u/AIMdash

Recently, I opened my online store using Shopify and the day after it went live, I was bombarded with emails and DMs for these Shopify Sales Experts asking if I ran my store and if I wanted more sales. My spidey scam senses were tingling like mad with all these sales experts, so I decided to use Google image reverse search to confirm my suspicions. As I thought their profile photos were all AI generated stock photos of happy business men.

I wanted to share this so other aspiring entrepreneurs can be more informed of these scams. I found out that these scammers find newly posted websites and domains, like mine, and look through the website to find contact information such as emails and social accounts.

I also think that a lot of these scammers scroll through the Shopify Instagram tagged section to find businesses who are trying to promote their business. I tagged Shopify in one of my posts and found following this post I kept receiving a bunch of follows, likes and comments from these sales experts so this is where I got this hypothesis from.

If you run an online shop using Shopify or other platforms similar to this, I recommend to do the following when encountering these types of accounts:

1) Check out their profiles by viewing their content, account age and location. An account that was only made that same month is one red flag that this account might be a scam. You can find this information by pressing the three dots in their profile then pressing ‘about this account’ to find the accounts age, location and the amount of times the user has altered the username.

2) Use Google image reverse search to see where the profile picture came from. Lots of these accounts use stock photos or AI generated images and using Google image reverse search will show you where else this image has been used on the web.

3) Check the emails. I found that a lot of these accounts use names of these people didn’t match their email address. Also, I don’t think professional same experts would use a Gmail address.

4) Remove these accounts from your follow list. When these types of accounts follow you, your account will pop up to other scam accounts due to their similar content. I know it can be hard to gain followers especially if your account is small, but you want your page to be recommended to the right people, not a pool of scammers.

5) BLOCK AND REPORT!!!! This may be obvious but this is crucial in helping to take these accounts down. Whether you’re 100% certain or a tiny bit suspicious, always black and report.

Be safe out there on the World Wide Web and always be careful when talking to people online. I hope this helps others who experienced the same situation as me - I’m just happy that my scam baiting knowledge actually helped me!!! The images included in this post are two of the Facebook DMS I received.

Someone messaged me on my business Facebook page asking about my T-shirts and they replied back with this. The ‘particular purpose/occasion’ in square brackets feels like they’re going of a script and forgot to fill it in. And now they are asking about how I manage my store. Seems fishy - what do you all think?