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One of the things Web Designers end up dealing with a lot of the time is scam and spam type situations. Inertial Zen Designs has on no less than 10 occasions ended up dealing with variants of a scam called the Agro America Scam.
Now, before I continue let me first state that this is nothing against Agro America and their website, but they seem to be being used as the “example” site for this scam. So let us go over just how the scam itself works.
Taking into accounts variations like who is sending the enquiry and how initial contact is made, the basic concept here is that someone makes contact with a Web Designer and asks if We make Websites and do we take credit cards as payments. Neither of these should set off alarm bells because, as a Web Designer, of course My company makes Websites and does have methods to process Credit Card Payment.
Upon first contact being confirmed, the person making the enquiry will respond with something along the lines of the following
(Screen capture of an actual email sent after this person first made contact via iMessage)
Firstly, word for word, this email has actually been sent to others, as evident by this link here
https://www.market2all.com/security-tips/spam-scam-phishing-email-kola-nut-gacillia-nut-and-cocoa/
Secondly, you might notice a few red flags here, like for example the requested Website domain they want. In this case running a Whois on the website shows that it’s actually a domain owned by 7-Eleven, which means being able to acquire said domain name is going to be high cost to buy it off the current owners.
Next problem is that this contact person is not THE contact they expect you to work with, as they have referred to a as of yet unnamed 3rd party who will be “providing the images, logos and content” and they expect the Web Designer to do all this for a top end budget of $8,500 which one can presume is supposed to include securing them hosting and the desired domain name.
Now the most recent round of this scam that crossed my communications inbox, “Wilson Tandy” was actually declined by Myself on the ground that for what was asking the budget was lower than what I, as a contracted Web Designer, was willing to do the job for. As you can see, when this amount was not enough to entice Me to take on what I already know was a sketchy project, the user instantly attempted to sweeten the deal by claiming that his numbers was a “reference budget” and then when I declined that, you can see that this person went to accusing that I was being rude towards him
(Screen captures of iMessage communications with "Wilson Tandy")
As this most recent attempt at this scam has failed, Inertial Zen Designs has implemented a strict policy that we will refuse any, and I do mean ANY client who uses Agro America as their reference site when it comes to a website project.
