I recently got an email from someone with an email address from @vminteractive.co.uk looking to guest post on a website. I deal with this as I always do and I ended up deciding not to publish the guest post because it was badly written and spammy. Some time passed and I didn't think any more…
Category: Shady Outreach
I have been running websites for quite some time. When I first found some success with a website, I found that with an increased number of visitors, I also got an increased number of people emailing me trying to make me buy stuff from them. Sometimes, the pitch was perfectly fine. We want to know if you would like to hire us to manage social media, SEO, web design etc. People just trying to get some new customers.
Other times, I would get emails telling me my site has been hacked or the killer “we have detected critical errors on your website, pay our SEO team and we will fix them”. As a developer, I know these garbage claims are not true as I can debunk them right away. These shady outreach pitches are designed to scare people into handing over money to fix a nonexistent problem.
I eventually realized that these emails cant be stopped. No amount of spam filters are ever going to stop these people. So I have decided instead to create a shit list of all of the terrible business pitches and spam email requests that I have received. Not only to name and shame the people involved but also in the hope that someone unfamiliar with all of this stuff would Google it and find out that what they were being contacted about is a scam and they should avoid it at all costs.
I recently got a large email from a site called brain-fold where they sent me a large list of fake problems they detected on a blog that I run. I was so annoyed by it that it inspired me to create this new series of blog posts. If you work for this website, well done,…