Recently I've been reading an excellent article by Cory Doctorow about scammers and passive income false expectations:
Pluralistic: Sympathy for the spammer (15 Jan 2024)
It reminded me of my first "Job offer" in IT. Or so to call it.
I was 17, just graduated from school and went to the university. Everything seemed so new: I was not used to having lectures in a huge auditorium with 8-meter tall ceiling and huge windows, sitting next to a hundred of other students, for 1.5 hours straight. So at first it felt kinda boring, so we chatted.
Next to me sat a cross-eyed guy who talked strangely, smiled weirdly and his jokes were very dirty. We talked a bit about our free time hobbies and stuff. Back then I have already been occasionally doing some free-lance jobs.
I knew PHP (I didn't really, it was all about the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I did not know about that either), I was very enthusiastic and very confident. Coding was my hobby, I spend most of my free time trying things. And it was my surprise that doing coding can actually earn you some buck, so I went for it. I've heard that few students did programmers jobs in their free time, some even for big IT firms, and I was considering joining the few.
So when the guy heard me mentioning I was a web developer - he became very serious all of a sudden and, darting his crossed eyes, he proposed me a job. A REAL job. In area of website making! I asked what was it all about, and he said he can show me, but after the lectures end.
After the uni we met and walked to a nearby internet cafe. I asked if the office was there, in that internet cafe, and he laughed: "The job is on the internet! So is the office!".
I remember feeling slightly sad, because it seemed the guy who brought me had a misconception of what web development is. Also felt nostalgic - haven't seen an internet cafe/computer club for quite a while then, because everyone had a relatively fast internet at home already.
Inside the cafe, a sharp-dressed old lady met us. She looked like a school principal or something in her business suit, with her serious eyes, strict face and lips forming a straight line. She welcomed my classmate and gave my hand a short confident shake. Then she nodded to the guy at the reception and proceeded to a room with computer in it.
Then she opened The Website. I had no idea what that was, but the site looked ugly. By just looking at it I knew I could do better - could make a site that would look more appealing and even work faster. I still had some hope that the job they proposed involved making sites.
The woman then gave me a lecture about passive income. She has shown me the statistics page in admin panel of that ugly-ass website she has been presenting and said she makes thousands of bucks off it. And then, of course, she said I could do the same.
Her suit looked like a thousand-dollar one, but ber shoes and the cafe we were in did not.
I asked politely, if they need my help designing their website. And she said that there is no need, because they have their own designers. "I thought that it is what I am here - to make sites and get paid for that" - I said
She then proceeded to pitching their "business strategy": they provide me with everything I need to run my own "internet business", so I can sell stuff on the internet. "What stuff", I asked. "Anything. It's up to you" she answered.
Now, it is important to note that back then not that many people ordered stuff from the internet here. Firstly, there were no reliable courier services, so you had two options: get your purchase delivered by a local postal service (and parcels often got "lost" back then - stolen by post office employees) - or rely on the shop delivering goods itself, but that costed. And, secondly, the internet was a novelty for most of the laymen, they used it mostly to download movies and play online games. Even social networking was not around much, it was still the aftermath of the dotcom era in our region.
So I've seen no viable opportunity to earn this way. Now, I was aware of the importance of initial investment of course, so I said I didn't think I would be able to find the suppliers (to sell something you got to have it first, right?), to afford web hosting (I was a poor student living with my parents, with no reliable source of income, and cheap decent hosting costed about $20 per month)
She said these were not the problems at all. They give me the access to a catalog of suppliers and provide me hosting. They even provide me with some sort of "editor" to build my side without writing a single line of code! And then they take care of the SEO for me too - they guarantee that my site will be in top of google's first page, because they have "thousands of search engines and catalogs working with them". And all I had to do was to join their club, which costs $299 per month, because "the license for web templates they use costs money, and everything else they provide for free". Oh, except hosting, hosting is another $199 a month.
It seemed sketchy at best. If they were so good they can completely automate all the hassle - why would they need me in the first place? The only reason I could think of was me paying them $500 per month. The money I did not have - even my parents earned less back then.
I tried to be polite and said I did not have the money to pay for such a service. She said I could probably borrow from friends or relatives. I answered carefully that even with all the promotion and help they provide I can't see how can this "business" be profitable enough to afford paying their monthly fee.
She looked angry and annoyed. She said I am a little boy and I have no idea how does internet business work. And that it was my only option to earn (money on the internet!). And also that there is a way to compensate monthly fees, by inviting other people to their "club", they had a perfect affiliate program.
That did it, I said that hosting typically is much much cheaper than $199, there are tons of free design templates on the Net, and they are of better quality than what she has shown, and that I can make my own, and that programming a site is what I expect to get paid for as a web developer, not for selling things no one needs. I told her that the whole thing feels dubious, feels like an MLM scheme (I did not know what is an MLM scheme back then, but I heard the term and realized that it has to be exactly that).
To that she just started screaming at my classmate for "wasting her time with me". So I went home and kinda forgot about whole deal. It turned into one of these funny stories programmers tell each other in a smoking lounge.
Later I discovered the company name was Intway, and it was a famous Ponzi scheme here. Turned out a lot of people fell for it even. Some even took a secured loan in a bank and lost their property eventually.
I believe that is mostly out of ignorance and belief that the internet was something magical, that can make you rich, no effort spend, you just have to be in a right time in a right place. An aftermath of dotcom bubble burst in a third-world country, if you will.