In a week that has seen the news dominated by revelations of dishonesty, profiteering, racketeering, and tax fraud in the political establishment it seems fitting that the following story found it’s way onto my radar.

Don’t worry, I am not going to link to the person behind the following scam. I will quote from his blog but I have no intention of giving this particular cheat the benefit of any Upstart Blogger Google juice.

The story begins with a blogger. A young blogger who didn’t want to play by the rules. Even though he had read Upstart Blogger religiously, and had taken advantage of the UPSTARTBLOGGER free three month hosting coupon code, he decided to ignore all of my advice about honest traffic generation, relationship building and professional blogging.

Instead he decided to cheat.

He even told his readers that he was going to cheat. His debut blog post proclaimed his dishonest intentions as follows,

I’ve found a way to make money with blogs working just one hour a day. Productivity God Tim Ferris has inspired me to outsource every aspect of my blogging endeavours. My content will be syndicated blog posts selected at random by a number of plugins that I developed by reverse engineering some automatic blogging software called RSS2Blog.

RSS2Blog is a badly written piece of code but it works. Most of the time. So I purchased it, pulled it apart, turned it into a WordPress plugin and then charged back my credit card to get my money refunded!

Now I have a system that works. My hosting allows me to build more blogs than I will ever need and gives me enough bandwidth to power my wildest dreams. Each day I add a subdomain to my main domain name. I install WordPress, pick a topic and my plugin does the rest, hoovering up content from top name blogs and posting it on my new blog.

If each blog attracts some unique visitors all I need to do is keep building and the traffic will keep rising.

And then, in his next blog post a couple of weeks later, his arrogance continues. Unfortunately, this time he appears to back it up with the following credible results,

Three weeks later and the money is rolling in. I’ve built on blog every day for the last fifteen working days across three weeks. This was achieved working less than one hour every day. My syndication plugin took care of everything. It found the killer content and posted it on my new blogs.

Each blog attracted approximately 20 unique visitors per day. That doesn’t sound like much but add all those little blogs together and that makes 300 unique visitors per day.

I have added adverts to each of my blogs and already they are making money. Not much money but the amount is growing as I add more subdomains and more blogs to my empire.

Working under 1 hour each day my traffic is growing at a rate of 20 unique visitors per day, every day. I have found a way to successfully game the blogging system and make traffic and money with little or no effort.

I bet his parents are very proud of their young scammer.

It would seem that in any arena where large amounts of money are readily available that there is always an abundance of liars and cheats who want to muddy the waters with their dishonesty.

Hopefully, scammers like this will eventually get kicked off the internet. I took the liberty of reporting this particular scammer to his host, since they are also my host and a company that I respect and value. I’m sure they won’t want him around on their servers when they discover what he is doing.

It will, no doubt, cost me a refunded referral fee for the hosting that he purchased via my link but it’s a small price to pay for making the blogosphere a cleaner place.

Blogging can make you rich. It can make you rich in two ways. You can either work hard, build relationships, write quality content and then watch your business and income grow with pride, or you can just scam your way to a quick buck by cheating and gaming the system for short term profit.

The first method works. The second method, I’m sorry to say, also works. But the second method makes you no better than the liars and cheats who infest all walks of society, from politicians to bankers, from pick pockets to car thieves.

It’s a choice that everyone has to make. To either make money honestly or dishonestly.

Make the wrong choice and you might make a short lived quick profit. But, sure as night follow day, someone will catch you and pull the rug out from under your feet.

Make the right choice, blog professionally and intelligently and the rest, including success, money, influence and respect, will follow.