s got at least TEN spam comments from these guys on them – on one post using a variety of their different spammy domains!
So this proves that this bunch of spammers are no only dealing in dodgy things like fake reviews and buying followers, but that they’re also very happy to pursue sales by some very dodgy means as well – although that really shouldn’t be very surprising…
Conclusion
Sadly, selling fake followers and reviews is now a big business.
Not surprisingly, the companies who are involved in this business are also happy to use less that legitimate way of advertising their services.
Normally, I say ‘the choice is yours’ as to whether you should deal with the spammers I cover. However, in this case the answer is rather more simple:
HIT THE DELETE BUTTON.