Ralph And Carol Lynn Try To Get To The Bottom Of A Marketing Scam Carbon Based Business Units

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today, [insert husband name] is very much in love with [insert wife name] even though there is much talk of second wives and same-sex lovers. That’s all I’ll say about that, so if you really want in on the joke you’ll have to listen.
Jessica Evans Makes An Introduction Ralph loves being in the middle of the drama, so when he recently received an apparent spam email from someone named Jessica Evans, introducing him to someone named Donna, he decided to play along. Jessica assured Ralph that Donna provided excellent services and would be a great fit for him.
He knows neither of these people, but of course the email was phrased in a way that implied he knew Jessica, who was doing him the huge favor of introducing him to Donna.
He responded to Jessica and asked for an introductory call. When he received another email of the apparent auto-generated variety letting him know that she was on maternity leave, things took on a life of their own.
Suffice it to say, Jessica, Ralph and Donna exchanged a series of emails that ended in the question: is this a scam? And who is scamming who?
The Jessica Character Ralph thinks it’s possible that Jessica is a real person. Well, clearly there is some person on the other end of the email but I think she’s a fraud. And we’ve got evidence. If you look up her photo online, it’s everywhere. But sometimes she’s Samantha. And sometimes she’s Julie. And one time, she was even Mohammed.
She has a company website that is so generic as to say nothing at all. And a LinkedIn profile tied to this company that lists it as having 11-50 employees – of which she is suspiciously the only one on LinkedIn.
The Donna Character Here’s where it gets weird. Even though Jessica appears to be no more than a façade, Donna has all the hallmarks of being an actual person. She has a real-looking website. And a real-looking profile. She even has a YouTube channel where you can see her giving real-looking talks.
Based on everything we've seen, she seems like a legitimate person with a legitimate business. So... how did she get involved with... and who the heck is... “Jessica?” And why is Jessica acting like she knows Ralph and is just making a friendly introduction?
A Theory We can’t leave this one alone, so we come up with a theory that Donna has hired one of those companies that promise to get you leads. And that’s exactly what “Jessica” is doing – getting Donna leads.
Maybe somewhere, someone set up this fake company with the intent of doing this kind of thing.
We can’t imagine why, except that it’s a deception to take money from people who want leads and then sort of spam a bunch of people into being leads.
At this point, Ralph is wondering if he’s the one perpetrating the fraud, because he’s pursuing the conversation with no intent to hire anyone. So if Donna is some unwitting player and has gotten involved with a bad company then maybe she is as much a victim of this deception.
We decide that instead of being a meanie, Ralph should approach Donna truthfully and find out if she’s part of the scam (if there is one) or offer some friendly advice about not hiring fraudulent companies.
Stay Tuned We don’t know where this one ends yet. Maybe neither Jessica nor Donna will respond. We don’t know who they are or what they really want, so maybe they’ll disappear into the internet miasma from whence they came.
But if we do hear from or speak to either, we’ll let you know!
What do you think? Scam? Fraud? What do these people want?
Ten Easy Steps To Spam We’re convinced that there’s a play book out there somewhere telling people how to “reach out” to other business owners with the intent of gaining some advantage – someone to read their book, try their product or let them post on your site.
We get the same emails all the time. First, it’s the introductory email where the person praises you and tells you how amazing you woul