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They want your ethics for $105
- userbinator 2y agoI'd reply "maybe if you add 6 or more zeros to the price, I may consider it" and see what they say.
- fuzztester 2y agohttps://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/?amp=1 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/?amp=1
- Etheryte 2y agoI've had similar experiences. I have a few browser extensions and other similar tidbits that I've built, and every now and then I get an email with an offer to sell it for a hundred bucks or so. Sell full scripting access to every user who installed something I made over the years? It makes me sad that that's the kind of world we're in, and sadder still knowing that surely there are people somewhere out there who do accept these bids.
- odo1242 2y agoKeep in mind, this is what happened to The Great Suspender lol
- arcanemachiner 2y agoI hope they got more than $105 to sell out their userbase.
- nox101 2y agoMakes me sad there are people making the offer. It's pretty clear we're screwed as a civilization. As tech gets more powerful, the same people making these offers as well as the same people doing cyberlockers, etc will do the same with bio-tech, nano-tech and anything else then can extort others with. They'll infect you with virus to which only they have the antidote, etc....
- hhejrkrn 2y ago[flagged]
- kibwen 2y agoAn intelligent species would extrapolate forward and realize that the ruthless pursuit of infinite resource expenditure is a guaranteed path to annihilation. If the game is self-destruction, then the winning move is not to play.
- daedrdev 2y agoWe aren't going to run out of efficiency gains anytime soon. And with a declining population projected, the whole infinite resources argument is less important since we can grow per person with less people
- hhejrkrn 2y agoHow do you get an intelligent species??
- rapind 2y agoWe should ask them when we meet them.
- Grimblewald 2y agoIt is most certainly not the only way to evolve and more importantly, while it can be cost effective short term, it is destructive long term. Long term everyone loses, and a concious intelligent being taking control of an evolutionary process should know not to partake in selfish destructive behaviour, otherwise is it really intelligent?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
- dataflow 2y agoWhat kinds of contracts do these come with? I imagine they also expect you to keep quiet about it?
- taberiand 2y agoAt that price, Google, Microsoft et al should get ahead of the game and pay the developers the pittance to ensure stability of their plugin ecosystem
- simfree 2y ago"Google offered me a pittance to take over and then kill my extension" doesn't make for a good headline. They'd rather just nuke the malicious extension when they get notified of its sketchy behaviour.
- CarpaDorada 2y agoJust take the money and never follow up on it.
- jabbany 2y agoThe article mentions having the OP send a PayPal invoice... Pretty sure the other side is not gonna pay it unless you follow through (i.e. they could always charge it back and claim you never delivered the invoiced service, heck they might do that even if you put up the link!)
- ErikAugust 2y agoIs there ROI for paying $105 for a single backlink on a blog?
- smelendez 2y agoMaybe for an SEO consultant charging thousands. If the company is fake, it’s also possible they’ll pay you with a stolen credit card or hijacked PayPal account.
- jabbany 2y agoThere's a chance that they might stall you and never actually pay (or chargeback the invoice). That way they'll get a free link for at least some amount of time, and if done at massive scales correctly, it could bump some site up the search results for long enough.
- cutemonster 2y agoYes, and, I guess not, but what if Ben is in fact an AI bot and this doesn't cost them any time, and they're never going to pay, just hoping that some people will forget to unpublish the links after non-payment, or they'll get some links for a while at least
- zahlman 2y ago>We'll send you $105 through the sketchiest way possible, PayPal, to make sure you feel like you're getting scammed, because you are! What are the good ways to be sent approximately this sum of money nowadays?
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoThe friends & family payment method in PayPal is risky to send money, cause there's no chargebacks or fraud prevention. For receiving money, it would be great, for the same reasons.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoIf I want to send money to someone I trust, I'd ask for their IBAN and do a bank transfer. Now, that cannot be reversed, so I really would have to trust them. (Also, I'm assuming that both bank accounts are in SEPA countries, or at the very least countries which use IBAN, because in my life, that's likely to be true.)
- immibis 2y agoNote that although the transfer itself doesn't have a recall mechanism, the recipient's identity is accessible to judges and lawyers and police officers if you got scammed.
- styyyaaa 2y agoAirwallex, Stripe, Wise, Direct bank transfer (which above will support OR just a regular bank) Requires trust yeah (except maybe the regular stripe credit card txn)
- Forgeties79 2y agoAs long as you don’t do PayPal friends & family and always do goods & services, you won’t get scammed.
- aembleton 2y agoUnless you're the one receiving the money in which case it's the other way round
- ronsor 2y agoThis is an especially sad offer since $105 is not a lot of money for a developer. These scammers need to revise their strategy.
- lmz 2y agoIt's for one blog post so the audience is random blog owners, not developers. Prices for e.g. taking over an established browser extension would probably be higher.
- debugnik 2y agoI'd think so too, but a top comment mentions hundred dollar offers for the author's extensions. I guess some devs will take that over earning nothing from an extension.
- walrus01 2y agoI think that's really cute that the author of the article thinks that reporting something to the FTC might be something he could do, as if the originators of this aren't working in the overseas scam equivalent of a call center that's effectively beyond US legal reach. There is no "Ben".
- card_zero 2y ago"Only publish things you'd publish otherwise" doesn't make any sense. If you had to be paid, you weren't really going to publish it. If you were really going to publish it anyway, you're deceiving the advertiser by making it seem like you require payment.
- Prbeek 2y agoI get such emails and offers everyday from SEO guys.
- p3rls 2y agoYeah these are the most boring emails I get. At least the adops guys pretend to use my website before they hit send.
- necovek 2y agoI would definitely at least take a look at the "Received from" in SMTP envelope to confirm the physical location of the last real mail server hop (or all of the public ones). That's great for confirming the physical location of the SMTP server connecting to your own server.
- happyopossum 2y agoNot taking issue with the overall point of the post - this is icky. Buuut, this: >More generally, it's bad because it deceives readers into thinking this is an organic link. This is a huge stretch. Somewhere on the order of 0% of the average blog readers would ever see the type of link used, let alone understand that “oh, that totally shoulda been a no-follow”. Those aren’t for readers- they’re for robots.
- boguscoder 2y agoIt could be more ridiculous, they could be in this “business” for those 4$ fees you ought to send them
- Glant 2y agoMy interpretation is that they wanted the poster to create an invoice for the $105, plus an additional $4 to cover the fee PayPal charges on invoices. I assume this is so if the terms aren't followed, they can get a refund from PayPal. I don't think they were asking the poster to pay the fee.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]