The truth about buytigers.com

Let me introduce myself, I am (as many in the world already know) Aldo Tripiciano, an italian 25 y.o. webmaster.
A couple of years ago I registered some web domains for my activities, and "buytigers.com" was one of them.
And yes, I am the one selling tigers. But listen to my story...

Originally I wanted to use the domain as a price comparison software, but suddenly something happened in my mind.
I was receiving about 25 daily emails about fake business proposals, fake stories (es. the famous bonsaikittens.com), etc... I couldn't believe of how some of these emails reached me for up to 10 times in almost 10 years.

Sick of them, I remembered of my domain:buytigers.com, and I decided to forget about the price comparison stuff and start a crazy experiment.
You have to know that I am a passionate and quite talentous writer since I was 7 years old, writing stories, poems and fairy tales. I am also writing a very cool 400 pages novel that I want to become an international best seller someday.

But let's return to buytigers.com: this time I decided to create a fool story about an online sale of tigers, and study its effects over people.
I created that sample page at www.buytigers.com and sent it to some of my friends, just for fun.
The content of the page is - in my opinion - hylarious. I am selling tigers, at a random price, with a book ("Hello Tiger") written by Almee Aryal, that is not really about feeding tigers but mostly FOOTBALL :) Click here to see and eventually buy the book at its real price!
The collar itself is something crazy, since i don't think it's possible to make such a big thing with round shape of hivory. And more than all there is no information about the company, the payment, the "pets". The site is not professional, I made it (including graphics) in 15 minutes, with Adobe ImageReady, and forgetting about a lot of xHTML / Css errors.

My friends liked a lot this joke, and the temptation to see the effects on the world started growing inside me.
With my good SEO (Search engine optimization) skills it was very easy to make the site reach the top of search engines searches as "buy tigers" "buy a tiger" or "buy pet tiger", and suddenly this funny site started becoming famous. I started receiving emails from all over the world, from people claiming that they want a tiger and could pay for it instantly. Yes, at first unbelievable but true, all over the world, five continents, all nations, everywhere a lot of rich jerks of all ages, 8 to 80, asking for tigers and willing to pay for them.

Recently the phenomenon has growed esponentially, with a lot of relevant sources talking about it. Here is some sample:
Yahoo News
Care 2
Wildlife Extra
The Century Times
Oneindia
Alootechie
Petaboy

Those are just samples, while everyone is talking about me as a criminal, wild-life killer.
What's most important is that there is actually (13/09/2008) a GOVERNMENT OPERATION IN INDIA to do something with that oltrageous and horrible breeding.
But well, I didn't plan to end my days in an india jail.
So let's find out what's going on.

I am an animal lover myself. I don't even ever kill flies or mosquitos, but rather let them go out the window if they are really disturbing me. I get crazy about violence on animals.
Some of those people, potential buyiers, wrote me a lot of details about them; a lot of them already own a tiger, some of them would just buy a siberian tiger because it's more "rare". When I saw the effect I thought: "god, this is crazy". Those people would REALLY deserve to be scammed by such a website. Until today I received far more than 300 tiger requests, and you may be asking yourself what I did with them, if I am already rich with my fake sales.

Well, easy: I NEVER answered any mail. I never got any money from anyone. Actually I'm also having trouble to pay some big fees for my car (about 700 USD) since I am not a rich guy at all.

With buytigers.com I realized soon that IF I REALLY WANTED TO CHEAT PEOPLE, by just raising the tiger costs to 30000$ and stating a 3 months shipping time I could have earnt something like $500.000 in the last 3 months, then escape in some place in the world and live all my life without working. But I didn't sell anything or even answer a single mail, I got zero $, and I had to pay for the hosting myself for all this funny and weird operation. As you can notice my real name and address is not hidden in the domain info, since I am a honest person not selling anything for real and taking responsibility of my jokes, even the international ones.

The site may have hurt someone's sensibility, I am aware of it. But now stop your emotions for a moment and think about the thing itself. The more a problem is complex, the more the research over it should be accurate. I can't believe that India government is actually trying to find a crazy breeding "selling" FOOTBALL BOOKS and managed by a 25 y.o. guy living in Italy. So, the truth is that most people likes looking for reasons to make a lot of loud and to feel proud of themselves, far before using a little common and rational sense to investigate and avoid losses of time and money.

I could have made a far better e-commerce site, I could have made registration private and/or with fake personal data, spammed thousands of people to get millions of hits, put adsense on the page to gain money from clicks, whatever. I would now be an international outlaw. My conclusions are that Internet is a crazy world where it's very easy to create fake information, if you know how to use it. Actually I run a lot of websites, and I could make this thing again and again with other topics, and gain these or very bigger effects.

All of the requests I received were very very weird, and they could represent an interesting documentation for any animal / wild life safety company wanting some data about people owning and threating with tigers, wonderful creatures that should only stay free and in their part of the world! A lot of people was willing to buy up to 5 tigers in one time, others wanted it as a pet for their children, others wanted to grow their tiger in Finland or in Egypt. Most of the people was contacting me from the States, from India and from arabian countries.

So, as you can see, a lot of interesting stuff. And again, I'm open for collaborations with all kinds of organizations. The information I gathered in these years just by receiving emails is something incredible about the "tiger market". You can see my contact information below.

The last reason I did it is that I would like to work as a freelance journalist for some good magazine, or as a S.E.O. for any kind of web company, or whatever else requiring creativity, knowledge and sense of humour. Since this site represents ONLY ONE over a lot of interesting stuff and experiments I made, I could be bring a positive BOOM for your publishing company. I have a deep knowledge of the internet world, social softwares, programming languages, search engines, psychology of marketing, and all relationships between these entities; I realized a lot of stuff far more interesting and accurate (for the public) that buytigers.com. So, just contact me at: bladesty[at]yahoo.it. OR info[at]buytigers.com if you like ;)

This is not the last time you will be hearing of me on the internet... he he he... what will be next?

Nightly Update: I am already receiving job offers from someone, please be accurate in describing your proposals. I will get back to everyone with my impressions and/or questions. People asking for interviews: yes, I am available for them but we must discuss it further. Thanks to everyone writing me.

ROAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!