Joe M.
Beware of SOLD.com fake leads
Beware of SOLD.COM fake leads They may have had a legitimate lead offering in years past, but the past 12 months and $thousands has revealed to me one of the biggest scams on real estate agents that is still in business and still perpetuating its racket. They present their product as referrals that request a market valuation or help obtaining a cash buyer from an agent. Many of the leads I could not reach after several attempts over weeks. Okay, not unusual. Of the 50-60% of leads I did reach on the phone, ALL OF THEM, except one, stated they have no plans or interest in selling for years to come and had no idea why I would be calling them. The one contact who was looking at selling clearly explained that she was in no way interested in having an agent reach out to her and never clicked a thing on the internet because she had always planned to hire a long-time friend to seller her house. After she listed with that friend agent a month later, SOLD.com emailed me a shame-on-you email and encouraged me to be more vigilant in the future. Epitome of insult to injury. I learned after the first 10 or so contacts that most of the contacts SOLD.com delivers as referrals or leads are just people identified as likely homeowners and SOLD.com scrapes the internet for their phone and email. Maybe a few of them happened to be searching for homes or researching home values on websites SOLD owns or is partnered with and provides SOLD their cookie data. Sold.com gleans what they can from cookies and skip traces the rest of their contact info and packages it as a "referral". They call their product a referral, but it's not even a lead because the person didn't request contact or services (raise their hand) from an agent. Most of them just happen to own a home. A few of them just happen to be online maybe researching home values, have their contact info embedded in a cookie, and elsewhere published online, and then they get an unsuspecting call from SOLD's partner agent for their city. Again, some of the folks I talked to had just recently bought their home and had no idea how I could be calling about help with their home's value, because they have no plans to move for many years from now, and they haven't been on the internet for many months researching real estate. SOLD.com claims each piece of contact information is verified with a bold green "verified" badge next to the homeowners name, address, and phone number. One of the packaged garbage contact data sets was the name of a 9-year-old boy as the verified homeowner, the phone number of the homeowner's live-in boyfriend (the father of that boy) as the verified homeowner's phone number, and the address of a home the real homeowner that the boyfriend said just bought two years ago and plans to live in for years to come. Out of over maybe 20 so-called referrals over about 4 months, I was able to reach maybe 9 or 10 after several attempts. NOT ONE said they filled out a request form or clicked something online, and only one of those, a FSBO lead (who swore she never clicked a thing and was already in discussion with a flat fee brokerage), had intention of selling. One of the contacts I actually know. She lives a few blocks from me. She works in the IT department with the school district. She assured me that neither she nor her husband have done anything on the internet about real estate for months. They plan to live in the home until she retires, 7 years from now, and maybe longer. What a dispicable scam. Needless to say, I will be contacting my credit card company's fraud department to get my money back.



