Fraud from the desk of Sebastian Foss

Frequently I receive emails from very angry people complaining about various "SEO tools" and "Money Making Software" delivered from the desk of Sebastian Foss (AdBlaster, Instant Booster, eZine blaster, Blog Blaster, Feed Blaster, Newsgroup Blaster, eBay Cash Machine, Doorway Page Generator, Google Cash Machine, and countless more scams), which got their sites banned or which just didn't work as promised, asking for a refund and demanding compensation. I'm sick of replying to all these emails to set the records straight, so here is the guy's address:

e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd.
Sebastian Foss
Böhler Str.14
Lindlar, 51789, North Rhine-Westphalia
Germany [map]
Phone: +49 2266 478 230
Fax: +49 2266 478 197
email: sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

I suffer from his fraudulent and spammy activities too. I find his URLs in my referrer stats, I receive his email spam from the desk of Sebastian Foss, and people get mad on me because they assume I'm him just because I blog about SEO and Internet marketing.

Here is the last email spam I got from Sebastian Foss¹⁾ at promote-biz.net:Can you afford to lose 300,000 potential customers per year ? How would You like to divert 1000s of fresh, new visitors daily to Your web site or affiliate web site from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others At $0 cost to you...? Never seen before! Brand new for 2007! If you don't try this incredible software, you are just plain off your rocker. ...iNSTANT BOOSTER diverts 1000s of fresh, new visitors daily to Your web site or affiliate web site from Google, Yahoo, MSN and others at $0 cost to you! ...No matter what you are selling or offering -INTSANT BOOSTER will pull in hordes of potential customers to your website - instantly! ...Automatically Get 1000's of other High Ranking web sites eagerly linking to your web site no questions asked. ...your web site will quickly achieve Ultra High Link Popularity on the Major Search Engines ...you'll get 1000's of Highly Targeted visitors to your web site or affiliate web site overnight For full details please read the attached .html fileAnd here's the attached HTML file:<html> <head> <title>Loading page...</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/"> <script><br />url='http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/'; if(document.images) { top.location.replace(url); } else { top.location.href=http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/; } </script><br /></head> <body>Loading <a href=http://www.promote-biz.net/mg/instantbooster/>page</a>... </body> </html>A smart investigator can should be capable to assign this URL on promote-biz.net to e-trinity Internetmarketing Ltd., Sebastian Foss' company in Lindlar, Germany.

If you're sick of spam and scams from the desk of Sebastian Foss too, then turn him in. Last time I looked, sending out email spam is a crime in Germany. In case the spam report form below (courtesy of the german cops) doesn't work, here you go: Police Lindlar, Germany.
SPAM REPORT (yellow background = mandatory)

Your coordinates:

Surname:
Birth name:
First name:
Date of birth:
Place of birth:
Sex: femalemale
Street address:
Zip code:
City:
Phone#:
Mobile phone#:
eMail:

What to report?

Type or source of fraud:
Web site, forum, blog...
Usenet group
Chat room
Mail list
Spam email (UCE)
Other

Provide internet address (URL), IP address, channel, email-ID (email header), and other information useful to track down the issue:

Copy+paste the complete email headerDate:
Time:

Details (mandatory!)

Sebastian Foss sent me this email spam: [copy + paste the text of the email and mention attachments]

Witnesses (if any, provide names and addresses)

Perpetrator and site of crime:

Unknown:
International
Germany
Perp name:
Perp address:

Here's a tiny sample of domains related to or operated by Sebastian Foss, according to Rip Off Report "[one of] the biggest scam artist[s] on the Internet":
10-thousand-dollars.biz 101-website-traffic.com 2click.com auction-machine.com automatedriches.com automatic-mailer.com blog-blast.com blog-blaster.com cashcreation.com clickedcash.com dollarbuddy.biz etrinity.com feed-blast.com free-traffic-handbook.com hit-booster.com hitworkz.com income-builder.com income-machine.com incomeuniversity.com instant-booster.com megapromoter.com megawealthpackage.com minuteprofits.com money-license.com moneybank.com plugin-income.com press-blast.com promote-biz.net promotionpalace.com sebastianfoss.com seo-secret.com submit-it-easy.com ...

It doesn't hurt to link to this post with "Sebastian Foss" in the anchor text ;)

Update: I received a threat from Sebastian Foss, so I've edited this post (look for original text followed by changes). I'm not 100% certain which instance of "Sebastian Foss" sends out the email spam, but all known instances of Sebastian Foss are obviously spammers. More Information on the spammer Sebastian Foss and his clones respectively multiple/virtual personalities.

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Full Disclosure of Paid Links

Following Matt's advice on paid links I've looked at this blog to reveal sneaky commercial links, although nobody really likes this idea.

I'm pretty sure that I never got paid for posting, so there was just the sidebar to check. I found a couple of links leading to articles I wrote with both educational and commercial intent as well. I consider these valuable resources so there's no need to report or nofollow them.

Next in the "What I read" section I didn't find a suitable procedure to report that "Books, tons of books" includes commercial stuff like database manuals and other publications with a clearly commercial message. I paid for all these books ... sigh.

Ok, next the blogroll. Again, all links point to good resources, nothing to report. Under the search box there's a link to Technorati which I can't nofollow because it's put by Technorati's script. Technorati sends me traffic, I use Technorati for research, so probably this link is fine and counts as honest recommendation, although it functions as a traffic deal too.

Checking the "Links and Folks" section I found a not that related link pointing to bikes for sale at OCC. Well, I really like OCC bikes, and this is my personal blog, so why shouldn't I link out to a resource unrelated to search and Web development? Hmmmm ... perhaps I should ask Google for permission to dofollow this somewhat commercial link before I receive a free bike in return.

Next the "Ads by Google" links are fine, because they're put client sided and even the Googlebot executing JavaScript knows that everything in a block of code containing an AdSense publisher code is auto-nofollow'ed by definition.

Both the MBL widget as well as the Twitter badge are put client sided, plus both were free of commercial links, at least last time I looked. End of sidebar, I didn't find serious fodder for a paid link report, could that be true?

Wait ... I missed the header, and luckily there's a big fat paid link:

With this link I pay Google for Blogger's services and hosting, and it is not nofollow'ed. Dammit, I can't nofollow it myself, so here's my paid links spam report:



Ok, seriously I think that Google can discount commercial links because that's how Google's cookie crumbles. And I perfectly understand that Matt asks for a few samples of paid links Google has not yet discovered to fine tune Google's algos. However, I fear that this call for paid-links-spam-reports will result in massive abuse of the form I use to report webspam that really annoys me because it disturbs my search results. I'm happy that it's pretty easy to filter out abusive reports filed to damage a competitor's rankings marked with "paidlinks" once Matt's team has collected enough examples.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google paid links spam reports

Update: Read Rae Hoffman's full disclosure too!

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