I fancy myself a pretty tech-savvy guy.

I’ve never fallen for a telephone scam, I can spot a phishing email from a mile away, and I’m as cynical as they come. Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear; that’s what I always say.

Recently, I fell victim to this common scam that has been plaguing web designers and graphic designers alike, and I feel that I would be doing a disservice to my fellow creatives if I didn’t write my piece about it here.





Here’s How the Scam Starts

It started out as a seemingly innocent request for web design.

I responded in my typically professional manner and landed the opportunity to issue a proposal. At this point, there were a few red flags that I hadn’t yet thought much about:

She insisted that we could only talk via email because she’s deaf (seems innocent enough at first). Her name (Mellisa) was spelled differently in my design brief form (Melisa) than it was in her email. The intake form was filled out very hastily with not much information provided. I wasn’t able to find one single bit of additional information about this alleged business for which she needed a website.

EMAIL TRANSCRIPT:

Scammer: Hi, I am Mellisa by name. I will like to know if you are available for website design if yes get back to me as soon as possible. Me: Hi Mellisa, I do have some availability closer to the end of March. The first thing I would do is learn more about your project to see if I’m the right fit, then schedule a week or two for the build. Would you like to tell me more about your web project? Scammer: Thanks for your swift reply. I am hearing impaired, and this is the reason why I am contacting you via email. I have a small clothing business for both male and female which I run here in Dallas,Tx now am trying to expand the business and I want you to build an information website for it for advertisement and to increase my sales rate.I need you to checkout this site but I need something more perfect than this if possible https://www.missguidedus.com I want the site to be e-commerce , so I need you to get back to me with an estimate for the web design, the estimate should include hosting and I want the site to have not more than 8 pages.I have a private project graphic designer,the graphic designer has the text content, images and the logos for the site. Me: I'm not sure if you've had a chance to browse through my website, but if you haven't already, you may not know that I develop exclusively with Squarespace. This means that I can take care of the design and setup, and make it easy for you to maintain products, prices, etc after the build is complete. There is a monthly or yearly fee paid to Squarespace that includes hosting, e-commerce, etc beyond my one-time design fee. If you'd like. You can fill out my design brief, and I'll send you a proposal with my design pricing and service offerings.

My design brief can be found here: https://minimist.ca/start Hope to hear from you soon.

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