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!! SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCES: What Scams Have You Fallen for in AM/IM? (44)

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I have been reading Mr. Green's blog and videos as well as Mr. Benjamin Yong's blog and video, and they both talk about some scams they encountered early on in their careers where they lost quite a bit of money.

So, I am curious, what other scams have you fallen for in the past in AM/IM, and what lesson did you draw from this?

Let's share experiences and stories!!!

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not a scam at all... but IMGRIND..

lesson learned: don't drink all the kool aid you are fed.

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A lot of this happens with new traffic sources who pitch us all the time. Usually, I just ask them if they are willing to share the risk and get paid on a per conversion basis while we test them out on proven campaigns.

This usually scares away the low quality traffic sources.

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Clicking on a "Make Money from Home, Google Pays me $1067 a day" link, and actually believing the sales spiel ... bad, bad mistake.

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What do them products even contain?

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I signed up for "Affplaybook PPV Masterind" for $700, and it was a bunch of super shady crap I wouldn't pay $0.70 for. I tried the methods and it got me kicked out of 2 networks. But you know it's....

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Nothing of value, but also constant harassment via phone and emails for upsells for several thousand of dollars. Very bad stuff.

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At an early stage I fell victim to a few scams.

Why?

• I was too nice.
• I was very naive.
• I was too eager.
• I didn't trust my instincts.
• I didn't do enough research/due diligence.
• I trusted people by default.

What do I do now?

• Sadly, now I make people earn my trust, instead of giving it away.
• I ask for referrals, getting people to vouch for whoever I'm thinking of working with.
• I write up clear expectations from the beginning.
• I trust my instincts.
• If something doesn't seem right, I deal with it immediately, instead of letting things slide.

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I remember signing up to all the ppc-coach sites back in the day.

All wasted money, didn't learn a thing and stayed subscribed for months to "unlock" the new monthly techniques.

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That's really interesting.. i always wondered what David was teaching at those things.

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Think cookie stuffing/popping over clickbank offers. ::groundbreaking::

Anyway, I think of it as $700 I had to pay to realize how shitty that forum is and that STM is the place I need to be. So I wouldn't say it was $700 lost.

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It was indeed very painful when you invest your hard earn money onto something promising and turns out to be a scam...

To me, everyone needs to be scammed at least once in order to realize that it's a cruel and dog eat dog world - and that's how we all learnt to be a better person and smarter person - and often people who got scammed and move on tend to have a higher chance to succeed.

Well, just saying.

Anyway... these are the ass holes that scammed my money:




Shaun Stenning --> I believe this guy scammed at least 10m from the victims.

Lesson: Learn to move on instead of crying like a baby - and work for the "WHY" that's in you (why you want to make money online? For whom?)

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All and all the PPC-Coach was filled with a load of crap BUT I did hit my first $100/day campaigns with Polls. It did teach a LOT of bad habits though.

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what kind of bad habits were they teaching if you don't mind me asking?>

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Basically the same with me, don't trust anyone in this industry until you get to meet them in person and hang out with them, then you can see if the person just want all the good info you can give him and steal your camps.

Don't be too nice when dealing with account reps (usually pretty women), it's your money and you should demand quality and fair prices, and must importantly, do a deep research before making a deal.

But, I think we all felt for some kind of scam when starting, like buying at least an ebook from the self-called gurus or paying for a course not worth a cent.

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Same pinch. I also joined the program, in the beginning days of affiliate marketing with paid traffic, wasted about 2 months time working on the method shared, but nothing worked.

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Being based in NZ and low on funds, I didn't have the means of meeting face to face with all the people I worked with. Skype had to do it for. I just made sure I didn't put myself in vulnerable positions from the start. I didn't meet face to face with one of my business partners until after 4 years! (I still work with him today). Stackman & BBrock I met them after a year of working with them.

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Any entrepreneurial venture requires a lot of hard work, a wide range of skills, and quite a bit of luck to even have a chance of succeeding.

Even with all these components, 90%+ of ALL entrepreneurial ventures fail.

AM/IM is no different.

Any "guru" that says otherwise, or that making money is easy, or that there is an automated system ... as long as you sign up for the guru's course, ebook, DVDs whatever, is most likely running a scam. They tell you what you want to hear, and they push all the right buttons, but pretty soon, your wallet will be a lot lighter than before.

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I've been lucky enough not to really be scammed but I've come close.

After EWA sent out three wires late I killed a $x,xxx a day campaign because I didn't trust them to pay out. It took around another year or so before they finally collapsed, but I consider myself lucky since they'd completely stopped paying a lot of people long before then. I was lucky I had years experience in the industry at the time, if that had happened in 2008 I would almost certainly have kept the campaign going long after they stopped paying me completely.

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What was the issue with them?

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Not scams but I didn't get much value from these ...

PPC/PPV Formula ... Gauher Chaudhry ... about $800 (one-time)
PPC/PPV/MediaBuy-Coach ... About $1200 in total (about $100 monthly)

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I guess everyone had their time..

My first 'scam' encounter was with a blackhat spam tool for CL spamming/harvesting.. ended up about $2,000 out in the long run.. this was right when I was just starting with AM..

Also signed up to ppc-coach a long time ago.. Definitely learnt the basics from there... and even some from affplaybook..

Ryan Eagle failed to pay ~5k ...

A "friend" I loaned money to who promised he'd pay back 10% interest each week til the entire amount was paid, ended up only paying 6% on what I loaned him and just stopped payments.

Totally unrelated, but the sale of my car recently in Canada, a "friend" was supposed to buy it, turns out he couldn't, tried selling, got a lot less than what I was able to get for it when I had it listed for sale and only ended up getting paid 4.6k out of 6.3k which was the agreed amount. He drove the car for ~6months pracitcally for free too.

Moral of the story, be careful mixing money with friends.. you tend to lose a few that way..

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BB.... And folks are still getting scammed to this day

Oh and paying $1000 an hour for coaching in the mmo niche... And countless thousands on solo ads.

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That was a wise move.

At the end of the day, it is collected revenue that matters ... not just potentially receivable revenue that just shows up on a computer screen.

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This just saved me $900.00. Thank you good sir!

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To quote Robert Ringer from his fantastic book, "Winning Through Intimidation:" "Closing deals is so much trash, if you my friend, don't get no cash."

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Oh my goodness back in 2007 I had just started blogging. I paid $118 (that was like a month's worth of rent for a boarding house room back then from where I am) for a how to make money live workshop by Fireball Planet. Now I realize that just so happened to be his niche... the MMO market. It was all nice-to-know but of what I can recall, the next actions were upsells to his other subscription services

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my worst experience was with Pre Pay
you never know if the traffic will actually come or not, worst thing was to try and get the money back while the source is trying to avoid me.

lesson learnt - No Pre Pay for new traffic sources only after the source is proved himself.

so from all the above trends and MR. Green says it perfect the worst scams are when you trust by default and when you don't trust your instincts.

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Back in the day I started out on the BH forums and fell for a scam or two, but quickly learnt if you are going to hang with that crowd then you expect to get burnt once or twice.

I then progressed to Warrior forum but very very quickly realised what a pile of crap the whole place was.....and still is.

Ive never fallen for any of the coaching or crap like that but can easily see how people do, everyones looking for the golden ticket and to be shown what to do so its an easy crowd to scam.

I was on IMGrind for a while and actually got some value from it, but have only been on STM for a long time. I reckon Ive spent about $5k here on subs over the years lol but you only need the odd nugget of info from someone to make that back many times over so its a pretty good deal overall.

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Before starting to work with anyone I don't know I always check https://www.facebook.com/groups/peop...ntpay/?fref=nf

Apart from that safest thing you can do is ask for a refundable prepayment. If they want to do that, you're in the clear. If they don't you can ask:

1. Three business references from current clients --> call them to see what their experience is with company X, Y, Z
2. Check linkedin. If a company is not on linkedin, its very suspicious and could be scam. If they're on linkedin and have +5 employees, 95% sure everything will be fine
3. Google them, look around on STM and on various FB pages such as the one above
4. Give them an internal credit so that your financial risk is always limited. e.g. 10k$ for each new advertiser that complies with steps 1-3 (until they pay; then take the cap off)

I'm in affiliate marketing for 5 years now and normally you have to calculate that - with doing steps 1 to 4 - around 1% of your REVENUES (not profits) will not be paid for and will end up with the collections agency.
E.g. you're invoicing 4mio a year, that means you will have 40K$ in bad debt....Just my experience. Would love to hear how you guys see this.

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This one’s not strictly IM, though a lot of our business was done via our website, and my original concept for it was as an almost entirely virtual web-based business with a global footprint. The version of this business that is running and successful today (with me not attached) hews much closer to my original concept than the one we built.

I took on a couple of partners at a low point when I was desperate and unsure of myself in 2011. Both guys were big talkers, but guys I’d known for years and I knew both were quite smart.

One had run a few successful businesses with other partners, but had falling outs with both and each time each business crumbled after the other guy left. However, he maintained he was the cause of the success both times. I knew he was a handful, but hubristically figured I could manage him and it’d be worth it for his smarts and dynamism.

The other was a middle manager at a Fortune 50 company, and basically had a photographic memory and knew everything about finance, management, etc. Another smooth talker, but he claimed to have money and it’s always good to have a smart guy with deep pockets on the team.

We all invested an equal amount of money, and went in as full partners, a third of the business each.

I had a great idea for a business in admissions consulting, with a site we’d get clients to sign up on for $10K+ packages to help them get into school.

The first guy quickly built a house-of-cards cult-of-personality business that demanded huge amounts of time and effort from me just to stay afloat (I’d manage the business from 7 AM to 6 PM, and then manage his wild emotional swings from 6 PM to 3 or 4 AM, 7 days a week). He lied to staff, potential clients, and potential partners constantly to impress them and make them want to do business with us, and I’m a “be as honest as you can be” guy, so this left me completely uncomfortable and way out of my depth, very quickly.

The second guy burned out quickly from all of the first guy’s wild mood swings and accusations and temper tantrums and just quit contributing pretty early on, though he still retained his full third of the business and kept calling it an “investment” (we’d only invested about $3K each to start).

First guy ended up repeatedly threatening to leave unless we gave him a bunch of contractual promises and “good faith” monetary payments, which we had to do since the way he’d structured things it’d completely collapse without him, but I kept thinking he was going to be the rocket fuel guy we needed to make this thing work. I went into this business $8K in debt with no income, adamant about not investing any more than that and that the only way we’d get more money being if we made sales; I left the business $60K in debt, all of this from the business, with a lot of that going straight into the first partner’s pockets.

I shut the business after 4 months, closed the office, and laid off the employees (many of whom cried; it really sucked). First partner claimed I and the second partner still owed him money contractually and would sue; we almost definitely could’ve won, and even gotten a judgment against him for the money he’d made off with, but second partner didn’t want to deal with it and offered to just give him what he wanted (full IP rights to the business name, concept, and creative… most of which came out of my head; it was my business proposal), just to be rid of him. I was displeased, but agreed just to be done with it.

To first partner’s credit, he then went off and sold the remnants of the business for who-knows-how-much (since he had full control now, he pocketed the entire take), and it is now a successful venture-back startup with loads of profit, and my dream has been realized. Sadly, I am not a part of it. Guess that’s how it goes in entrepreneurship. Anyway, to the new managers’ credit, they’ve done a better job building my business than I did. At least the new one has my name in it.

Aftermath: took me two years to pay off that debt, paid out from my other IM business (which I’d actually started before this other one; had virtually no time to work on it during this maelstrom though). I spent 5 months recovering in early 2012, which is a lot for me – I’m usually a pretty resilient guy.

Lessons learned:

• Never trust someone else to make the business happen for you. You’re just handing your balls over and hoping the other guy’s going to treat them gently.

• If you’re bootstrapping, someone’s got to be the get-clients guy. In our case, we had the silver-tongued guy (first partner), the manager (second partner), and the workhorse (me). We all had some sales experience, but no one actually had experience getting clients in our market, and when we started out with high expense and no one who realistically knew how to get clients, it was pretty much doomed from the start.

• Everything has to be contracted, no exceptions. At one point, I signed a $30,000 contract with First Partner where he’d get $30K in exchange for a small chunk of his shares. That’s all that was on the paper, but what he’d said in PERSON was that this money was just going to him because he really needed to feel like I and the other partner believed in him, and he was going to put all this money back into the business anyway. I didn’t have much experience and have always been a friendship/loyalty kind of guy, so I trusted him. Even shook his hand and told him, “Make me right.” A month later he was claiming he’d never said anything like that and that that contract had never been for anything but what was written on the paper: we pay him $30K, and we get X% of his shares (in this failing and revenue-devoid business with its sky-high monthly costs). Touché, business partner; lesson learned. If it isn’t in the contract, assume the worst, and assume the other guy won’t do it.

• Never make decisions tired / late at night. First biz partner would pressure me for decisions late at night (like, 2 AM, when I’m desperately sleep deprived and have been trying to get out of there for 8 hours now but he keeps insisting we need to “get to resolution”), and eventually I would just say fine, whatever, and agree to something. What I agreed to was always, in retrospect, some awful deal that I would never agree to when well-rested (paying him lots of money for, essentially, nothing; etc.). If I can detect the other person is putting even the slightest pressure on me for a decision now, I will tell him, “I don’t make decisions under pressure, so send me your offer via email and I’ll review it later with a clear head.” And if he continues to beg and plead, I’ll just say, “In that case, I’m not interested,” and cut it off. I’m no longer troubled by the “But what if I’m passing up on the deal of a lifetime?” question anymore, because I know if a guy’s pressuring you that hard, it’s always a bad deal. I knew this logically before, but now I know it emotionally and experientially, with is worth about 100x logical book knowledge.

• Social media managers are not for startups. This was back in late 2011, and the social media bubble’s more or less popped by now (though Facebook’s stock price hasn’t realized it yet!), but just in case you’ve got an IM business and you want to get your social on, save the $4K a month you’d spend on a fulltime social media manager and put that into media buys, or sales people, or whatever you need to actually get results. Find someone who’s already on the team and really enjoys social, and have them do it instead. They’ll do a better job, and you won’t be throwing your money away.

Ultimately, I learned everything in first partner’s manipulation playbook from all the intensive time and study spent around him, and when he tried to leverage a contract we had to take control of my other projects, I lawyered up, boxed him in, and got him out. His fatal flaw was fighting me for too long; Lycurgus instructed the Spartans to never fight one enemy for too long, lest you teach that enemy how to beat you. In this case, first partner fought me too long, taught me how to beat him, and I eventually did.

Bunch more lessons I learned from this one, but I don’t want this post to get any longer than it already is. It was hands down one of the most informative periods of my life; set me back a bit in some ways, but I’m happy I got screwed early on when all I could lose was $60K, instead of later on when I will (hopefully) have a lot more to lose.

Once you’ve learned how to fight off the jackals, that’s a lesson that sticks with you.

Chase

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Yikes ... Seems like you've had your fair share of battle scars.

I suppose it ended up becoming an untenable situation and no amount of preparation would have changed that.

That said, I think perhaps two more valuable lessons that folks can take away from here are

1. Choose your partners wisely. This should be seen like a marriage not a one night stand, where you see each other together through thick and thin.

2. Get aligned on expectations upfront and over invest in this if necessary. Most shareholders agreements have vesting schedules even for the founders as well as "bad leaver" clauses in case one of the partners don't pull their own weight. In the excitement of getting a venture started, many people just gloss over this step of explicitly (and legally) aligning all the parties' expectations.

In any case, glad to see that you have bounced back from what must have been a truly awful period in your life.

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cmdeal,

Haha... yeah, that was terrible. But invaluable. Your takeaways are on point:

Advice I've repeatedly seen (post- all this) is any prospective partners you're thinking about teaming up with, work on them in small jobs first and get a taste for how they are in a team setting. In my case with this business, these were a couple of intelligent buddies of mine I'd traveled with and had great conversations with, but never actually worked together with... working with someone is dramatically different than, say, doing a roadtrip through Europe with them.

I ran a social-club-for-elites business after this one where I and the partner thought we were on the same page, and it wasn't until after half a year of slaving away on it when we launched that I discovered she wanted a lifestyle business and wasn't so focused on big growth, fast, while I wanted big growth, fast, and wasn't so focused on the lifestyle aspect of it. I was stressed out that we were growing so slowly and we were getting so little press and word-of-mouth, while she was effusive over how great it was that we were having parties and some of our members had hooked up with each other, etc.

The big lesson there for me was reading between the lines. I told her early on I wanted something global that'd be linking up elite men and women as business and social contacts around the world for not-insignificant annual membership fees, and I wanted to grow it aggressively, and she paid lip service to it and said yeah, that's what I want too. But what she was actually EXCITED about was having a really cool social group, and once we had that any motivation she'd shown previously to help drive this thing forward and make it big evaporated (which was my signal to exit the business, something I promptly did).

So important to read between the lines and make sure you know what aspect of the business your partner is legitimately, positively excited about before you start putting in work on it. Everyone says, "Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, I want that too," when you're discussing stuff theoretically, but sooner or later you'll reach a point where you really need them to push to make that happen, and if they're on a different page from that objective they just won't because they don't want it enough.

Sucked at the time, but it was a legitimate hard-knocks university education. I saw the worst case scenario: throwing away money you don't have on expensive hires, bad partnerships, and useless creative, and throwing away time on business ideas you can't make work for whatever reason (even if they're good ones) - the opportunity costs. You feel pretty good when you can bounce back from that.

Plus, you come out of it with some fairly epic stories for parties and networking events

Chase

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I have always personally found a lot more success building new friendships on top of existing business relationships than trying to build business relationships on top of existing friendships ...

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What this guy said. Having been burnt quite a lot on WF WSO's it now takes me ages to commit to a new source of information. In fact I just signed up to STM...it took me TWO WEEKS to make this decision thanks to being too eager in the past.

Fortunatly for STM there were some posts by people on BHW (where I am not a member) criticising STM which is actually a GOOD sign when researching it. Those WSO's that have a ton of reviews with cloaked affiliate links that just seem too good to be true? They usually are.

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Scammer number one: Jozef Skunta!

Has ripped off at least 5 STM members that I know, including myself for 3K.

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I haven't really been scammed. Maybe 50-100$ a few times back when I was starting out on Blackhatworld forum.
This is high risk business and you have to shoot in the dark a few times

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Many Scams during my 2.5 years of IM.

The biggest scam of mine is a 40K USD scam. It is about lending money to a media buying company to fund their profitable campaigns and I take a revshare.
Normally People wont fall into this scam, it is too good to be true.
My business partner introduced me to this scam...so I trust it 100%.....damn (he is quite famous)
After I do the transfer, then whole company disappear....LOL

so Dont trust anyone in the internet if you have to pay them.

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wow...
Can you tell us more how he scamming others?

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40k

Ouch!

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130k - when Mobjizz Ltd (ewank) went bankrupt. thx to Jack Cresswell & Co. big lesson learned! insolvency is still in progress. let see if i can buy myelf a coffee from the leftovers. i doubt it will be enough for the cheesecake though.

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Spent $2500.00 on Google Cash Detective from Chris Carpenter back in 2006 (I think)...Lost another 3k in adwords trying to sell clickbank products using his spytool. This was my introduction to IM...

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My experience has been that a friendship founded on business tends to work out much better than a business founded on friendship.

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Indeed!

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