More Topsites LLC Scams and Lies

Part 1: Background
Part 2: Correspondence
Part 3: Topsites Uncovered 
Part 4: More Topsites Scams and Lies
Part 5: Topsites Revisited
Part 6: For Sale: Topsites.us / Topsites LLC

--- Updated March 15th 2004 ---

Sadly Topsites LLC is still operating its scam, but there have been a couple of new twists.

Topsites Venture Capital

They actually had the cheek to run an ad for "Topsites Venture Capital" for several weeks on their front page, presumably as a way to launder some of the cash they've ripped off webmasters. The spin was this.. Topsites would buy most of the stock in your company and turn it into a "sucessful" operation like Topsites LLC. Presumably, this means that they would spam the entire world repeatedly with you site with scant regard for the law and the intellectual property of others (more of which below).

Topsites Translation Services

Topsites claim to be able to translate your website into eight different languages, charging "only" $5 per month for the service. However, they are actually using the AltaVista Babelfish translation service (which is free) and are attempting to pass it off as their own. Clearly a violation of intellectual property, we can only hope that the AltaVista / Overture / Yahoo! legal department will take action against them.

Lies, Damned Lies and Topsites Statistics

The front page of their site says: TopSites is one of the 10 fastest growing websites in the world says Alexa and Alexa said TopSites was one of the 600 most popular sites in the world on Sep 21 03. They back this up with a couple of links to what appear to be Alexa pages, but in fact they are merely fakes. The real Alexa pages for Topsites LLC can be found here, here, and here. These are some of the very worst Alexa reviews I've ever seen. As for the traffic.. well, the traffic is being generated through a huge spamming campaign.

The other statistic they like to use is More than 10,000 websites link to TopSites according to All the Web. However, of the 14,987 or so pages (not sites) listed, 13,830 are from the topsites.us domain itself, and most of the rest are to the ripped-off translation service. In other words, there are very few sites linking to topsites.us. Indeed at the time of writing, Google doesn't see any inbound links at all.

<< Previous
Part 1: Background
Part 2: Correspondence
Part 3: Topsites uncovered 
Part 4: More Topsites Scams and Lies