Making money by driving readers nuts

Thousands of readers regularly visit IAmFacingForeclosure.com not to praise Casey Serin, but to bury him.

The failed real estate flipper draws more rubberneckers than a rush-hour wreck with his annoying behavior. Serin, 24, has perfected his “irritainment” performance art to the extent that CNET News.com recently dubbed him “the world’s most hated blogger.”

The California resident launched the site in September to chronicle his efforts to repay “every dirty penny” of the huge debts he incurred buying eight houses in hopes of reselling them at a quick profit even as the residential real estate market was peaking.

Serin first irritated readers by admitting — in posts with titles such as “Will I go to jail for mortgage fraud?” — that he’d inflated his revenues on the “stated income” loans he took out to buy the properties in 2005 and 2006.

Some critics blamed him for helping overheat housing prices. Others were simply angry that he played fast and loose with the facts and refused to get a regular job.

The attention-craving blogger then infuriated the “haterz” (as Serin dubbed readers who flood his posts with negative comments) by floating crazy schemes for getting back in the black. These included an “almost-guaranteed roulette strategy” and cutting expenses by living in his car.

Serin blamed his wife, Galina, for spoiling the latter dream, writing at the end of April, “Yes, I sometimes feel held back by marriage.” By that point, she was cleaning houses for cash, they were living with her sister and he had lost the last home to foreclosure.

The situation came to a head May 17. That night, Serin signed an agreement promising to “kill the blog and get a job” if he couldn’t deliver $1,000 to the kitchen table by 11:59 p.m. every Friday. He also agreed to stop writing “about Galina or any family member.”

A new advertising program (aided, ironically, by the “haterz” who compulsively visit the site) enabled Serin to show Galina the money. But he broke the agreement’s second part with a May 27 entry detailing how one of his brothers accused him of neglecting the marriage.

Serin pulled the plug on IAmFacingForeclosure.com May 31. He erased the archives and posted a farewell message on the otherwise-blank page.

In one version of a note he revised several times before removing it, too, Serin wrote, “It all came down to choosing between my wife and this blog.”

After copying several juicy IAFF entries cached by Google, I e-mailed Serin and three advertisers June 2 to find out more about why he’d abandoned the site.

The advertisers said Serin had provided pro-rated refunds. They also expressed sympathy for the young entrepreneur and said the ads had worked for them. He’d apparently handled the closure responsibly.

Serin responded to my interview request June 4. “I’m not sure,” he e-mailed. “I might be willing to. I will run by my wife.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the site sprang back to life. “There has been some recent developments and now after being down for a week this foreclosure blog is back,” Serin wrote, both cryptically and ungrammatically. “More in the next post on why I was forced to bring this foreclosure blog back up.”

While more than 100 “haterz” were responding to the post, I e-mailed and called Serin. No response. He’d excised entries about Galina and the contract, however, suggesting she might have attached some strings to his “forced” comeback.

Thursday morning, two of his advertisers expressed shock that Serin had revived the site. And then it was time to file this column.

While I can’t deliver the full story here, I’ll post updates on the Blogspotter blog. Or you can visit IAmFacingForeclosure.com for the latest.

Irritating, isn’t it?