Dear Would-Be-Scammers,
Move along – we aren’t falling for it. There is a scam against web designers running rampant right now. If you haven’t seen it, fellow web developers, it is only a matter of time.
The first scam attempt was at least a little more subtle. We received an email quote request for a website. Her Gmail picture was of a cute blonde. They provided us a lot of detail (using a lot of poor grammar) about their business, an example of a site they would like their site to resemble and the $5000 budget. I created a detailed proposal for the potential “client”, who responded quickly that “she” wanted to move forward. She did, however, need a little favor. LITTLE FAVOR = BIG. RED. FLAG.
I knew immediately that this was fishy, but I was curious about the balls-i-ness of this person, so I asked what that the “little favor” might be. She’s in the hospital and her copywriter doesn’t take credit cards so could we simply double the amount we charge to her credit card for her deposit and wire the difference to this person. We could keep $100 tip for our stress. LOLZ! That would be a big bucket of nope.
Since then, the scammers sure have gotten lazy. Instead of detailed quote requests from “hearing-impaired” people (hint to all you scammers, that term is offensive) or people in the hospital unable to have a phone conversation, we just get short emails and texts (!) asking if we can charge credit cards.
I just file them away in a folder named “Scam Bam Thank You Ma’am” and move along with my day. What I would like to do is respond “You’re a little late to this scam. We’ve already seen 13 of these. You should be embarrassed by your lack of creativity. You call yourself a scammer??” All well, maybe next time.
