Cybersquatters suck. Your mom’s going to deserve everything she gets.
So start from the other end. Don’t convince her that the website is crap. Ask her what her plan is to make money from the websites she’s purchased. Ask her in her three months how many of her domain names she’s sold. And if she (shocker) hasn’t sold a single one to date, ask her to back off the purchasing while she focuses on making money. Tell her to try that out for a month and see where she is.
This is pretty fucking sad.
Can she afford to blow 2 grand on this, or are we talking about her next six car payments?
Just tell her to register Nameboysucks.com. Apparently it’s worth $2,421.25 and I’m pretty sure that will get some hits.
I like being a hardass on the internet too, but this is pushing it. The lady clearly has no idea what she’s doing, and it’s not “cybersquatting” unless she’s deliberately targeting domains similar to ones that legitimate entities might need, like “straightdoep.com” or whatever. This is like saying if a dementia patient wanders off with a candy bar wrapper from the trash, thieves suck and she deserves everything she gets. She lacks the mentality, the intent, of a thief, and she’s also not taken anything of worth.
Precisely… She’s new to the internet world.
At least she didn’t get any emails from Nigeria… it could be worse. :eek:
I disagree. She is trying to be a cybersquatter, or she wouldn’t be buying domains she thinks are in high demand with the intent of jacking up the prices later. She might be really bad at it, but that’s still her intention.
Well apparently google.com is worth $4008.
Let me give Google a call and see if they will sell their domain for that amount.
So you think her plan is to pick domains that are unlikely to be used, and thereby never make money off them? Interesting.
Whether she’s doing it cleverly or not, her intent is very clear. She’s not a dementia patient scavenging bins (and probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison) she’s a person who’s made a deliberate decision to try and tie up domain names with the intent of holding them to sell later for - as she sees it - thousands of dollars (according to the site’s ‘appraisal’ values). And that makes her a cybersquatter, whether she realises it or not.
Yes, except I can’t even get to the bit where I can type in nonsense and have it valued.
This is the key here, I think. It’s pretty obvious she doesn’t have the slightest idea how the internet works, much less the (admittedly pretty dense at times) thicket of law surrounding it.
Yeah, but since she’s had it explained to her *why *and *how *the activity is inappropriate and inadvisable, I think at this point she’s given up the right to be considered an uninformed, innocent and accidental bystander and has officially began operations as a Fully Complicit Ass.
For kicks I tried it with a domain I own and use and for which I’ve been offered six figures in the past…
$7634
I think I’ll pass, thanks.
Wow, can I hire you? You created a domain now worth more than Google!
Ya, I just don’t get it. I’ve tried multiple times but she doesn’t want to believe me, or anyone for that matter. I’ve explained every god damn detail and she just doesn’t want to take my advice. She’s been living a lie and it’s going to be damn near impossible to change her ways of thinking and it’s pissing me off because the more and more I try the more angered and frustrated she gets with me, thinking I am trying to derail some non-existent fortune. I thought that since I was her kid at least she’d believe me, but it seems in this day in age dollar signs run the world. Promise people a fortune and they’ll give you the world and even their bank account information. It’s pretty damn sad that people can’t function or be motivated anymore without the thoughts of money.
Consider open source… If things weren’t so fucked up financially, people wouldn’t be doing shit for free, but they’re beginning to realize that people simply don’t want to work for shit anymore, and they want it handed to them. So their income is from advertisements and such, rather than sales, because they’d never thrive from them. Only big name companies would thrive even if their product was great.
I’m a member of several forums and I often give people tips on certain areas such as html, design, and other things, and it’s gotten so bad people can’t even fucking say thank you anymore. They just expect shit.
And that’s why the system that namboy uses is ever-growing. It gives you the impression that a fortune is easy to come by so it grabs you by the balls and doesn’t let go, unless of course you were educated on the matter prior, in which most people aren’t. And it’s FREE! Doesn’t get any better than that.
Try imagining how many people fell victim to email scams and then think how long it took for people to actually start realizing it was a load of garbage. I’m sure my mom isn’t the only one experiencing this. It just sucks it caught her at a bad time.
Why else would they be shoving religion down the throats of children? Cause it works.
As for technology it’s quite the opposite. In this case the adults are more likely to fall victim to a scam like this because for some reason adults were under the impression technology wouldn’t be important to them (my step-dad still doesn’t know how to use a computer or a real cell phone, nor does my grandmother or other relatives) so they felt they didn’t have to be apart of the technological world. Now it’s too late, and most of them are only now realizing technology is in fact running the world, but they have been pushing it off for so long they are in way over their heads, and the longer they wait the more vulnerable they become.
I know your pain, seriously. I spend way too much time trying to convince my father that just because he reads something on the internet, it doesn’t make it true. And since he’s more stubborn than me, I usually end up just getting angry and giving up.
I’m very glad he hasn’t discovered Nameboy, since I know he’d be exactly the kind of person who’d think that was a marvellous idea (for him, it’d be like a game - he likes auctions for the fun aspect) and would happily camp any and all domains he thought would pay off eventually. :smack:
The power of Christ compels you!
That is absolutely common. It is, in fact, the defining trait of someone who is about to be scammed for a lot of money.
No. Open source has been going on since the 1950s: The first software was free to share. It has been a political movement in the software world since the 1980s, and it has gone by that name since the mid 1990s, some years before the dot-com bubble. The Internet was built on open source software.
I wasn’t implying that open source was born yesterday rather than it’s been heavily expanding these past couple of years. It’s now gotten to a point where you can get nearly anything as open source and the product will stand firmly against another high dollar product, and not just something mediocre. It won’t be too long until these other companies fold because when you’re predecessor is handing out a competing product at no charge how are they to benefit… I hope you enjoy seeing advertisements 
EpicNonsense: In an open source world, you don’t earn money by charging secrecy rent on bits. You earn it by supporting your software and doing custom work to order. It’s really a more professional way of working, because it makes the programmer closer to an artisan than a short-order cook. The programmers who can’t adapt can make good money by learning how to be plumbers. Everyone will always need plumbers.
This is such a transparent scam that I have trouble believing that its legal. Which might be an avenue you should pursue: have you considered contacting your attorney general’s office? They tend to get frowny at the idea of hucksters bilking the elderly out of thousands of dollars.