Bloggerwave launched a company offering to pay bloggers for reviews on their websites. At the time of their launch many bloggers questioned the similarities of Bloggerwave’s policies and web design to that of PayPerPost.
Some bloggers on the PayPerPost forum and other boards outside of PPP even questioned the possibility that the PayPerPost website had literally been copied from a content perspective.
About 2 weeks ago, I received my first payment after completeing a Bloggerwave assignment. The payment was for the amount of $10. Shortly after that PayPal initiated an inquiry into the payment.
They requested information and proof from me that I expected the payment. As the receiver, PayPal, an Ebay company, considers me the seller and Bloggerwave the Buyer. They are used to dealing in transactions in relation to physical goods. This not despite the fact that PayPal originally formed as a way of exchanging money and was later acquired by Ebay.
I provided the information requested and indicated that I had provided a service as a freelance blogger writer. I expected PayPal to confirm the situation and free up the funds.
Over the weekend, PayPal closed their inquiry. They reversed the funds and sent the $10 back to the original account. Note, I did not say sent the $10 back to bloggerwave.
Calling PayPal for more information
I pulled up the history on this situation.
I phoned PayPal at this point. I wanted my money and suspected that PayPal was just being a little dense. The representative at PayPal corrected my assumption. They indicated that the email address
payment@bloggerwave.com had been connected fraudlently to either a credit card number or bank account that had not authorized the payment. Ergo, someone setup a paypal account and linked it to someone else’s bank account or credit card number. Or possibly, someone had hijacked an existing paypal account and added the email address
payment@bloggerwave.com.
Eitherway PayPal was sure that fraud was involved.
PayPal Does not Protect Services
PayPal will protect sellers if they are defrauded from buyers if and only if a physical exchange of goods takes place that can be verified with tracking information. (Like a delivery receipt signed by the buyer)
A permalink for a blog article is not something they would count and so services even if they can be tracked in cyberspace do not count. In this regards, I have no recourse to receive my payment from the company that calls itself Bloggerwave. (I did attempt to contact them, but as of this article I have not yet received a response. If I receive a response I will provide a copy in a follow up article.)
What does Bloggerwave gain from this?
From this point on, I can only provide speculation. However, lets suppose that a person, group or company was up to no good. Lets suppose that they gained access to someone’s credit card or bank account.
They could then sell advertising services to paying customers and collect money. They could hire bloggers to write articles to promote those companies.
Instead of paying bloggers with the revenue from the paying customers, they could pay in with the fraudlently controlled bank account, credit card account or paypal account.
The company then pockets the entire revenue from the paying client.
This type of scam has a short shelf life. They can fool a few bloggers for a few weeks and iterations but once they lose their payments they will not work for this firm any longer.
To Continue more Gullible Bloggers Needed
Since you can only fool bloggers once (possibly in a batch at a time of articles) this firm would need to continue recruiting and preying upon new bloggers. That means that in this case, bloggers need to get the word out and warn each other about the potential of this scam.
