The Scams and Tricks Used by Cheat Copywriters and Freelancers

The freelancing economy is alive and well. It gives skilled creators a chance to work from home, turn their time and their skill into profit, and leave the stress of the rat race. The vast majority of freelancers are hard-working and desperately eager to make something of themselves, but there are also those who only care about earning a quick profit and will do everything they can to make that a reality, even if it means destroying your business.

I’ve been freelancing for many years. I even wrote a book on online freelancing (The Online Writer’s Companion, Allworth Press) after making my way to the top of several freelancing platforms. In that time, I also hired a lot of freelancers to create numerous online businesses.

I encountered the very worst of this industry; freelancers who could have destroyed my business and cost me a fortune if I hadn’t been vigilant. I also worked with clients who came to me after hiring scam freelancers, desperate for me to fix the mess they had created. I saw the damage they did, I saw the tricks they used, and that’s what I’m going to discuss here.

Bear in mind that these tricks are not used by actual experienced, hard-working freelancers, but as soon as you go below a certain price point and start hiring people who don’t have the credentials, you run a significant risk.

Blatant Plagiarism

I’ve encountered some shocking plagiarism in my time. I once hired 10 freelancers to create basic question-and-answer content for an app. Eight of them let me down, and of the ones that did, 3 just blatantly plagiarised content.

The worst of these simply stole the content directly from Wikipedia. He copied and pasted it word-for-word. I caught him before I even ran his content through CopyScape, and I did that because he had literally copied everything—formatting, links, and all. When I challenged him, he denied it, entering into a monologue about how he was a hard-working writer and I should be ashamed.

When I showed him the links, he went silent and disappeared. This was laughable and easy to spot, but it’s also very common. They think that clients won’t check the content, and half the time, they’re right.

If you’re hiring any freelancer outside of a reputable agency, you need to check their work using sites like CopyScape. This will tell you whether they have copied it from anywhere.

Devious Plagiarism

In 2017, I helped a client build a large coupon/voucher site. He wanted me to write 100+ articles, with a view to placing these on his site alongside over 1,000 existing descriptions. He also asked me to optimise the site while I was adding the articles. “And while you’re at it,” he told me, “please fix the formatting on the descriptions.”

As it turned out, the 1,000+ well-written descriptions on the site weren’t being accepted by the built-in spellchecker, or so it seemed. The words, although spelt correctly, all had red squiggly lines under them. What’s more, when you right-clicked them to get a viable replacement, there were no suggestions.

Several weeks before hiring me, he had paid a writer from Kenya a sizeable sum of money to complete these descriptions. The writer did as was instructed but said that his word processor had an issue and was spewing random red lines. The client accepted this, uploaded the content, ignored the lines, and left it at that.

After some digging, I discovered that the “writer” had stolen content from Groupon and then used the “Find and Replace” function to replace many English characters with foreign ones, switching symbols like “o” for the Greek Omicron or “o”. It looked the same to the naked eye, and the content was great, but Google, Word, and WordPress just registered it as complete nonsense.

It destroyed his rankings (Google couldn’t even determine if his site was English), wasted his money, and essentially wrecked his business. And this isn’t the only dirty trick.

In the past, before a new breed of morally bankrupt writers switched to AI, scammers would use “spinning software”, which automatically switches words in the text for synonyms. It has the same meaning, it passes CopyScape, but ultimately, it’s still stolen, and Google still recognises it as such.

I once received one of these texts from a freelancer I had hired on behalf of a friend. He was cheap, so I accepted it despite the odd wording. It passed CopyScape after all and I knew a quick edit would fix it. But when I finished the edit, replacing the oddly chosen words with more sensible ones, the CopyScape went from 0% to 100%, and it became clear what had happened.

The moral of the story here is that you should always trust your instinct and never accept bizarre excuses.

Cheap SEO

A respectable SEO expert will never “guarantee” a high ranking in a short space of time because there is no easy and guaranteed way to make this happen so quickly. Proper SEO, like the services we provide here at InkBlimp, is a carefully coordinated process that requires a lot of good content and organic links.

Google is constantly adjusting its algorithms to attain a state where the best content is always displayed first. If you search for “A Complete Guide to SEO”, they want to show you results based on comprehensive, detailed content written by qualified writers, not sites that have simply gamed the system by acquiring a few spam links.

A lot of low-cost, questionable SEO “experts” will simply spam your site to as many forums, blogs, and comment sections as they can. This will cause a surge in backlinks, which in turn will boost your rankings. When that happens, they can collect their money and walk away. By the time Google realises what has happened and penalises you, they will be long gone, and you might not even realise it was their fault.

This sort of service is epidemic right now because everyone wants a cheap, quick fix. But SEO is no longer about having the most links or the most keywords; it’s not about quantity. Always be wary of so-called experts who make grandiose promises and then insist on upfront payments. Ask them what they intend to do and how they intend to achieve those results. If it doesn’t involve onsite optimised or quality content, stay well clear.