Everyone thinks they are smart enough to recognize Forged Scammers Are Growing When They See an Online Proxy innovative every day.
recent BBC The story about Madbird, a fancy digital design company, is pretty shocking.
The “company” has more than 50 remote employees, most of whom are hired on commission only for the first six months.
But after a few months, new hires found out that a lot of their online colleagues were fake, they wouldn’t get paid for not closing project deals, and the founder was a pathological liar who fabricated all his online personality. .
crazy things.
To avoid being tricked by these dodgy remote agencies, here’s what you need to do.
trust your intuition
Imagine a business:
- With decades of industry experience
- Provide any type of service under the sun
- Promise leads to Very short time
- Benefit from 24/7 quality customer service
- Interest rates are below average
Sound too good to be true? This is because it might be.
You see, any competent company takes pride in their work.
It doesn’t offer every kind of service. Instead, it usually offers specific services in a niche industry. Why? Because he knows what he is good at and doesn’t want his reputation to be tarnished by poor workmanship.
These types of companies will give you advance notice of the actual time needed to achieve meaningful results.
And since they know what value they bring, they won’t come cheap.
So trust your gut when it tells you there must be some kind of trap.
If your intuition is wrong, that’s okay – there are plenty of other fish (institutions) in the sea.
But if they’re right, you can avoid seeing your hard-earned money disappear.
Find company office address
Gone are the days when these fake online groups used PO boxes or other messaging systems instead of physical addresses.
Today they proudly disclose a traceable office address for viewing more truly. This makes sense since most people wouldn’t think to check an office address. If it is mentioned, it must be real, right?
bad! You should always follow the office address. That’s how Madbird employees first discovered the scam.
what does she want to see airport shuttle Looks like the end of the pandemic. But alarm bells started ringing in his mind when Google’s Street View showed only one apartment building, which looked nothing like the stylish workspace on Madbird’s website.
She immediately contacted the real estate agent advertised at the same address to confirm her suspicions. Lo and behold, Madbird’s world headquarters turned out to be purely residential.
Perform a reverse image search
Did an institution’s digital portfolio really impress you at some point? I hate to tell you this, but it’s probably stolen from somewhere else on the internet.
To see if the work really belongs to the relevant agency, you can do a reverse Google Image search online.
It can help you find:
- The URL where the image was originally posted
- Other pages where images are uploaded
- same type of image
The process is very simple and can be done in seconds.
All you need to do is:
- Open a browser on a PC or Mac
- Go to the homepage of Google Images
- Click the camera icon in the search bar
- Paste image URL or upload from your computer
You will now be able to determine whether the work really belongs to the institution.
You can also use this method to see if the people working at the agency are real.
Just copy and paste their photo URL into the search field and see if a similar photo comes up.
get in touch with their customers
It’s the norm these days Marketing Practice Display glowing testimonials on the website’s home page.
It encourages trust. After all, if so many seemingly genuine people are happy with the product/service, the agency must really know what they’re doing, right?
not completely. Why? Because you can easily fake these letters of recommendation.
Just upload a stock image of a man or woman, tweak it a little, add some proxy praise, give that fictional character a fake name and company, and you’re done! You yourself have a “true” witness.
To verify the authenticity of an institution, please contact them for a letter of recommendation.
Research their website or LinkedIn account and ask about their experience with the agency.
If there are no testimonials on the site, ask the agency to tell you about some of their past clients.
In this case, fake agencies are likely to use “invasion of privacy” as an excuse. But real organizations will be more than happy to talk in depth about their success.
Check the domain authority of the site
A fake online agency will have a fake website. A fake website will have a bad Domain Authority (DA).
DA is a search engine ranking score created by Moz. It is widely used to calculate a website’s chances of ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Generally speaking, it shows the confidence of a website in search engines such as Google.
A newly created website has a DA of 1, while a website such as Facebook has a DA of 100.
To minimize the risk of being scammed, I recommend working with an online agency with over 30 ads.
Does this mean a website with a 30+ DA is still safe? Do not.
Are all websites with a DA below 30 fake? nor.
So why is an institution with 30+ ADs more trustworthy? Because turning 30 takes a lot of time and effort.
And I don’t think the people behind these scams have a lot of patience or diligence.
Image credit: Cotton Brothers; Pixel