This is going to burn a huge bridge for me, maybe several. I am thinly disguising the name of the individual this story is about to keep from shaming the guilty, because he got what he deserved in the end. Maybe too much of it.
There was this guy, we’ll call him Scammer Rick. Scammer Rick convinced a (still) trusted friend of mine to join an organization whose sole aim was to help certain types of corporations with a very specific kind of online marketing that involved what I still think is one of the best products I have ever seen or used.
The friend wanted me aboard. Because of how great the product was and how much I trust my friend, of course, I said yes. I still don’t regret that decision because I met some great people.
Scammer Rick was the pitcher, and my friend, myself, and a few other people were the catchers. When we got the clients he signed, we actually got them set up and did the actual legwork.
After about a week working with Rick, I realized that my clients were being sold something completely different than what they were actually buying. I found this out when a new customer called me up asking what exactly he had bought.
I said “What do you mean, exactly?”
He said, “Well, Rick said that we were buying the most powerful marketing system online but he didn’t tell us what it actually was or what it does.”
I hated Rick desperately for a couple of years after this was over, not just for the mess I had to clean up, not just because he never paid me most of the money I made on any of the jobs I did, but because of the innocents harmed in the making of his scam.
However, I always will have a reluctant respect him for his sales ability, though not how he used it. To date, I still haven’t quite figured out how he got people to fork over what eventually amounted to thousands of dollars for something several of them claimed not to be able to identify.
If only he had used his power for good.
Getting back to the story, this kind of thing became a pattern. One of my biggest regrets in the time I spent with his organization was that sometimes I have too much faith in people, and that just because the product they are reselling is mind-blowing, doesn’t mean they are themselves good people.
It seems like a silly assumption now, and I’m alarmed that I was so naive then as it wasn’t that long ago. Since then, I’ve learned that if something doesn’t feel right, no matter how rational things seem on the surface, I have to trust my instincts and walk away.
If I can just get one person to realize that same truth, well, that’s really not enough people, man, LOL.
Seriously, here’s the reason it’s so crucial to know this.
