The day I nearly got conned by a guest writer Ross Campbell

Weeks back, I got a nicely written mail in which the writer briefly talks about his relocation to Mauritius since a year and according to him, this was a very good decision he made. In the same mail, he politely asks to write a guest post. I accepted right-away as this was definitely not like those tons of mails proposing free guest posts.

Normally, most of these posts automatically land into the junk folder but this mail was special. It contained quite some valuable information which shows that the author has put particular attention while writing it. However, I should add that later on, he did politely request adding a link to his company. I said to myself : Why not? I usually link guest posts to the author’s Facebook profile. So, I accepted right-away.

After a few exchange of mails, the author sent me a draft of the guest post along with a picture shot on a beach. I was totally surprised by the good quality of the article written along with relevant links ( and of course, his company’s site). But when I asked him a few questions, he replied quite vaguely. On top of that, he was quite technical when we talked about his web site link. This behavior roused some suspicion.

Minutes before I planned to publish the guest post, I decided to put the article on hold. I first did a Google Image Search which did not return any similar images. So, the guy probably shot the picture himself (perhaps while on holidays here or during a business visit in the island):

Update 17 Jan 2017 : A facebook friend did the image search again and surprisingly, he got the source of the image. Right now, I can’t say who uploaded the original image but Ross Campbell did not take the picture, definitely not!

After spending some more time asking Google, I finally discovered that the guy Ross Cambell moved to at least half a dozen of locations during the same year! Most of the articles were written in November / December 2016! LOL!

As you can see below, several other web sites contained his guest article, specifically adapted to the country targeted in the web site. For instance, by contacting me, he mentioned moving to Mauritius while for the other web sites, he wrote relevant articles for Singapore, Panama, Mexico, Solomon Islands (USA) and blabla…

Why?

A friend asked me why did the person do this? I mean, what are the motives behind this move?

Well, I will explain using very simple terms : By spreading his company’s link all over the web, he is building his online strategy as search engines (Google etc) have a tendency to rank search results depending on the number of times the words/sites/links are mentioned on the web. That’s why he is asking to write blog posts to increase the number of times his company’s link appear all over the internet.

Moral of the story : Always verify your sources!

Ross Campbell : You now need to change your name, just in case somebody else does a google search. I already guess that this is a fake name but nevertheless, think about switching to another one 😛