Fun letter

I know someone that got a hand-written letter in blue ink that says:

Dear (name)
My name is David, my wife is Jennifer. We would like to buy your house at (address). Please call me @ 408-772-0507.

Sincerely,
David Jan

My friend thought this was strange and did a Google search for 408-772-0507 and came across this page on David Jan. Several other people report getting similar notes. They speculate that it’s a property flipper looking for cheap houses without having to compete against other house buyers, because 4-5 other people mention that they’ve gotten these hand-written letters as well.

One difference is that the other earlier letter refers to “my assistant Jennifer” instead of “my wife Jennifer.” Did David Jan marry his assistant? Or maybe his wife is his assistant?

I like that Google can help with stuff like this. Someone gets a handwritten letter in the mail that sounds like a personal offer, but a quick search uncovers that this David Jan fellow has probably sent a bunch of these letters.

105 Responses to Fun letter (Leave a comment)

  1. heh your blog is already in the index for the search… minty fresh!

  2. Matt,

    Does that mean that Google WebSpam Team consider David’s & Miss/Mrs Jennifer letters as spam which should be reported to GOOG ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. I guess he changed from writing “assistant” to “wife” because it looks like a family looking for a new home rather than some property shark.

    I don’t know if this is spam. At least it was delivered to his home, so it’s more like a contextual ad ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Was it really handwritten or just that font that looks like it is hand written? ie. did you do the lick test (lick your finger and see if it smudges)?

    Chip-

  5. Unfortunately, this is actually causing us a nightmare. A company out of Jamaica has gotten hold of a clients 800 number and is calling people across the country with this number on caller ID. When I looked on Google I found that others are also looking for this number – which is causing us a headache ๐Ÿ™

    Hey Matt, I have a question that’s bugging me, and I’ve asked on Google Groups but not getting any real answers that are helpful. Any suggestions on other places I can ask questions regarding multiple websites competing for the same keyword and traffic ranking consecutively? I have the opportunity to buy 3 competitor websites all ranking with mine 1-4 – I really need to know how this will affect my main site.

  6. You’re too modest to say so, but Live.com, Yahoo! and Ask all failed to return useful results when I ran that phone number search.

    Good job. (pat, pat, pat)

  7. Yep, Google has all kinds of amazing uses with numbers. When I do job interviews I love to google the name, or phone number. Also, it works amazingly well for tracking down part manufacturers. If you have a part, or a product with no identifying information you can often google it and track down the manufacturer or at least somewhere that sells it.

    I have also used this to clarify addresses. If you have an address and other parts of the address are off, I will often use just the address number, industry, and town to clarify the address. Or as above, a phone number will often turn up a name and address.

    You can also enter code numbers for laws and often find the law much faster than if you were to try to search for the law itself.

    I am still enjoying the last post about being able to search in shorter times.

    I really like posts like this about the basics of searching. I still find that most people I talk to do not know the basics of how to search. They simply enter the keywords in the main search box and do not even realize about exact match or any of the other parameters.

    Matt, do you have any stats you can make public about what percentage of the people search for = world cup soccer = vs = “world cup soccer” ?

    dk

  8. Is that a scam or just an aggressive real estate investor?

  9. I agree that Google could be even more helpful in these situations.

    For instance, I report a lot of phishing requests in gmail, but I have no idea how that data is used. It would be nice to have a visual signal when I open a suspicious message that “This is a suspicious email”. Even better, have messages that give me more info like “372 gmail users reported similar messages as phishing” to leverage/promote the community. You might also display a list of reasons for the suspicion: “Link points to China instead of [bank]” or “Link text and address don’t match”.

    Glad you guys are thinking about this stuff.

  10. http://blogondirt.com/2007/06/20/is-this-a-scam.aspx
    Here is another related article.

    But it is nothing more than creative marketing – no difference in spirit than what most Internet Marketers or Media Advertising pros do every day

  11. David: I expect most people search for ‘world cup football’ ๐Ÿ™‚

  12. Some very ‘Lost’ like assumptions regarding Mr Jan’s wife/assistant there Matt. Good stuff though although I did run a similar test a couple of weeks back on a suspicious number, however it returned no results – Guess there are some legitimate people in the world! ๐Ÿ™‚

  13. On reading this first, I thot that yahoo and msn can also give similar results… but they failed…

    http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=408-772-0507 – No results
    http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=408-772-0507 – 69300 spam results

    Google rocks ๐Ÿ™‚

  14. When I needed to move a couple of years ago, I drove around the area where I wanted to live, chose a few houses I liked and sent this kind of letter to about 10 addresses. I found a cheap home this way and don’t think there is anything wrong about it.

    Well, in the case of this guy it seems to be a little different. I would also be annoyed by these kind of letters from real estate agent and such companies.

  15. I bet David Jan didn’t expect his little scam to show up on the Matt Cutt’s blog and warning thousand of readers about his little trick. ๐Ÿ˜›
    That’s one thing I like about blogs in general.

    Keep it up, Matt!

  16. I really love Google for this ability Matt. I look up phone numbers using Google all the time.

    Now if someone would just make an ip phone with a web browser that automatically searched google for the incoming phone number and displayed the results before I picked the phone up in my house.

  17. I have used Google to clarify an address many times.

    Recently I was working on a postal address list for a website, compiling a new master list from four previous partial lists that had come from different people around the world.

    One address seemed to have two different ZIP codes, with just two digits flipped. A Google search soon confirmed the correct one, and I also dropped a line to the four sites that were using the wrong one to inform of their error. Three sites put that right within a week. The other never did.

    Another time, I had three different spellings for the building name and four for the street name. Google soon confirmed tens of thousands of results for one spelling and only a few dozen for the other three.

    I also verified that the largest count was for sites actually based in that area, and that I wasn’t looking at one error that had propagated onto hundreds of affiliated directories, or had been republished by multiple scrapers, skewing the results. In that case the correct spelling might have actually been on the minority number of sites.

  18. Hi,

    Google is great for exactly this sort of stuff! Whilst this is clearly lo-tech spam, I will often search for numbers on Google even when the phone is still ringing!

    Quite often in the UK they are people dialling banks of mobile numbers to try and sell you a new mobile phone contract – often they will even state that they work for your operator! All they need is a few tiny pieces of (what seems innocent enough) information, to force through an upgrade and a contract change for you, tying you in for yet another 12 months!

    I made a post about one such company to my blog and included their phone number – it’s actually one of the most popular pages on my site!! Clearly showing that other people do the same search as I do when the phone is ringing!

  19. man at least you could have put the number in the post title …

  20. It’s kind of interesting that when I google “david jan jennifer” your post comes up on top, Matt, yet my Firefox extension shows your site has no PageRank! Out of curiosity, did you willfully exclude your blog from PR? If so, why do you come on top for this query?

  21. Brian – many, many sites are showing zero pagerank at the moment – this weird occurence started being reported on the google webmaster help forums several months ago – and no obvious reasons for it.

    We can only speculate that G might be doing some ‘experimentation’ with the toolbar PR.

    The good news is that this disappearing pagerank doesn’t actually seem to equate to a real loss of PR (ie your site has PR, google just isn’t showing it anymore) – sites still rank just fine.

    doc

  22. Well the net is a place for scams and also a place to uncover them.

  23. This letter may actually be a 419 scam. I’d need a bit more info to find out for sure, but I might give this guy a call and find out a bit more.

    Matt – you may or may not be aware that Google regularly saves people from being scammed by the 419 scammers. A friend and I run four scam email blogs, publishing the emails from the scammers which are sent to us. These sites get a massive amount of visits for all sorts of keywords found in the emails, everything from email addresses, telephone numbers right through to terms contained within the letters, company names, and scammer names.

    There are so many scams out there, lottery scams, fake job scams, pet scams, the regular 419 kind of scams and recently we have seen the assassination scam arrive. I’d imagine if this is a scam they want to pay for the house by check or “wire transfer” (which will also be a check but you won’t know this and your bank won’t tell you), and then at the last minute something will go wrong and they’ll ask for the money back.

    It’s my first time commenting here so I won’t put a link into this post but I do have an article on my blog about how I made 5 million dollars online – sort of. ๐Ÿ˜‰ It’s worth a read especially if you don’t know too much about the fake check scams.

    The most important thing to remember is – any check can bounce up to a year to two years after you bank it. Even if they tell you it has “cleared”.

    The bank can take back the money at any time if the check is found to be fake or stolen. Say someone got Google’s bank account information and they made a whole bunch of counterfeit checks – some companies would not spot it for a while, because some companies don’t check their bank statements – and how many of us reading this check ours? Many people get the statement and put it aside without even thinking about it – some companies put it aside for the accountant who comes in once every 3-6 months to do the books and it is only then that the missing money is spotted.

    Anyway, I just thought I would drop by and mention that it could be a version of the Nigerian 419 scam. I try not to use the word Nigerian because that puts people on the look out for Nigeria when these scammers can pretend to be in any country around the world thanks to the internet and free phone redirection services these days. Many of them are in different locations, the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Middle East – Dubai and India seem to be the two new hot spots. A lot of the fake checks I have received come from Canada where there’s a gang counterfeiting checks, but I have also got them from many other locations.

    Cheers!
    Snoskred.

  24. Sluething stuff in Google IS fun. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Note: Googling personal old phone numbers and home addresses is also a great way to find them and have them updated or removed. There is a privacy issue here, do not forget privacy Google.

  25. I hate when one of my dirty little secrets is publicly revealed like this!

    Seriously, that phone number search is great, but I find I have better luck with spaces instead of dashes, since it catches phone numbers of the form (XXX) XXX XXXX or XXX.XXX.XXXX. I once did a search like this and found the new address of a customer who owed a client of mine approximately $12,000 and went to ground. For two minutes’ worth of searching, that’s time well spent.

  26. We got one of those letters! It was a different name, but essentially the same thing. Handwritten, addressed to us, and purporting to be from a family who was looking to move in to our neighborhood, but found the houses they’d looked at out of their price range, but admired ours while they were there and would we be at all interested in selling (or words to that effect – I can’t remember exactly) Since we’ve been there 35 years and have no plans on leaving, we just tossed it; didn’t even bother looking it up online.

  27. Yeah i have noticed as well that phone number usually show up in google and not any of the others.

  28. I always use Google for phone number searches, in fact when I see a number I don’t know come up on the display I will punch it in to find out who it is, most of the time I can find out who is calling within about 3 rings and answer the phone well an truly prepared, or just avoid the call of course!

  29. Asia, I’d be a little cautious about an approach that ended up with you owning multiple sites in the first several slots. Someone asked me about a business doing that at SES San Jose, and we ended up using them as an example in training earlier this week. I’d say to buy a business for the genuine assets if you want, but if you end up with multiple sites in the top 10 and those sites end up as just different views on the same backend database with little to distinguish them, in a sense you’re hurting the diversity of the web results.

    Chip, I’m looking at it now, and it’s definitely hand-written. The ‘y’ is a little different each time. ๐Ÿ™‚

    graywolf, I didn’t want the post to sound like a (great) 80s song. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Jonathan, I didn’t think to check that–thanks!

    Nutmeg, do you live in the Bay Area? When I dug a little deeper, I started to wonder if this is something that’s happening in other places, too.

  30. Hey Matt,

    Google has helped me with weird stuff like this too. At home we got hit a lot with an autodialer that I would have assumed was a telemarketer. The twist? They never said anything. It was someone’s messed-up autodialer that didn’t work. Or something else very mysterious.

    Eventually, I typed the full phone number into Google. From there I was led to a website that actually logs user comments on “annoying” phone callers (a surprising number of these are from registered charities, sadly).

    In this particular case, users were trading theories about why everyone was getting these calls, and a business address was finally discovered that showed this company ran about 15 similarly-named roofing companies, all with similar addresses. Creepy.

  31. Reason is – crisis in real estate. This people know that many house owners have troubles to pay their mortgage etc. They just want to collect information about people who really own a house and might thinking to sell it. After this they can use this information to send credit card offers, refinance, bank credit, real estate promotional letters etc…

  32. Matt,

    You said “Asia, Iโ€™d be a little cautious about an approach that ended up with you owning multiple sites in the first several slots. Someone asked me about a business doing that at SES San Jose, and we ended up using them as an example in training earlier this week. Iโ€™d say to buy a business for the genuine assets if you want, but if you end up with multiple sites in the top 10 and those sites end up as just different views on the same backend database with little to distinguish them, in a sense youโ€™re hurting the diversity of the web results.”

    I’m in the same position as well. Should I just retain their content as is or should I do a 301-redirect from their homepage to my existing homepage. Many of the top 10 sites basically have the same content, just arranged differently. For the most part the other sites have been playing “follow the leader” when I add content pages they add a page with similar content.

  33. Thanks for the answer Matt. I’m going to let the opportunity pass – as they are my competitors, selling the same products – so buying them would only be the same website, different copy but not different elements. How do some people get away with it then? even with press releases that they’ve bought or partnered with their competitor sites and all remain on the same top 1, 2 & 3 ranks. Mind covering this a bit? Or telling me where to look or what conference to sign up for?

    On Topic: I use google to find just about anything, phone numbers, I once found an old old email address,, I used when I was 16 on fark – then I had 36 email addresses, just to avoid spam. Anyway – it’s a great thing, unfortunately it does cause for some negatives. For example – stalking is much easer through google. I’ve used it to google tons of people, and there’s information I would rather not have found, with facebook going public, this form of reSearch will be quite fun, however.

  34. I received nearly a dozen letters like this last year. All handwritten, and they came in batches. I strongly suspect a correlation between these letters and large real estate investment seminars (Donald Trump came to San Francisco to run a mega-session last year).

  35. Matt,

    I love this – I can’t count how many times over the years I’ve used Google as a detective-resource. Whether it’s helping to track down long-lost friends, or my ex-wife’s father whom she’d lost contact with when she was just a small child, finding my landlord’s mailing address to send a late rent check to because I’d blanked on where to send it, and more times than I can shake a stick at – to de-bunk emails or myspace bulletins from friends and family who forward myth based garbage…

    Yay Google!

  36. Nutmeg, do you live in the Bay Area? When I dug a little deeper, I started to wonder if this is something thatโ€™s happening in other places, too.

    (that’s NETmeg)

    Nope, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  37. Great story.

    My mother inlaw when looking for a house, went to a house that was not even for sale and asked the owner if they had thought about selling. They did and she bought.

    Is that spam, asking when it was not up for sale. ๐Ÿ™‚

  38. Hmmm,

    Dear (name)
    My name is Matt, my wife is (name). We would like to buy your house at (address). Please call me @ (Matt’s phone number).

    Sincerely,
    Matt Cuts

    Thinking ?!? he he … and suppose someone sends a bunch of _these_ letters some others

    But I appreciate that Matt in this post nowhere refers to this hand-written post as “Scam”, unlike some of u folks

  39. typos regretted …

  40. The post office is totally going to ban him from sending any more mail…

  41. Matt, not that it really matters, but it looks like a slight canonical issue with a trailing slash on your (this) post in the SERPs:
    http://www.google.com/search?q=408-772-0507&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0
    (when filter=0, but nonetheless, and interesting occurrence)

    I can’t wait until the day canonicalization fixes itself ๐Ÿ˜›

  42. Hi,
    I have a direct experience of people comming to my home telling that they heard about selling it. A man also called on mobile from distant place. These all are work of brokers….

    PEACE …

  43. Matt,

    Regarding the chinese spam sites I have reported and that you said you looked at, I can see clearly now.
    It seems that my site got hammered also, probably being to close to the chinese “spam profile” which we have been trying to get rid of for the last week working 24/7. We DO want to be totally white hat and we are trying hard to get rid of all SEO-Guru-ideas and kisd of start over, but it’s tough to change a site that’s been around for years. Lots of pages to change ๐Ÿ™
    We have submitted a re-inclusion request and had a visit from Google today. Hopefully an ocular review of the site.
    Doing a few searches shows me this:
    Results 1-6
    My site is on first place. Place 2-6 are chinese spam sites!
    Result 210,000 pages
    First place, not relevant at all for the search
    2nd place, spam site
    3rd place my site
    4 and 5 not relevant to the subject
    6th spam site

    This is just a few examples and I can show you more if you email me.

    I have always wondered why, when I submit spam reports, my site sometimes disappears for a while but, like I said, I see clearly now, that when you look at spam sites, you create a profile which you run against search results and if sites fits within that profile, they become collateral damage.

    Harit and Adam, I don’t want to be hung in public so I won’t tell you what site it is ๐Ÿ™‚ There are a lot of people who just want to bash you without giving real advice and being nice about it. Not everybody is a web wiz but we all try our best.

  44. That’s a fun letter. I like to Google many things like that. Whenever I can’t find a satisfactory answer– which happens surprisingly often, although a minority of the time– I pose the question on my blog, and stunningly often, I get a good reply! Presumably, my question goes right into Google and is found by the next person who runs the same search I did ๐Ÿ™‚

  45. Dude, if you don’t want to be “bashed”, as you put it, you may want to rethink that last set of comments. You’re complaining about being the 3rd listing of 210,000 results. Not 3rd page….3rd.

    Never mind the fact that rank checking is a useless exercise and establishes nothing other than who doesn’t know what the real measure of search engine success is (i.e. the traffic), you’re actually still on the first page on at least one datacenter. There are people who read this blog who would probably slit your throat for that ranking, and none of us even know what the term is. (No, I’m not one of those people…I’m just pointing out that if that’s your complaint, then you’re not being taken seriously for a reason.)

    That would be like me complaining if I was rank checking and my blog slipped in position for “The Biggest Idiot on the Internet”. No one would take me seriously (nor should they.)

  46. We do need to get to the bottom of the assistant / wife thing.

    I just can’t but plug Vanessa Fox’s local search article here.

  47. George, I don’t think you doing a spam report would have anything to do with your site dropping to third place. They just wouldn’t be related.

    Nutmeg, that’s wild. My investigations made me think that there’s a larger network that folks like this are drawing upon. Something like a real estate flipping course that teaches people to do this, and possibly provides web sites for them. It’s fun stuff to dig into. ๐Ÿ™‚

  48. test

  49. roger – roger that – 10/4 – I can hear you harith ๐Ÿ˜€

  50. It’s a great first responder fib detector. Some real estate agents like to pose as online buyers, digging for free information. A keen sense of smell and “Jane Doe” Realtor or “Jane Doe” agent, sends them to the bin almost every time.

  51. Matt, the only thing that makes me wonder is the “spam-like” approach. Did they actually use your friend’s name in the letter? Well, at least is “personalized spam.”

    I read on the Blog On Dirt that what these “property flippers” do is legal, but when we think that unsolicited bulk email marketing is spam and illegal, how would we call such an offline approach?

    I think it is illegal and maybe your friend should report it to the police. Just in case… I don’t know how the laws are in US, but in Germany they are very strict when it comes to private property.

  52. Adam,
    You are missing the point. I am not complaining about the 3rd place out of 210,00. My point is that there are spam sites that should have been removed. Some of the installs a virus/spyware on your computer and threatens the credability of a safe Google search.
    I am not doing rank checking. I used a search that I found in my stats program so that was a search a real person did to find my site. Like you said, it’s all about traffic so when spam sites pushes you down then the traffic suffers. Also, for the search you mentioned, you are not even in the listing anymore ๐Ÿ™‚

    Matt,
    The coincidence in it is that you are working on removing chinese spam sites that I reported. You might have been working on it anyway so I guess that was the only coincidence. We are working hard, 24/7, to remove anything that would fit any of your spam profiles, even though I suspect that whatever you do to remove spam, there will always be people that will outsmart your algo’s from time to time, just like computer viruses. As of this morning compared to last week we have lost 90% of our traffic from Google and our traffic now comes from Yahoo and MSN/Live. From our stats I can see what people have used to find our site and the keywords/phrases is much more defined than from Google.

  53. Nutmeg, thatโ€™s wild.

    Forever doomed to the wrong nickname….

  54. Yeah – it’s cool being able to do this stuff. In the UK there is a big thing at the minute about claiming unlawful charges back from your banks. My partner wrote to her bank about this and got a really long letter (sounding as if it was personally written for her) trying to discourage her. By quickly typing the first paragraph into google we found it was actually a standard letter that should be ignored. Very handy.

  55. The state the housing industry is in right now, it’s only going to get worst.

  56. Guess my post got deleted so here I go again.
    Adam,
    You missed my point. I wasn’t complaining about being 3rd out of 210,000. I complained about the chinese spam sites that install spyware on your computer being there.
    Matt,
    The only coincidence is that when I submit a spam report you are already (?) working on it and I guess the collateral damage I talked about is that it seems my web site gets caought in your spam trap fitting into yout “spam profiling”, hence being in 3rd place after chinese spam sites.
    We have been working hard 24/7 to try to get rid of anything that would fit in one of your spam profiles now and in the future, which might be a tough thing to do since new spam sites, just like viruses on a Windows computer, keeps popping up, tricking your filters.
    I can see in the future that spam sites will use “clean profiles”, getting closer to what is accepted and more “ordinary” sites will be hit with collateral damage.

  57. I use the search phone numbers that I receive daily.

    When a number cannot be found, it would be great if the initital phone number search would show the area code’s geographic location.

    May just be me but when a number is not listed my next search is to determine where the area code is from.

  58. I love using Google to look up phone numbers. It comes in very handy at times.

  59. Heh. NETmeg, we hear you.

    I guess Matt has his darkest shades on today. ๐Ÿ˜Ž

  60. Yeah I can’t count how many times I have typed in peoples phone numbers on google but also I have taken down my info on it so no one can search my number which i think most people will end up doing in the future which will negate this

  61. Hi Kenki

    I think someone said this before but.. Think you could condense?

    Like – merge all that. Into one post.

    I have some go daddy issues – not going to air them here… But, no offence – you really need to calm with the posts. It’s better to post constructive and like small tins of milk, creamy ones… than get banned, and I fear that within a week you will go the way of a recent poster who perhaps looked upon this blog as his own domain. I suppose what I am trying to say is, chill dude.

  62. It is an interesting note and as a realtor in Denver I can say there could be other angles. For example, it could just be a realtor looking for a lead. Anyone who calls is obviously interested in selling the home so sign them up on a listing agreement and sell it for them. Most people would rather talk to an individual than a Realtor. I don’t know why. I’m a nice guy, but that is just how it is.

  63. Click on the phone number link in this post now. By now, I expected Matt’s blog entry to be the number 1 result. Instead, it’s the number 3 result and the guy in position 2 (fedscope[.]com) is a blog article spinner. Kind of interesting to read the awful spin job…. but more importantly, how is that spam ranked ahead of Matt’s post? It must be the high quality content? Or perhaps the guy as a better link profile than Matt? lol. Anyway, think the vacation is over Matt… time to get back to work and do some spam busting.

  64. I love Google for all the info available at our fingers. I’ve also checked many numbers this way too. Pity it was a bit of a scam – If he was trying to ‘steal’, it will come back and bite him one day …

  65. Hi Matt,

    I don’t mean to hijack the thread but you’ve gotta hear this SEO Song…its a riot!

    http[XXXX]://www.kontrapelo.com/2007/09/10/benj-arriola-sings-seo-song/

    GaryTheScubaGuy

  66. Live.com, Yahoo! and Ask all failed to return useful results for me google is the best.

  67. This is actually common practice among flippers or real estate investors. It could also be know as “bird-dogging” which is a person who locates properties for investors or silent partners with the sole intent of assigning that contract for a fee to someone else who will rehab or repair it. In many states this is considered illegal.

    This is most likely someone who got creative and is trying to get into homes way below market value to flip, sell, rent or move into.

  68. Heh, keniki, lay off spamming this thread by posting eleven comments in a row. You’re out of order.

  69. this post cracks me up i can imagine all the calls they are getting and response from this

  70. That’s pretty creepy, actually. Someone handwriting all those letters and delivering them? Someone (potentially) scoping out your house when it isn’t even for sale?

    I do agree that Google is pretty handy for looking things up. I recently found someone’s “UPass” (student bus pass) and I was able to track down who it was via Googling them, and get it back to them that day (turns out they worked very close to me).

    I also notice how much I miss being able to find stuff out when I am away from the computer. I recently went camping and the number of times I had to stop and go “darnit, I can’t google that” was phenomenal, amusing, and frustrating.

  71. Keniki only thinks of himself and has ZERO respect for Matt or his Blog. Matt has told him a few times now to stop spamming, yet he just carries on spamming…

    Ironic that Keniki dribbles on about blackhats and spammers when he is showing himself as one.

  72. Come on GODADDY defend your position against Keniki.

    I’d love to see the IP addresses of keniki and SearchEnginesWeb. They’re the two most common people who refer to themselves in the third person.

  73. Hey guys I don’t post much but I read everything =oP, Question, Why does Matt let this Keniki guy keep posting on his site if all does is use bad words and insult people or businesses? Matt? =oP

  74. I envision keniki as more a non-person, than a turd…oops, meant third ๐Ÿ™‚

  75. Ok. Here is a reminder of what Matt did last time. Watch out ๐Ÿ™‚

    Booting someone

    This time I saved the MySQL command I used to delete a userโ€™s comments in WordPress:

    delete from wp_comments where comment_author_email like โ€œ%domainname%โ€ or comment_author_url like โ€œ%domainname%โ€;

    That lets me delete all comments by unwelcome users more easily next time.

  76. I could have sworn it was hard coded with “keniki” :))

  77. I think that google can help in situations like this, but the guy trying to get peoples properties is probably some type of property developer. Its a sales tactic, and dare i say government tactic! to pose in the guise of a sincere entity. Its just frowned upon more if the little guy tries it. The question is what was the offer on the house and if it’s why not accept it?

  78. If PageRank were a GPS are you telling me that it would need directions like” Australia/Vicrotia/Melbourne/South_Melbounre/ParkSt/
    PalmerstonCrescent/Taten/27.street.address ” to be more certain that the was the address for Taten rather than the latitude and longitude coordinates -37.8339, 144.97023

    How dumb is this? Why should a URL have any bearing on the significance of the content held at that location?

  79. keniki: dude, stop being annoying and off-topic! Consider this your final warning before you get the “igor” treatment and I delete all your comments. Sheesh.

  80. Anyway, back to the topic of the hand written letter.

    If someone sends it to 1000 homes and 1-1.5% respond (which is typical in real estate mailouts), he has 10-15 chances to buy a house maybe below the market. To mail 1000 letters is $410 in postage Theoretically he will buy any of the houses for 20% (or more) under market value.

    Perhaps, out of the responses, he actually buys 1 out of every 200 responses. He has spent $6-$8 thousand dollars, plus quite a bit of time, to make 20% of…let’s say $600,000 or $120,000. Not a bad business plan.

    Of course knowing what “the market” is on a individual house, can be a challanging process also.

    There is a do not mail list (at least around here), like the do not call list, and if he adheres to that, is there really a problem?

  81. Matt I couldnโ€™t give a fxxx about any of my comments..

    Neither does anyone else!

    You are one of the most rude, arrogant and stupid person I have encountered on the web in quite some time.

    You WILL be banned soon and I can hear the cheering from here ๐Ÿ™‚

  82. Wife / Assitant – The guy was probably split testing ๐Ÿ™‚
    Google AdWords has that for free.

    yigber.

  83. Oh, sure, Google’s been helping me detect frauds and scams for a long time… You should always give it a check before making any serious decision. Congrats!

  84. Heh, keniki.

    Matt gives freely of HIS time to help people and all you do is abuse the priviledge.

    If you haven’t got the message yet, then the message is GO AWAY. You will not be missed.

  85. I don’t wish to have to cut through swathes of your crap to get to the real topic of conversation.

    Spoken in a DaveN accent: “Matt, can you thwack that wanker over there, please?”

  86. I think it makes great business sense – and good on the guy! We printed off hundreds of flyers and delivered them round a specific set of streets after working with realtors failed to get us anywhere. We got 6 good leads and bought one of the houses. If you know what you want – don’t hold back, go for it!

    However, I do wish people would do their due diligence and research people more often (not just in this instance), it would save alot of heartache!

  87. I second G1smd’s post about banning Keniki.

    Come on Matt, follow through with your promise…………………..PLEASE!!! ๐Ÿ™‚

  88. Great thing google exists (without it lots of people would think they were the only ones who got the leter)

  89. Dave (original) if you say โ€œPLEASE KENIKI PLEASE STOP POSTINGโ€ In those words exactly capital letters as well and nothing else, no snide coments. I will agree to stop posting.

    You must think I’m as stupid as you!

    PLEASE KEEP POSTING SO MATT BANS YOU ๐Ÿ™‚

  90. keniki, for the third time, Dave (original) is not Dave Naylor. If you want to know who he is, it’s not that difficult to figure out. I’ll even give you a clue: the continent he lives on ends with the letter “A”.

    And if you’re going to “expose” blackhats, shouldn’t you actually cite some examples?

  91. No, I AM Dave Naylor, no doubt about that. MWA is trying to confuse you………………..well, confuse your more than you already are!

    the continent he lives on ends with the letter โ€œAโ€.As Keniki has an room temperature IQ I’m adding another clue. It’s friggen cold all Year-round.

    And if youโ€™re going to โ€œexposeโ€ blackhats, shouldnโ€™t you actually cite some examples?

    If he did that, he wouldn’t be hollow man, now would he ๐Ÿ™‚

  92. Don’t lie to him, Dave. It’s only cold from January to December. The rest of the time, it’s fine. ๐Ÿ˜€

  93. Hasn’t Matt banned you yet?

  94. Cripes, ban Keniki already.

    Anyhow, not sure if I’d describe receiving a letter like that as “fun” – more like creepy.

  95. But in your own words please reply , why are you so desperate to have Keniki banned Dave?

    Because you dribble shit and are all hot air and noise.

  96. Very impressive, again, with Google’s ability to look for a specific phone number or other personal stuffs like that. On the other hand, has anyone one tried calling that number? Is this a scam or what?

  97. OK Iโ€™ll play along another example of black hat from dave (original NOT!) claimed origin state of โ€œAโ€ in USA. That is coldโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆ..

    Alabama average temp 70-80f
    Arizona average temp 60-70f
    Arkansas average temp 70-80f

    guess that leaves Alaska, lets find some black hat activity in Alaskaโ€ฆโ€ฆโ€ฆ.

    Here you go โ€œsite:mxak.orgโ€ an attempted scrape and hijack (failed) through google api.

    Do you want some more examples?

    Keniki

    First of all, I said the continent of Dave’s origin ended in “A”, not the state; I’m not even sure if the state Dave lives in ends with “A” (although I think it happens to as well…I’ll let Dave answer that and send you on a wild goose chase).

    If you can’t even read simple English, how the hell can you be a great spamfighter or determine who is or isn’t a blackhat?

    And what does that Marine Exchange of Alaska site have to do with scraping via Google’s API? You made an accusation, now show some evidence (because a simple glance at that search query doesn’t reveal a damn thing.)

    Seriously, I’m all for freedom of speech and all that, but you need to stop for your own sake.

  98. Are you this stupid in real life?

  99. First of all, I said the continent of Daveโ€™s origin ended in โ€œAโ€, not the state

    I’m astounded he got some States listed that *really* do start with “A”.

  100. Google with magic eyes !!!

    Great index, means that everything written on this world is accessible to everybody in some milliseconds.

    That’s Google

  101. If you shut up and stopped posting, he wouldn’t have to ban you.

    And for the five millionth time, Dave is not the same guy as Naylor. Do you need to have that skywritten before you’ll figure that out?

  102. I think that Jennifer was the assistant, then became the wife…

  103. Following the searchresults (today) on Google, I found this ranked pretty high:

    http://cashnow4yourhome.com/

    It looks like David runs that company, if you browse their pages.

  104. Yeah, I got a scam letter in the mail from someone claiming to be from TV Guide saying I won money. It looked official except the address appeared to be that of something in a rural area in Florida (instead of a city) RR address. Also the language was dodgy, so this ticked. I looked it up on Google and found that several people also got this scam thing. Google is really handy when it comes to scams. I can always find information when I have a question.

  105. I get scam letter everyday they want to book a home for more then it cost with a cashiers check then they want me to send the extra money back to them. I dont thing so! Its sad you have to watch everything now.

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