Fake Insurance Leads Cost $4,800,000

Posted on | November 16, 2008 | No Comments

Here is a story to consider if you are thinking about buying leads from another website. MostChoice hired a contractor, Brandon Byrd, to submit falls leads to its site. Byrd purportedly worked up to 30 hours a week for over nine months, and then turned around and knowingly sold these leads to Netquote.com.

While this is a popular marketing tactic for insurance, mortgage, real estate and other industries, I think lead generation is an out-dated internet marketing strategy.

When I created a mortgage site at Mortgage101.com in 1998, lead generation quickly became our largest revenue source from mortgage brokers across the country.

Today, while it is still ranked in competitive search results on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the most valuable marketing activity for advertisers is gained from sending traffic to their site instead of trying to generate on their behalf.

In today’s internet marketing world, you are better off directly marketing with potential customers via your website instead of buying captured information from 3rd parties. When I talk to companies in other industries, this same trend is quickly validated.

NetQuote is based here in Denver, Colorado and I know a few people that have, or currently work there. I am glad to see that NetQuote put in the quality control systems and that they also took action against MostChoice even though it took over 2 years for the judgement to be placed. One last note, NetQuote was only looking for $2.4 million in punitive damages, but the jury ACTUALLY doubled the penalty according to SEOMoz.

Source: http://www.marketingvox.com/mostchoice-forks-over-48m-for-stuffing-rival-with-fake-leads-041980/

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Fake Insurance Leads Cost $4,800,000

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