Beware of the Phantom Buyer

#1

If you have a review gig, you might get a message like this:

=========

hi its me [NAME DELETED BY ME] i forgot the password of my old account so i’m texting you with this one.
here is the review that i ordered that you can’t open.

"We had a leak under the kitchen sink in my brother’s house in Los Angeles. My brother tried to stop it somehow, but it wouldn’t stop. We called [NAME DELETED BY ME] based on the reviews and it turned out to be a good choice. They took our number and the address and called back in less than 15 minutes with the name of the technician. The dispatch guy told us that technician Ed will come over to fix the leak of the sink.
When he arrived at my brother’s house my brother remembered that one of the toilets was not flushing properly so we asked Ed to fix that too. He first had a look at the leak, which was a defective faucet. He advised to change it and I bought a new one which he replaced. He also fixed the toilet. For both jobs the price was good, honestly we were expecting much highly than the actual price was.
We are really satisfied with the service in general and the price. Thank you. "

just go to yelp and search for [NAME DELETED BY ME], it will show that we have 49 stars in yelp. please type text manually in yelp, thanks.

Don’t fall for it, if you don’t see “1 Sale” in the “Conversation with Whoever” section, that means they haven’t bought anything and are too cheap to give you $5.

#2

There’s also the message that drops into the inbox saying something like “Hi! You promised me a free gig when I wanted one, and now I’m ready to accept it! [details]”.

Again, if there’s no previous sales, there’s no reason to believe them (and if you are promising free gigs for whatever reason, keep a track of them somewhere…). Just ignore them and click on report.

#3

Exactly, they’re sneaky bastard. I wish there was a button to report them. Imagine the poor seller that isn’t paying attention and ends up working for free? I feel sorry for them.

#4

Thanks for the heads up!

#5

I had something similar once. Even funnier, it was something like " I bought SOME storyboards from you before and now need more", but no one has ever ordered my storyboard gig.

#6

Thank you guys for sharing !

#7

Hi, quick clarification, turns out that my buyer has two accounts, he forgot his password on account one and messaged me from account two with visual proof of the order. I told the guy to retrieve his password and message me from account one.

#8

Wow, that smells like some of that Nigerian scammer nonsense I heard people talking about in the early 2000s…Yanno, where some relative is dying of such and such and they need x amount of money wired to them…We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried huh? Thanks for giving us a heads-up.

#9

In the end it wasn’t, just one of my clients writing from his other account, because he forgot his password on his first account. Why he has two accounts I don’t know.