I have 180 incredible small business and nonprofit clients as of this writing. When you have as many clients as I do, and you’ve been doing this as long as I have, see things. More importantly, you see recurring things.
One thing in particular I’ve noticed lately is a very strange proliferation of what I can only describe as “sockpuppet” graphic designers. It’s one thing to say that there are a lot of graphic designers offering cheap, low quality services on platforms like Fiverr – there are, but that’s a more complicated issue that I won’t get into here. These graphic designers seem to not even really exist beyond a name and an astroturfed social media presence that only seems interested in getting an upfront deposits.
I’m in a number of local Facebook groups where residents of the various neighborhoods where I live and work can congregate to discuss relevant topics – missing pets, requests from job seekers or apartment hunters, asking for the best local restaurants, and so forth. Generally local businesses, freelancers and entrepreneurs are also permitted to promote their services, and this is how I started noticing a strange proliferation of spam.
Over a few months, across multiple Facebook groups, different accounts from different, unconnected people claiming to be professional graphic design freelancers copied and pasted the exact message bellow, verbatim:
Business owners…
Please be realistic when budgeting for your logo.
I’ve been seeing budgets on Upwork/Etsy/Fiverr for $10 – $25 for a logo (high chances of it being copied).
For example – we just designed a logo for a client that took a total of 3 hours including revisions.
There’s no way our years of experience designing hundreds of quality logos is only worth $5/hr.
Let alone allow me to pay my staff AND make a profit.
We charge $100-200 for a professional logo, which comes with 3 concepts and 3 revisions with all file formats.
Just remember…
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!
marketingagency graphicdesign graphicdesignerlife keepgoing hashtagdigitalmarketing hashtagentrepreneurship
(As an aside, I copied this exactly – whoever posted this used the word hashtag for two hashtags in a manner that suggests this message was rapidly copy and pasted without checking for a typo.)
I didn’t think much of it the first few times, because in a vacuum the message makes sense – you should never treat graphic design services like a race to the bottom. It seemed innocuous and a decent enough way for a freelancer to promote themselves.
When it started showing up multiple different times from different Facebook accounts it started raising eyebrows, from both me and a number of other people. The posts were flagged to administrators as spam or scams, and quickly deleted. I started wondering what the connection was.
When another one of these posts popped up, this time I was the one who proactively flagged it. The profile, named “Ava Amelia” – which I consider maybe one step removed from calling yourself “John Smith” – proceeded to unwittingly give the game away. I’ve gone ahead and blocked out actual responses for privacy.
“Our company hire individuals from different States and offer them part-time contracts. I am also a local here and the company directs us to use these pre-edited posts to ensure that we are working for them and not working as a private individual.”
Oops.
As I noted in my reply, “Ava” admitted that the company wasn’t local. And by the sound of it, neither is “she.”
I’m using air quotes because I did actually reach out to “Ava” offering to take a look at her portfolio, but she has messaging disabled. Odd for someone actively looking to promote a graphic design business through Facebook, isn’t it?
After I ran this by an actual graphic artist friend she noticed something I initially hadn’t – “Ava’s” profile photo was a random Instagram model, and not an actual person.
People don’t necessarily use their own photos on social media, but it’s strange to use a photo not of yourself while seemingly building a brand or a business. The profile itself is very suspect, with no identifiable information connecting “her” to the neighborhood, nor is there any information about the business she seemingly wants to advertise. The public timeline itself is just filled with stock memes and random inspirational quotes.
The only people liking “her” posts appear to be similarly threadbare accounts doing nothing but posting memes, and they’re all liking each others’ posts every single time a new one is published. “James Habel” and “John Jesstor” are legitimately obsessed with “Ava” – I have close friends who I’ve known decades who I don’t follow this intently. The intro sections of all of these people are nothing but generic inspirational quotes like “Making every day count” from “Samuel Ethan.”
In isolation most of these could just be written off but together, they form the telltale sign of some sort of offshore network of collaborators working on behalf of a company using them as a digital sweatshop of sorts.
I reverse image searched the profile photos and got no results, and of course none of these alleged individuals have any personally identifying information tying them to any kind of company. So I wondered what would happen if I Google searched the original post about getting what you pay for. One very memorable search result was another sockpuppet account, “Jessica Adley”, who appears to be a stock photo of a model who, despite ostensibly living in New York City, was spamming the exact same message verbatim into a Facebook group for Dallas, Texas for some reason:
Another result that immediately popped up led me to a company called Lancorp Digital Solutions, which recited the exact same quote on its LinkedIn page:
Business owners…
Please be realistic when budgeting for your logo.
I’ve been seeing budgets on Upwork/Etsy/Fiverr for $10 – $25 for a logo (high chances of it being copied).
For example – we just designed a logo for a client that took a total of 3 hours including revisions.
There’s no way our years of experience designing hundreds of quality logos is only worth $5/hr.
Let alone allow me to pay my staff AND make a profit.
We charge $100-200 for a professional logo, which comes with 3 concepts and 3 revisions with all file formats.
Just remember…
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!
hashtag#marketingagency hashtag#graphicdesign hashtag#graphicdesignerlife hashtag#keepgoing hashtag#digitalmarketing hashtag#entrepreneurship
I can’t say for certain if this is the company overseeing this strange network of sockpuppet freelancers or if Lancorp here is just another “client.” Lancorp does appear to be a legitimate company based in Iowa with appropriate registration and even a listed employee. I did try reaching out to the person listed as CEO of the company but never heard back.
I had another possible bite when I noticed that “Jessica Adley” was listed as working for a company called Codes e Tech. The website appears to be a generic marketing agency with content rife with spelling errors and other typos. Their blog posts were detected immediately as ChatGPT-generated. Unlike Lancorp, this is more likely to be the source of the scams.
Codes E Tech LLC is registered as a LLC in Florida it appears to be in business, listing two active websites as clients. Even so, its employees (or people claiming to be employees) are promoting either themselves or the company by masquerading as people local to a certain region.
Now that we’ve gone down this weird rabbit hole, it begs the question: What is going on here?
This is where I start speculating, but it’s not as if there isn’t prior for this: I believe that a company (or possible multiple companies) is essentially creating an astroturfed network of people to market on behalf of “clients.” It’s a very simple process when you consider the logical steps:
- Hire a large network of offshore freelancers for the cheapest prices you can find on Fiverr and Upwork, usually with respectable sounding titles like “Marketing Associate” or “Business Development Lead.”
- Set them up with interconnected sockpuppet accounts on social media sites and have them post vapid, generic social media content. Have them all friend each other and upvote each others’ social media posts to present the appearance of authenticity.
- Start aggressively promoting with copy/pasted content to local social media groups where business owners congregate, using messages that are true on their own merits.
- When interested parties respond, seeking your graphic design “services”, funnel them to the agency you’re being contracted to do “marketing” for.
The agencies, in turn, are hiring seedy companies for “client acquisition” without actually questioning where new leads are coming from or what the client development process is – or worse, they’re just turning a blind eye to it. Agencies and digital marketing companies should know better than to farm their own marketing by having a bunch of offshore freelancers falsely represent themselves on the company’s behalf. If they’re doing this willfully it makes me wonder why they’re even in the industry at all. I’ve bemoaned the current state of digital marketing but this is essentially hiring people to lie for you.
As for the business owners these sockpuppet designers care about so much, this is another case study on how and why to always be cautious online. When you connect with a vendor, talk to them directly. Ask about their website, their credentials, for referrals, whatever you can do to verify their integrity. Your money – and your stress levels – will thank you for it.