I Know You're There by Susan Allison-Dean

The exact scams aren’t changing much – a basic web search will turn up dozens of minor variations on the same web design scams that are being recrafted into seo scams, designer scams and other freelancer scams.How long they’ve been going on for – these scams have been going on for a while, and they don’t look to stop.

How involved they are – by the time any money were to actually make it back to the scammers, a lot of work and time is devoted to each scam.What’s amazing about these web design scams So when the legitimate cardholder disputes the payment the business is left holding the bag on the money retrieved from their account and what they transferred to the scammer. As I’m sure you’ve figured out, the fix is that the card used is stolen and the third party is actually the scammer. I imagine your correspondence with your ‘client’ has been along these line. Essentially, the scammer makes a payment (generally in the thousands) for a project, and pays more than they need so you can then transfer money direct to a third party (e.g. Designers such as yourself are common targets for a type of scam known as a Third Party Payout. The Fraud Prevention department at credit card payment processor Stripe put it like this:

They’re called the Third Party Payout Scam, the Payment Reversal Scam, the Advanced Fee Scam or the Overpayment Scam. Be alert, trust your instincts and reach out to others in your professional community. In the web design industry, we’re all targets. We all know how prevalent scams are online, so it’s no surprise that these extend to specifically crafted web design scams, SEO scams and other scams that directly target photographers, designers and other creative professionals.

What started as a simple text message turned into a call with the Secret Service (yeah, really). Recently, we’ve received a number of different requests for website redesign proposals that had some odd and striking similarities, enough to trigger alarm bells that something wasn’t right.

I Know You're There by Susan Allison-Dean