This article is going to take a look at the most common email scam that specifically targets web designers. In the past, I’ve seen a few unfortunate Facebook and Reddit posts from Web Designers detailing how they were scammed – our agency must get at least two contact emails for this fraud per week, so I figured that I’d show you exactly how this scam works.

Hopefully you can use this to avoid losing a sizable chunk of change in the future.

Keep in mind, the names, email addresses, and content will always change. Sometimes we get an email from somebody who is terrible at English – other times, it’s perfect. Sometimes our scammer owns a hardware company, other times it’s a flower shop.

You can help report fraud here: https://www.justice.gov/fraudtaskforce

The Web Design Scam Email

First, this is always conducted over email. Our scammers must be sending 100s of these per day.

The following content is copied directly from a scam email that we played along with to show you exactly how they try to steal your money.

Initial contact

The initial contact email has 4 main aspects to it:

• Intro: The scam begins by introducing a “legit” company looking for a website.
• Setting The Scene: With this scam, content is always created by a third party. As a designer, this is great, as you don’t have as much work.
• Site Requirements: The site is always quite basic, as this scam wants to target anybody who can throw together a site.
• Budget: The budget is always crazy. If this was real, it would be your lucky day. $18,000 for an incredibly simple website is great, but not reasonable.

Also note the name and email. David Potter, emailing from infopotterdavent032@gmail.com. The name is generic, and “American” sounding. The email is also generic. Once it gets burned, the scammer will simply make another name and email combo.

After this initial contact, the web designer would go back and forth, eventually sending a proposal or quote. In our case, we offered $10,000.

Estimate Acceptance

The scam will then happily accept whatever price you respond with. They will also offer you a down payment of about ½ the total project price.

At this point, the scammer will request “a little favor from you”. The designer will typically want to know more about this favor.

The “Favor”

After asking about the favor, the scam will get to the “make or break point”. Here, all the cards are on the table. If you accept, you’ll loose money. If you don’t, they’ll simply move on to another victim.

How The Web Design Scam Works

Let’s go over how this works. In the final email, the scammer wants you to help him pay the “consultant” that was already hired to create logos and content for the site.

The consultant cannot accept credit cards, and the scammer conveniently can only pay via credit card. To solve this problem, they offer you this:

You charge the card $11,550.00 (or any other suggested number). From this charge, you pocket the $4,000 down payment.

The remainder of the charge, $7,350, is to be sent directly to the “consultant”. This can only be done via money order, cashier’s check, or any other non recoverable payment form.

For example, a cashier’s check is essentially cash. That means that once it’s sent out, you’re probably never going to see that money again.

Once you’ve sent the money, one of two things will happen:

As soon as the “consultant” (who is the scammer, or one of their buddies) gets the money and cashes the check, they initiate a chargeback on the initial $11,550.00.

In many cases, the money will be returned to them. However, you’ve already sent out ~$7,000 in funds that you’ll never get back.

OR

The card that they used to initially pay you was stolen. That means that there won’t even be a chargeback from them, but when the owner of the card realizes the scam, the bank will try to recover the money from you, leading to a massive drawn out process. Instead of you being the only victim, there’s now another.

The scammer, however, still gets away with their chunk of change, which you’ll never get back.

Conclusion

The names, emails and even content of this scam is always changing. However, the structure and “favor” will never change, as this is the mechanism that they use to get money from a web designer.

If this was a real request, it would be the easiest and most profitable project I’ve ever done.

At the same time, especially in the web design industry, if it’s way to good to be true… it is! Many established agencies and freelancer get these types of emails all the time – it’s just a part of the industry.

If this is your first time hearing about this scam, hopefully this article saved you some time, money and grievance. If you found it helpful, feel free to share on social media. If you have more info that will help others avoid this, leave it in our comments section!