by Structured Settlement Watchdog®
Who owns the web domain webuypayments.net and why should you care?
The website is the landing page for a series of rogue websites spreading like a virus, that use the names of players in the structured settlement and structured settlement factoring industry, cities, states and towns in an apparent search engine optimization effort to boost local traffic to what appears to be a spam website.
Webuypayments.net, which is anonymously registered with GoDaddy.com lists no address, no phone number, yet has the audacity to include testimonials to this mysterious "company". "John Smith Entrepreneur" and "Jessie James Work Accident Victim"? C'mon!
The feeder websites are also anonymous. Needless to say, in my opinion, this is reason enough alone for consumers to avoid webuypayments.net like the plague. My opinion extends to any website that does not place its address and telephone number conspicuously on its website landing page, or at the very least on the "contact us" page.
This author believes that participants in both the primary and secondary market sites were victimized
Prior to the sites pointing to webuypayments.net the landing page was often (at least on the initial click) pointing to the website of Sovereign Funding Group, an active factoring intermediary. This author contacted David Springer who runs Sovereign Funding at the end of last week and showed him the problem. Mr. Springer denied any role in this and said he would contact Google. Since that conversation the links no longer point directly to his company 's website.
Anyone on the structured settlement primary or secondary market side should carefully check for anonymous owned websites that use your name, company name, member's name, or company name in the URL (in an attempt to game the search engine because no content on the ensuing web page is about what is in the URL. It's important to distinguish this activity from pages with fair criticism or commentary and relevant content is presented) and clicking on the link brings you to webuypayments.net. For those that regularly post to blogs or already have a very strong Internet presence the offending websites may appear on page 2, 3 or beyond in Google search results.
The sleuthing continues.
A. It appears that the owner of the site has an affinity for wine judging from the sites that are being followed on its Twitter page
http://twitter.com/#!/WeBuyPayments/following
We can also see who is following this person company by checking who its followers are despite no postings. Who follows someone with no postings unless they know them, right?
http://twitter.com/#!/WeBuyPayments/followers
B. The "company" has a YouTube channel with no videos.
C. A Google search of the address and phone number listed on the Facebook page (as of 12:45pm on July 25, 2011) for WeBuyPayments.net, matches up perfectly with the address AND phone number for Sovereign Funding Group on the Better Business Bureau website
It is only by the collective efforts and alert observation of those who are victimized that the activity by people that create such sites can be obliterated
Postscript
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