Ask HN: Are these scam sites?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=388715

by paul9290 • 18 years ago

12 6 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Two days in a row either my cellphone or my land-line woke me up in the early morning. The caller was a robo-dialer (1st time picked it up, no one was on other end, other time didnt bother 2 answer).

I Googled # naturally (as Im sure 1,000 to millions of others doing same) and first link I saw was wtfcalls.com(started in Sept 08 has really good growth per Alexa).

Anyone think this site and others like it are the ones doing the robo-dialing and in turn igniting their traffic and Google Adsense revenue?

Im on the DoNotCall list and since they woke me up before what I set to do so..I did some digging.

What u think?

agentbleu• 18 years ago

looks like a good scam:)

paul92902• 18 years ago

Well if it is.... this operation(s) needs to be stopped!

dfranke• 18 years ago

Seems like an odd conspiracy theory. Robo-dialers are nothing new and I haven't noticed any increase in my receiving them. Any evidence for this?

ericb• 18 years ago

I don't think the math supports your conspiracy theory. Website ads do not pay enough to support robo dialer + real phone calls + electricity + risk of getting sued.

omarchowdhury• 18 years ago

You are completely wrong to think that websites that list phone numbers and other people's histories with said phone numbers are perpetrating the actual calls. Site such as WTFcalls.com are only trying to seek traffic through ranking for phone number keywords in Google (because it is very easy to do so - those phone numbers occur on very few other pages on the web).

If you look at this example page:

http://wtfcalls.com/649-200

You can see that WTFCalls has automatically generated every conceivable phone number in the United States - in an attempt to rank highly for those numbers in search engines. WTFcalls.com receives around 200,000+ unique visitors monthly, almost all from search engines. Their ad revenue from Adsense should be a sustaining amount.

Not bad for simply creating a script that makes a page template optimized (to rank in search engines) for every known phone number (example: http://wtfcalls.com/n/649-254-1011).

I put a random number into Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&...

Look who came up first! WTFcalls.com

Rest assured.

paul92902• 18 years ago

Thanks for that perspective!

Well this other perspective stems from prior to these sites Google populated the # info. Also, prior to seeing these sites (which just started popping up) I never received such phone calls since the DoNotCall list took affect.

I just thought I'd debate this somewhat out there perspective (should have done this b4...roll eyes) ...but I see these sites have found a lucrative market with little effort!

Ask HN: Are these scam sites?

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