I got scammed

Twice in the same month.

I couldn’t f*cking believe it.

You ever paid a “consultant” to do something, and a few weeks go by but nothing gets done?

Me too.

Have you ever paid $600 for a link, then been blackmailed into paying $899?

Me too.

Have they ever both happened in the same month?

Also, me too.

Story time.

Last summer, the agency began to grow pretty quickly, and I needed help.

I brought on an operations consultant that had been referred to me. It cost me $8000 over the course of 4 months.

Honestly, my experience was just fine. That’s all I’ll say.

Fast forward to early 2024, I partnered with this consulting agency on another project.

Truly, a stupid decision by me.

They had some Shopify builds that, on the surface, were going to save me 20+ hours per week, maybe more.

Who wouldn’t want to save 20 hours per week?

Long story short, none of them worked.

They built them all out but never completed the implementation — unreal.

I followed up countless times and after no response, just terminated the contract.

I was pretty frustrated, but I ended up solving the issue on my own a few days later, for free I might add. Funny how that works.

At the same time as all of this is going down, I’m chasing down a publisher for a link that I pre-paid $600 for.

It was for a client, I needed that link to go live.

It was supposed to be live in 72 hours. It took 40 days.

And when he finally published it, he said the price was now $899 because it was a parasite link. Quite a stretch on the parasite classification if you ask me, but I digress.

An extra $299 for a 37 day delay? That math didn’t check out to me.

I took a few days to respond to him, I wanted to think through how to handle this.

My initial thought was just to have him remove the link and refund me the $600, which I’d already paid.

We’d met on a platform where you can hire SEO freelancers for specific tasks, basically a Fiverr for SEO. That’s also where I paid the fee.

I won’t share the name of that platform, because aside from him, I’ve had a great experience on it.

I’d previously ordered a service from him that went fine. After it was complete, on time I might add, he sent me a list of sites that he could build links on.

I looked through it. There were some big name sites, all with some big price tags on them.

We agreed to a “handshake” deal in the messages on a link from one of those sites, so there wasn’t any legally binding contract to protect either of us.

This is the risk with link building. You will get scammed. This wasn’t my first time paying for a link and never getting it — it won’t be my last.

This just happened to be the most expensive one.

Back to the story. Before I could respond, he looked me up on LinkedIn and messaged me.

He ghosted me for 37 days and had the audacity to follow up with me after I took 48 hours to respond. Unreal.

He said he’d take legal action if the updated fee went unpaid. He also said he’d remove the links and message the client that I’d built it for directly.

F*ck.

I had a few options:

• Report him to the platform. Technically, we both broke the terms & conditions by exchanging services & payment outside of what was approved by the platform, so that wasn’t going to work.

• Ignore him. He’d contact the client. I build great relationships with my brands, and I didn’t think an email from this guy would change that. But I didn’t want to take the risk. That was off the table.

• Continue to argue with him. Again, this probably ends with him taking legal action & telling my client. Not an option.

My hands were tied, and he knew it.

I paid the fee, begrudgingly.

It was a tough few days. But this is the reality as a business owner, you’re constantly putting out fires.

These fires felt enormous at the time, less so now.

There will be more, probably this week.

And I’ll put them out too.

Catch y’all on Monday.

Kai