Kevin (the administrative contact for zieak.com) received this email today seeking a text ad on one of my old blog posts.
hello,
i will pay you something in the ballpark of $35 dollars to place a text ad on your webpage: http://www.zieak.com/2007/03/08/clearing-out-the-myspace-fake-profiles/ the text ad would be for a company that sells fake diplomas. i can pay you through paypal immediately. please get back to me if you are interested
thanks!
sarah raymond
I foresee many solicitations like this in the future. $35 is a fair price for a permalink from a website as old and varied as zieak.com. If i added the link none of my regular readers (you) would ever likely see. Just the 35 people that have done a search for “myspace fake” or something similar and landed on my page. Of course, linking to scammy sites is a good way to get my pagerank knocked down because of poor credibility - but it is interesting to see the advertisers starting to approach site owners about placing content.
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Lorenzo Reyes on 
Tiffany Borges on 
May 7th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Well, I’m not sure having some text placements would be so bad for you. Seems like if you are careful which to approve it could be a nice way to offset the costs of running the site.
August 16th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Whether you like it or not fake diplomas are a fact of life, the best way to counter these fraudsters is for the HR department to thoroughly check the credentials of all their future employees.