Apparently it was not enough for Francis to rip off AdultVest investors for millions of dollars, now he has turned his sights on ripping off the adult industry itself. Francis has bilked lots of porn advertisers out of some big dollars by faking the iPorn user numbers. Not only does Francis claim that iPorn is worth $1 B, he is telling advertisers that iPorn has 500,000 unique users per day (the real number is 8K/day) and making copies of his Alexa ranking as proof. This is how he perpetrated his scam:
In late May, iPorn’s Alexa ranking was 201,000. A few weeks later it was 2,986. This type of meteoric growth is nearly impossible. In iPorn’s case, it was fraudulent. Francis spent tens of thousands of dollars with traffic brokers to purchase garbage traffic -- skimmed traffic redirects, pop-unders and 404 error redirects. In fact he purchased 25 million of these hits from one traffic broker alone. This is the kind of traffic that users have no idea how they got on a site and just click on the site to close it…before it pops up again…and again…and again. Of course nothing converts because these users never meant to go to the iPorn site in the first place and most leave within seconds – the amount of time it takes to find the close window button.
Francis figured out how to game his Alexa rankings by throwing lots of dollars to get tens of millions of hits in a short period of time. Once iPorn broke into the top 3000 ranking on Alexa, Francis instructed his salespeople (most who have left the company because they did not want to be part of Francis’ fraudulent scheme) to make screen capture shots of the ranking and start ‘dialing for dollars’ calling every company that advertises on porn sites and getting pre-payments based on his Alexa ranking. Francis targeted a few of the larger companies to contact himself, to create six figure deals to rip them off personally.
Surprisingly, many top companies fell for the scam and prepaid ad dollars, and a few of the larger companies entered into more complicated deals so that Francis could charge them the really big bucks. Some of these larger companies did a 2 or 3 day test to confirm the numbers. When this occurred, Francis purchased some higher quality traffic just during the test phase to be sure that the conversion rates were not in the toilette. After the test—and AFTER the money was wired into his bank account--Francis would turn off the higher quality traffic because he was losing money on it.
This was a good scam because it is believed that Francis raked in well over $500,000 within the past month from his victims. Now, of course, there was the small problem of delivering on the numbers. Advertisers quickly started phoning iPorn demanding their money back. So Francis devised another scheme and ordered one of his techs to create a script to send 50% of this phony traffic directly to the advertisers on a rotation basis so they would see lots of clicks—but to have the traffic appear that it was coming from iPorn and not directly from the traffic brokers.
The other 50% of the phony traffic still goes to iPorn to keep the Alexa rankings high so he can continue to perpetrate his scam. However, Francis does not want to blow all his new cash on traffic (he needs most of it to spend on his lavish lifestyle since he already blew all the AdultVest investors money), so you will see that his iPorn Alexa ranking has been slipping.
And those poor advertisers, they are now getting clicks from users who not only have no idea who iPorn is, but have no idea how they got to the advertisers ads in the first place. Do you think there are good conversions going on? Well, I bet the advertisers know their not—and if they read this—they now will know why.
But Francis has not stopped there. Quick recap: 1) Francis bilks well-heeled investors for millions in AdultVest, 2) Francis bilks porn advertisers and other big companies for hundreds of thousands. What is the encore?
Now he has targeted the ‘little guy’ and trying to bilk people not in the industry out of their life savings by attempting to sell “iPorn clone sites” for $25K each. These clone sites are exact duplicates of the iPorn site, but with a different logo slapped on it—and Francis gets the cash upfront plus 50% of any ad revenue on the site. Now, these so called clone sites does not take very long to create and charging $2500 might be a stretch—but $25K is robbery. And of course, Francis is sending some of his phony traffic to the clone site (yes, he already found one poor sucker to take him up on his offer) to ‘prove’ that this was a legit deal. Well you can be the judge of this one.
I finally come to the end of posting my iPorn expose. Fact is stranger than fiction and knowledge is power my friends—so anyone else that gets ripped off by Francis Koenig can’t say that they were not warned beforehand…unless of course they don’t read this forum. So do this industry a huge favor and share this posting wherever you can
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