I’m all for a bit of evil blogging and I’ve definitely been known to pull a few unethical tactics in my quest to make money online - but breaking the law is a line that I won’t cross.

Others will.

Blogging Dosh is a site that I reviewed here and when the author contacted me to collect his free link on John Chow dot com, I decided to head over to the site and have a look at how it was progressing.

Straight away I noticed that there was a huge RSS subscriber count which seemed out of proportion to the number of comments that the site was receiving. I know from my own experience that when a site has 278 subscribers, you definitely get at least one comment on every post and many posts on Blogging Dosh didn’t have any at all.

I smelled a rat.

Let’s go hunting

Looking at the location for the Feedburner counter, I noticed that the counter was actually displaying the Feedburner count for a site that uses BAYB to label at it’s feed. Why does BAYB sound familiar? Because I gave Blog About Your Blog a review here and I often drop by to see how things are going.

Heading over to Blog About Your Blog, I noticed (surprise!) that the Feedburner count was exactly the same!

Blogging Dosh is ripping off Blog About Your Blog’s feed count and promoting it as their own.

Someone needs a lawyer

Of course it’s unethical and I’m sure Blogging Dosh isn’t the only site to do it, but in this case it’s also breaking the law. Blogging Dosh is charging $30 for paid reviews and doing so with the representation that it has over 200 subscribers. Due to the fake counter, I doubt that it actually does.

Judging by the Alexa graph, I’m willing to bet that the site also doesn’t receive 200+ uniques per day like he states.

The webmaster for Blogging Dosh is located in Australia and a quick Google search on Australian contract law tells me that the laws there are pretty much the same as the rest of the world:

A misrepresentation is a false statement of a material fact made by one person to another in order to induce that other party to enter into the contract and which has this effect. A misrepresentation is, therefore, a representation which does not accord with the true facts.

When you accept payment for a review you’re entering into a contract with the advertiser to provide the review under the conditions that you represent on your site. When you blatantly lie about your Feedburner or traffic count and it has influenced or induced the advertiser into purchasing a review, you have committed a fraudulent misrepresentation and are guilty of deceit.

As soon as you start receiving money with your blog, being unethical can quickly turn into being criminal.

If an advertiser takes you to court - you’ll lose - and they’ll get their money back.

Get your money back

If you’ve purchased a review on Blogging Dosh or have bought advertising there, I recommend heading over and getting your money back. If you can’t get it back, feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to make sure that you get some free advertising on CashQuests.com

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