I ran a real web agency and clients almost never asked for references and were happy to pay up to 50% of a 5-figure project total upfront to get started, even from remote or overseas clients that I never met in person who found me through SEO.
Crazy that they couldn’t land even 1 contract with whatever stolen portfolio examples they desired.
But it seems a bit nuts too. It actually takes effort to run a business with a bunch of people, and more if you have to remember all the lies you told each person.
Perhaps what it really says is that success appears so superficial these days, a random chancer thought he was close enough to having all the pieces that he gave it a shot. It's only a few steps away from "this equity will be worth a million in 4 years".
For the folks who got tricked I feel bad for them. That's a rough way to learn the lesson to be very suspicious of commission based work. It's usually a losing situation
Having said that, a variant of this type of behavior is not uncommon in large organizations where 'go-getters' can self-manifest by creating chatter and finding underlings. But in that case there is already a revenue flow to support time and attention.
Spec work and pitch work are very much a thing. As counterintuitive or infuriating as it may seem, having no paying clients doesn't mean there is no work to be done, in the agency world.
> But no deals were ever finalised. By February 2021, not a single client contract had been signed.