Everyone thinks they are smart enough to recognize one peke online agency when they find one, but scammer is on the rise innovative everyday.

The recent BBC The story at Madbird, a fancy digital design firm, is pretty surprising.

The ‘company’ has more than 50 remote employees, most of whom are received on a commission-only basis in the first six months.

But a few months later, recently hired employees discovered that many of their online co -workers were fake, they couldn’t get any salary because no project deals were finalized, and the founder was a pathological liar who made his full online persona.

Exciting stuff.

To avoid being scammed by these cunning remote agencies, here’s what you need to do.

Trust Your Instincts

Imagine a company that:

• Has decades of industry experience
• Offers every type of service under the sun
• Promises yield a very much short time
• Boasts 24/7 quality customer service
• Pays less than average rates

Too good to be true? That is because it is likely.

You see, any company that values ​​its salt is proud of its work.

It will not provide all types of service. Instead, it typically offers specific services to niche industries. Why? Because it knows what’s good and it doesn’t want to tarnish its name with subpar work.

These types of companies will deal with you about the actual time it will take to achieve significant results.

And because they know how much value they’re bringing to the table, they won’t be cheap.

So trust your gut when it tells you that there must be some kind of catch.

If your instincts are wrong, well, it doesn’t really matter — the many other fish (agencies) in the sea.

But if they are right, you can avoid seeing your hard -earned money run out.

Find the Company Office Address

Gone are the days when these fake online organizations used a PO box or other mailing system instead of a physical address.

So far, they have proudly revealed a traceable office address to look at further really. This makes sense because most people don’t think about verifying the office address. If mentioned must be true right?

small! You should always keep track of the office address. This is how a Madbird employee first discovered the scam.

He wanted to see what was to commute will look like when the pandemic is over. But alarms began to sound in his mind when Google’s Street View showed only a block of flats, which looked unlike the sleek workspace featured on Madbird’s website.

He immediately contacted a real estate agent with a listing at the same address to confirm his suspicions. And here, Madbird’s global headquarters has become pure habitat.

Perform a Reverse Image Search

Were you impressed by an agency’s digital portfolio at one point? You don’t want it to destroy you but it may have been stolen elsewhere on the internet.

To see if the work is actually owned by the agency in question, you can perform an online reverse Google Image search.

This will help you find:

• URL where the image was originally published
• Other pages where the image was uploaded
• Same type of image

The process is very simple and can be completed in seconds.

All you have to do is:

• Open the browser on your PC or Mac
• Go to the main Google Images page
• Click on the camera icon in the search bar
• Paste the URL of the image or upload it from your computer

Now you can determine if the work is actually owned by the agency.

You can also use this method to see if the individuals working in the agency are real or not.

Just copy and paste the URL of their headshot image into the search box and see if similar images appear.

Interact with Their Clients

These days, this is a norm marketing skills to feature glowing testimonials on the homepage of a website.

It encourages trust. After all, if so many real -looking people enjoy the product/service, the agency should really know what it’s doing, right?

Not exact. Why? Because you can easily fake these testimonials.

Just download a stock image of some man or woman, edit it a bit, add a compliment for the agency, give this fictional character a fake name and company, and voila! You have a ‘real’ testimonial.

To verify the authenticity of an agency, contact its testimonials.

Find their website or LinkedIn account and ask them about their experience with the agency.

And if there are no testimonials on a website, ask the agency to tell you about some of their former clients.

A fake agency is more likely to use ‘breach of privacy’ as a reason for this situation. But real organizations will be more than happy to talk in depth about their success stories.

Check the Domain Authority of the Site

A fake online agency will have a fake website. And a fake website will have crappy domain authority (DA).

DA is a search engine ranking mark created by Moz. It is widely used to calculate a website’s chances of ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).

In general, it shows how much trust a website has in search engines like Google.

The DA of a newly created website will be 1 while the DA of a website like Facebook is 100.

To reduce the risk of falling into a scam, I recommend working with online agencies that have 30+ DA.

Does this mean that a website with 30+ DA is always safe? No.

Are all websites with DA less than 30 fakes? Neither.

So why is an agency with 30+ DA more trustworthy? Because getting 30 takes a lot of time and effort.

And I don’t think the people behind these scams have extreme patience or diligence.

Photo Credit: cottonbro; Pexels