A few times per day, I get a message asking something like, “How much do you charge for a guest post on TechCrunch?” People try to get backlinks from Techcrunch for SEO reasons. The theory is: a TechCrunch link gives your site trust in the eyes of Google, so it’s worth doing. But is that what is really going on here?

I know I should ignore them, after a few hundred of them, but then I got a message from someone who had paid someone on Fiverr, a site for freelancers, for a link on TechCrunch. They had scammed him and he came to ask me when he was going to publish the article. He was confused; apparently someone had used my name as a contact at TechCrunch. Needless to say, I informed him that I couldn’t help and to address it with Fiverr.

So I wondered what would happen if I tried to buy an article on TechCrunch.

A search on Fiverr showed dozens of people offering items on this site. I engaged with a handful of them and paid them. I did this using my full and real name as well, so there was no confusion as to who was asking.

fiverr clean house

The scammers came out in full force. “I have sent this to my contact. Will take 16 days to post but release payment now and I guarantee it will post,” one replied. Asking for the funds to be released before the final result is scamming.

“Funds remain in ‘pending’ status for a 14-day clearing period,” Fiverr explains on his website. “This schedule is for financial processing and buyer satisfaction guarantee.” In other words, when sellers tell you to wait 16 days, they’re not expecting your internal contact to click “publish,” but rather waiting for the funds to clear.

“These services should never have made it to our platform. Thank you for letting us know about this as we have been able to update our tools to ensure this does not happen again. We take this very seriously and the services you mentioned have been removed,” a Fiverr spokesperson told me. “We see some of these services manage to outperform our toolkit as bad actors try to outsmart the system, but the team is proactively tracking and adapting to the techniques used in every way possible. When found, they are immediately removed and the seller is blocked. We continue to update our algorithms and automated tools to actively capture, remove, and block these services before they hit the market.”

Fiverr cleaned up his act; Today, three weeks after speaking with the Fiverr team, a search for “TechCrunch” returns zero results. However, that does not mean that the problem is solved; the scammers simply moved on to different targets and are no longer promising articles on TechCrunch.

doubling

The scammers I spoke to were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep their scams alive. Some created fake websites, saying they had delivered the job. When I pointed out that a link to a site that did not have techcrunch.com in the URL was not an article published on TechCrunch, I received some bogus arguments in return. Some sent screenshots of the article “published” on TechCrunch. The Photoshop works weren’t good, and of course the article couldn’t be found anywhere on the site. When challenged in that, they told me I didn’t know how to use Google. They got wary when I suggested they could send me a link.

One of the Fiverr scammers said his contact was jag reunion — one of my esteemed colleagues, who would never do anything as foolish as accept money for a link on TechCrunch. I checked with Jagmeet and they informed me that yes, of course I hadn’t done that. Then I received a message from “Jagmeet” on Telegram:

Of course, that was a trick question; I haven’t actually met Jagmeet in person, but the real Jagmeet would know. This Fiverr scammer (“Kurt Dylan,” if you’re reading this, Hi!) was particularly incompetent.

When Fiverr finally closed the account, after Dylan tried to submit his work half a dozen times, and after I sent the screenshots to Fiverr, I received one final message from my new friend.

So who is running these scams?

One of the scammers who was willing to talk to me told me that he was a 23-year-old man living in Lagos, Nigeria. He didn’t have a job and explained that he and several of his friends were trying to get people to pay money for these interactions. However, it became clear that he was simpler than a lone wolf con man trying to make a quick buck; It turned out that I actually didn’t know that it’s not possible for someone to post an article on TechCrunch like this.

Another person told you what to say and how to run these scams, on a multitude of platforms. I never got any firm confirmation of what was going on, but I got the distinct impression that it was some form of organized crime. In fact, he made it clear that when he got paid, he had to pay two-thirds of his earnings to a third party.

This was a recurring theme for several of the scammers. They told me that they had to pay someone money, and that I had to pay them fast, so as not to get them in trouble. When questioned, they were vague about who this “someone” was, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that several of these scammers were being run by the same people who were the masterminds behind the operation.

“We have a Trust and Safety Team working around the clock to quickly respond to any reports of inappropriate content, as well as implement manual site searches,” the Fiverr spokesperson said. “Building trust in our platform continues to be a priority for Fiverr.”