Offline “Home Business Opportunity” Spam

For the last six months, as I travel around the Gold Coast I keep seeing various bits of advertising at intersections and traffic lights. The advertising is normally stuck or pinned against the light post in the middle of the road, such that the driver can easily see it when stopped at the lights.

When I first came across the advertising, I thought it was very creative. Instead of bothering with professionally printed signs, they were hand written using a wide tipped Nikko – black writing on a plain white plastic cardboard. The sign said something to the effect of ‘executive income from home, phone x or visit y’.

It wasn’t long before I started seeing more and more of these little advertising boards, stuck up at intersections all over the Gold Coast – so one day I thought I might as well check out what they are going on about. Shortly after visiting the site in question, I realise they aren’t selling anything specifically – but are offering business coaching. Sounds like a good idea to me, a little further reading and the business coaching they are offering is based on the magic of the stupidly cult popular “The Secret”. At that point, I began to become disinterested in anything they had to offer; sorry to say it but willing your home business to grow and earn you six and seven figure sums of money isn’t going to happen – no matter how far you put the good vibes out into the world.

Recently, more and more of these types of banners have shown up over the Gold Coast – except now they are varying in style – some printed professionally, some hand written and so on. The web site addresses being promoted are different, however there is a common theme – all pushing the home business opportunity and executive six figure plus income from home.

Further investigation shows that the web sites are strangely similar – the same cookie cutter style sites, but with different people telling you how their home business opportunity will change your world forever. Lots of personal photographs of the person in question around the world, all inferring that it was a derivative of the power of awesome service. That lead me to find out where the cookie cutter sites are coming from, the same business in each case. Throwing their web site address into Google returned huge volumes of results and looking through the URL’s of the sites, you could easily spot a common theme.

Looking into their business further and it would appear there are a lot of unhappy people getting around the internet about them. They are embroiled in a huge scam, how it works I’m not quite sure but I’m guessing it involves duping a client into believing that willing their business to grow through positive thinking and good vibrations will work, all of which can be your for a tidy sum of money.

I’m wondering how many people on the Gold Coast have seen their guerrilla advertising and followed through?

One thought on “Offline “Home Business Opportunity” Spam

  1. Sounds like a pyramid scam. The top guy tells ’em they can make money easy, following his system. He’ll even do the hard work and provide a free website. They just need to print up billboards and post em at intersections to drive traffic (or crash it, if we’re going to play around w/ words :).).

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