Chani, close your eyes, because I have to talk about sitemeters for a minute. Sitemeter, the thing I use to keep an eye on who is coming here and how they’re getting here, seems to have changed things on their site and in fact it does not work at all in Firefox for me. I opened up Microsoft Internet Explorer (shudder) to see if it still worked and it did but they’d installed a bunch of things like flash on the site, and I HATE flash with a passion.
Never fear, for I have a backup plan. When it comes to trackers they are fairly unreliable. I actually had two here on the site, sitemeter and stat counter, and never the two did agree. In fact sometimes they had serious disagreements. I could understand if maybe one had 10 more visitors than the other, but sometimes we are talking differences of 100 or more. And considering both these counters only show you the last 100 visits, it did get annoying.
Never fear my friends for as always, Google has a solution. Google Analytics. And as always when these things happen I am one of the last to know and get on the boat. I am really happy about this new development because of the 419 blogs that we have. They’re 419 Letter Repository, Job Scam Repository, Lotto Scam Repository and Miscellaneous Scam Repository.
These sites get a LOT of hits. Let’s take a look at the Lotto Scam Repository. Since January 1 this year, there have been 28,298 unique visitors on the site with 40,931 page loads. And a lot of these visitors get there by searching for scammer email addresses, scammer telephone numbers, the names scammers use in lotteries. For example –
7 lottoscams.blogspot.com
6 staatspromonl
4 barrister desmond oconnor
4 (mrs.) angella richardson (program co-coordinator.)
3 vodafone.nl vodafone stake incorporation
2 euromilliones2007
2 coventry lottery leiden
2 for: smith carpenter afro-asian zonal cordinator. bigtime lotto in
1 1.64% agentelizabethgary01 tel #
1 seat automobile e-mail promotion
1 do an national australianlottery exist like lotto australia
1 lotto bill gates 1 000 000 gbp
1 bv powerball lottery e-wheel e-game 2007
1 eu lotto from telephone
1 microsoft winning notification
1 hans-peter schössler
1 microsoft award teammicrosoft corporation #1 microsoft wayredmond, wa 98052.
1 australian lottery board
1 your email address has won the uk national lottery games!!!
1 italian superenalotto 2007/winning notification !!!
1 microsoft uk promotions
1 agentelizabethgary01@ tel #
1 online lottery 2007 webnet national/international lottery
1 microsoft_agent230 @yahoo.co.uk
1 awareness promotional lottery
1 florina_215 @hotmail.com
1 new about bmw lottery international programs held on the 8th of may 2007 in london uk.
1 the board of directors, members and staff of the inte
1 yahoo/microsoft promotions {congratulations you are a winner} !!! …
1 gameboardcente @aim.com
1 alyson & associates u.k
1 the free lotto company snopes
1 yahoo award winning notification ; your email adress emerged as a
1 grupo bilbao security company sl
1 uk online lottery raffle draw held on may 1st, 2007.
1 guiness stout promotion agent
1 rsa canada lottery prize claim form
1 dayzers lottery headquarters
1 peugeot auto-mobiles headquarters, 19 ul,
But these trackers *only* track the last 100 visits. And for a while there we tried to keep track of the search terms – while the traffic was low we could visit once a day and copy and paste what you see above into a spreadsheet. However now, this site is getting anywhere between 200-500 unique visitors a day. It’s not possible to keep track – you’d have to log in every 4 hours or so to make sure you have the info. Of course you can have more than the last 100 visits tracked but it costs money – and I’m already spending plenty on internet related things like domain names and various other things.
But now, google analytics is going to solve this problem for me, and I am really excited about it. Being able to see this kind of information will really help us know how we can help scam victims better find out that they are being scammed.
The reason we created those 419 scam mail blogs was simply so that a scam victim could google things that appear in scammer mails and it would come back with the word scam. If you look for most of those terms you’ll find them on other sites as well, like Joe Wein’s fantastic site. In fact Joe Wein runs a huge scammer blacklist of email addresses which daily saves victims from being scammed. He’s also extremely helpful to us baiters. ;)
It was a massive headache to get the blogs working right, we had all kinds of issues with mail to blogger, we at one stage were posting things manually to the blog, it still gets a lot more mail than actually gets published there, and google sends a lot of the scam mail to the spam trap, which means it doesn’t get published.
If you get scam emails, please don’t just delete them. You can put them into Joe Wein’s Scam-o-matic or you can have a look here to see how to forward them to him. You’re probably getting scam mails that we don’t get – and by putting them into the scam-o-matic and having those scammers blacklisted you too can help prevent victims being scammed.