Let’s say you opened up an e-commerce website to sell some merchandise and created some social accounts for exposure. All the sudden you received an offer from someone on Facebook or Instagram to help you promote your social account. Maybe you used used the services of someone on Fiverr to help write a press release, or syndicate the press release.
You just fell into a world of fake services and scams, mostly from IP tracked back to Nigeria and India. I say this because I’ve have experienced this and know several others who experienced the same situations.
Fake accounts and fake followers
There are numerous accounts on Instagram with thousands of fake followers, they will offer you a variety of services for a rather cheap amount. They will call it promoting your business. The offers could be from getting you thousands of followers, post likes, or comments on your posts. This is done through bots and never real or organic exposure, so it’s worthless.
This can happen on Facebook or other socials as well, unfortunately there are too many people who fall for these scams, and the scammers make too much money.
Even services on websites such as Fiverr are compromised. I can only imagine how deep this circle of false offerings reaches, I can only give you my experience and that of those I’ve communicated with.
The Fake Services and Scams they offer
I’ll tell you how it started for me; I paid someone on instagram $5 to get me 1000 followers on one of my socials. I just wanted the account to appear active, and pretty much knew they would be fake followers from bots.
During the same timeframe I had another person on Fiverr create a press release and syndicate it for me. Another $5.
All the sudden I was in the world of scam services. Over the next couple weeks I had hundreds of messages on instagram and my e-commerce website’s contact form. Most of the visitors IP tracked back to Nigeria.
The services ranged from further promoting my social to get me followers, and other fake bots services that would be empty. Offering to promote my posts and said they would get me buyers to my website. These were all the small fry offering social account services which were under the category of promoting.
But then came the other ones. These normally started by a “hello, can I ask you a question” and then start to ask about my sales and how was my website generating traffic. They claimed they were Shopify and Woocommerce experts and knew how to generate sales funnels.
I knew these were all scammers and not real professional services, but wanted to hear a little more just to understand how their scams worked. Later on in the conversation their plot was revealed. They wanted to sell me hacked or nulled shopify themes, and wordpress themes claiming they were premium themes and how they would generate more sales and be more user friendly.
The problem with nulled shopify themes is that they are not purchased from the developer and shopify could request you pay the developer for their product or face copyright enforcement action under the terms of service and license agreements. Not to mention that you would have to give these scammers access to your website, and who knows the extent of damage they could cause; from stealing information and having access to your financial accounts.
On WordPress it could be worst, there could be all sorts of code injected into the theme and cause all sorts of vulnerabilities and exposure of information.
The bottom line
If you open up an e-commerce or other business online, stay away from scam social account services, its better to pay a little more for a professional business to help you grow organically than having to deal with constant scammer with their fake services and scams. If it’s sounds like a scam, it most likely it!