Solo ad scams are not clever. That is the frustrating part. Twelve years and 4,000 customers into this, the same handful of patterns keep working on new buyers, not because they are sophisticated, but because new buyers do not know what to ask for.
I am going to lay them out plainly. I am not naming anybody and I am not telling you stories I cannot back up. These are the shapes, and the checks that kill them.
The most common one by a wide margin.
You pay. Traffic supposedly runs. At the end you get a number. Maybe a screenshot. The number matches what you ordered, because of course it does, somebody typed it.
You have no way to confirm any of it happened. You cannot separate a bad campaign from no campaign at all.
The check: insist on a live stats page you can open during delivery, showing unique clicks and geography. Not after. During. A screenshot can be made. A live page that agrees with your own tracking while the traffic lands cannot.
This one check eliminates most of the field before you spend a dollar.
Your counter goes up. Your visits are there. Your opt ins are nearly zero and your page has converted fine before.
Automated traffic is real in every sense that a click counter can measure. It is worth nothing.
The check: run your own tracking alongside the seller's. Watch time on page, geography, and the shape of arrival over time. Real email traffic arrives in a curve, because humans open email when they wake up and at lunch and after work. Traffic arriving in flat even intervals did not come from a person. I walk through the full setup in How to Track Solo Ad Clicks.
This is the one that gets experienced buyers, because nothing is technically false.
The clicks are real humans. The geography is fine. Your opt in rate looks acceptable. And then every single one of those subscribers goes silent and never opens another email.
There are three real quality levels in traffic: low intent, medium intent and high intent. Cheap clicks are cheap because the intent is low. Nobody is lying to you about the clicks. They are just selling you attention from people who click reflexively and buy nothing.
The check: judge every order on open rates over the 30 days after delivery, not on the click count. You are mailing new leads twice a day during that window anyway, so you will know fast. Full breakdown in Cheap Solo Ads.
If a price is dramatically below the market, that gap has to come from somewhere. It comes out of the quality of the list, the intent of the traffic, or the existence of the delivery.
Nobody sells genuinely good email traffic at a loss for your benefit.
The check: know the real range before you shop. My pricing is public: 100 clicks $55, 250 $112.50, 500 $225, 1,000 $450, 2,500 $1,125, 5,000 $2,000, custom up to 10,000, with monthly autopilot plans at the same per click price. A number far under that is telling you what you are getting.
You pay. Communication stops. Questions go unanswered. Eventually there is a number, or there is nothing.
This one is entirely preventable and it is prevented before you pay, not after.
The check: ask three questions up front. When does traffic start? How do I watch it? How do I reach you while it runs? On my orders: clicks start arriving within 24 hours, you get the stats page from the beginning, and you can reach me. A seller who is vague on any of the three is answering the question.
Less a scam than a quiet abdication, but it costs you the same money.
You are asked to write the email. It goes out exactly as you wrote it. Nobody with any knowledge of that list stood between your words and their subscribers.
Your copy is accurate about your offer and blind about that audience. The clicks it produces are low intent by construction, and then the traffic gets blamed.
The check: ask who writes the email. I write it for every order myself, because the ad is what qualifies the click before anyone ever sees your page. Here is exactly how I do it.
Praise is cheap to collect. Repeat purchases are not.
Nobody buys traffic a second time to be nice. They buy again because the first order did something for them.
The check: look for evidence of people coming back, not volume of quotes. My reorder rate is 85%, and that is the number I would want to see from anybody I bought from.
You do not need to be clever. You need to be specific.
Run those and the patterns above have nothing to grip. I put the same list in a wider context in How to Choose a Solo Ads Vendor.
None of this requires trusting me either. That is rather the point.
Order 500 clicks and verify every number yourself.
Seth Johnson has been buying solo ad traffic since 2007. He tested me with 100 clicks, then 200, then ran 500 clicks to an aggressive squeeze page and made $965 in commissions over about a month.
September 23, 2026 · 5 min read
Remy ordered Mixed Tier and thousands of clicks. It came back at 98% Tier 1 with a 40% opt in rate, at about half the per click price he had been paying.
September 23, 2026 · 6 min read