Get Rich or Lie Trying by Symeon Brown

Author:Symeon Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

How to hack Facebook

In 2017, Joel launched the website Shopolis with Joseph. The shopping site had a blue logo and an online presence that was branded like Amazon. Joel used both paid ads on Facebook and stealthily hidden advertisements to build up huge traction for the random products they were selling from the warehouses of suppliers in China, stocking anything from a teacup that stirred itself to mini-helicopters. ‘It was just very gimmicky products like a pancake flipper. As a matter of fact Kylie Jenner used it on her Instagram story one time. It’s like a red circle that goes on a pan and it has other circles inside made from like silicon,’ Joel describes. A buyer makes pancake mix separately and ‘so you pour it all over and you flip and you make five pancakes at the same time. It’s gimmicky … It’s stupid little products like that [but] you’re moving 10,000 products a day. You’re making a ton of money.’

He always kept an eye out for opportunities to expand sales. Facebook and Google are so dominant in internet commerce that shifting products has moved from an art into a science. The price paid to the big platforms for a click that guarantees traffic is set. But Shopolis also built a busy page on Facebook with videos of quirky gadgets that went viral due to Joel’s techniques. The videos were often stolen from rival sellers and re-cut to be internet-friendly. On Instagram, Shopolis had 11,000 followers but on Facebook they had 305,000 likes. The last ad video they posted had 346,000 organic views and 370 comments. This is the kind of engagement that news and entertainment organisations would kill for. More attention meant more sales, and at its peak, Shopolis was generating $500,000 a month in revenue, according to Joel. There were two problems. Not only did the products hardly ever do what they claimed to, but even worse, many of Joel’s customers were not receiving what they ordered. In fact they often didn’t receive anything at all. The money was leaving their accounts and nothing would arrive in the post. Cheated customers would try and contact the company, but nobody would reply.

One woman calling herself Betty paid for seven ‘mini-helicopter balls’ as Christmas presents. None of them turned up. When she tried to contact the company, she was met with silence. Brandon was a retired policeman who reached out after his wife’s order never arrived either. ‘Take it from a retired police detective, who worked on a financial crimes task force, this is “theft by swindle” in its finest form. Have filed a dispute on my wife’s behalf with PayPal,’ he wrote on the review website Trustpilot, where Shopolis has a shocking 98 per cent poor rating. The company was accused of fraud by infuriated customers, who began reporting it to their credit card companies and the Better Business Bureau in the US. Complaints still litter the Shopolis social media page as I write this. Alice, another of the company’s thousands of customers, tried to contact the company online.

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