“Instant Karma’s gonna get you…”
I got an email from Freddy scot (sic), he’s got a new company that will be importing Kola Nuts and other Central American ag products.
Freddy is also deaf so we can’t talk on the phone.
He needs a website right away and his budget is from $4000 to $8000. It should look similar to and function just like www.somewebsite.com.
Oh, he needs to pay by credit card.
And he has a consultant who will provide the text and images. But this consultant can’t take credit cards so he wants to overpay me and then have me send a check to the consultant. (Then the scam kicks in: they’ll go for a refund from the credit card company and I’ll be left holding the bag.)
I’ve gotten this exact (word for word) proposal about 8 times in the last 2 years from a number of people, all with Gmail accounts (which can’t be traced) This has led me to believe that somewhere on the dark web some huckster is selling this as a turnkey, cut and paste scam operation and bragging about all the money he’s made. I’m sure it sounds impressive: make thousands of dollars with just a gmail account.
In fact, I would like to see the pitch. Here are the emails I sent to Freddy:
Freddy, I’m sorry, but I’ve already seen this scam. I hope it didn’t cost a lot of money to buy this “money making opportunity.” Most of my web design friends have all gotten this dozens of times already. It might have worked the first time, but by now I’m afraid the market has been saturated. You’ve wasted your money. Good luck on finding an honest way to make a living, its much easier on your karma.
Then a second one:
Hey Freddy, where did you buy this scam? It’s obviously a cut and paste get rich quick thing. As a student of marketing I would like to see the sales pitch.
Over the last six months I’ve asked several of the would-be scammers for the info, but they never get back to me.
Freddy is just learning who the real victim is in this scam. The original scammer probably did get some web designers to bite, but I bet he’s making more selling his template for a scam than he did actually scamming designers.