Years ago, emails started to flood in offering website design services. Some were real offers by companies and many were real but from individuals as it is the sort of work that can be done easily from home.
Then lots of scammers saw this as an opportunity – offer these services but take the money and do nothing or subcontract at low cost to an idiot who will do a bad job.
After some years of this, the offers turned a bit more aggressive – stating such as that they had checked my website and found it lacking and giving a random general list of faults that they could fix.
These messages were annoying in their volume and being told our website was no good.
Some businesses offering website design moved on to saying that although our website was very good in some ways, it needed more work on some specified things. The scammers copied this new approach.
Again, these were general comments as the scammers never actually viewed the website they were talking about. When you are sending out these messages by the million – you don’t have time to actually view websites.
Then the scammers moved on to offering SEO services. After a while these changed into starting with insults about the lack of SEO on our site and how better SEO can bring in more customers.
You can see the pattern here – the changes often start with genuine businesses offering the services in a new way then the scammers catch on and copy the approach.
Next was social media optimisation and then onto web chat facilities and recently onto chatbots and some have moved on to AI chatbots.
A recent email to the radio station first of all compliments us on our great website design and SEO then offers statistics on why just getting people to the website is pointless unless you have an automated way to get them to make a purchase. The message has pages of boring stuff about how effective these new services can be and eventually some links for us to try their demonstration.
No thanks – any email that starts with a lot of lies about us and our website (however complementary) could never lead to business.
If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.
