They want your ethics for $105 | Hacker News Reader

They want your ethics for $105

ntietz.com

116 pointszdw50 comments

I've had similar experiences. I have a few browser extensions and other similar tidbits that I've built, and every now and then I get an email with an offer to sell it for a hundred bucks or so. Sell full scripting access to every user who installed something I made over the years? It makes me sad that that's the kind of world we're in, and sadder still knowing that surely there are people somewhere out there who do accept these bids.

Keep in mind, this is what happened to The Great Suspender lol

I hope they got more than $105 to sell out their userbase.

Makes me sad there are people making the offer.

It's pretty clear we're screwed as a civilization. As tech gets more powerful, the same people making these offers as well as the same people doing cyberlockers, etc will do the same with bio-tech, nano-tech and anything else then can extort others with. They'll infect you with virus to which only they have the antidote, etc....

What kinds of contracts do these come with? I imagine they also expect you to keep quiet about it?

At that price, Google, Microsoft et al should get ahead of the game and pay the developers the pittance to ensure stability of their plugin ecosystem

"Google offered me a pittance to take over and then kill my extension" doesn't make for a good headline. They'd rather just nuke the malicious extension when they get notified of its sketchy behaviour.

>We'll send you $105 through the sketchiest way possible, PayPal, to make sure you feel like you're getting scammed, because you are!

What are the good ways to be sent approximately this sum of money nowadays?

The friends & family payment method in PayPal is risky to send money, cause there's no chargebacks or fraud prevention.

For receiving money, it would be great, for the same reasons.

If I want to send money to someone I trust, I'd ask for their IBAN and do a bank transfer. Now, that cannot be reversed, so I really would have to trust them.

(Also, I'm assuming that both bank accounts are in SEPA countries, or at the very least countries which use IBAN, because in my life, that's likely to be true.)

Note that although the transfer itself doesn't have a recall mechanism, the recipient's identity is accessible to judges and lawyers and police officers if you got scammed.

Airwallex, Stripe, Wise,

Direct bank transfer (which above will support OR just a regular bank)

Requires trust yeah (except maybe the regular stripe credit card txn)

As long as you don’t do PayPal friends & family and always do goods & services, you won’t get scammed.

Unless you're the one receiving the money in which case it's the other way round

I’ve never had an issue on either dude of it tbh

either side* what a bizarre typo ha

Ethereum

Depending on context: Monero, Bitcoin Lightning, or your preferred ERC20 stablecoin.

/s?

Can't even tell

This is an especially sad offer since $105 is not a lot of money for a developer. These scammers need to revise their strategy.

It's for one blog post so the audience is random blog owners, not developers. Prices for e.g. taking over an established browser extension would probably be higher.

I'd think so too, but a top comment mentions hundred dollar offers for the author's extensions. I guess some devs will take that over earning nothing from an extension.

I think that's really cute that the author of the article thinks that reporting something to the FTC might be something he could do, as if the originators of this aren't working in the overseas scam equivalent of a call center that's effectively beyond US legal reach. There is no "Ben".

Is there ROI for paying $105 for a single backlink on a blog?

Maybe for an SEO consultant charging thousands.

If the company is fake, it’s also possible they’ll pay you with a stolen credit card or hijacked PayPal account.

There's a chance that they might stall you and never actually pay (or chargeback the invoice).

That way they'll get a free link for at least some amount of time, and if done at massive scales correctly, it could bump some site up the search results for long enough.

Yes, and, I guess not, but what if Ben is in fact an AI bot and this doesn't cost them any time, and they're never going to pay,

just hoping that some people will forget to unpublish the links after non-payment, or they'll get some links for a while at least

I would definitely at least take a look at the "Received from" in SMTP envelope to confirm the physical location of the last real mail server hop (or all of the public ones).

That's great for confirming the physical location of the SMTP server connecting to your own server.

"Only publish things you'd publish otherwise" doesn't make any sense. If you had to be paid, you weren't really going to publish it. If you were really going to publish it anyway, you're deceiving the advertiser by making it seem like you require payment.

I get such emails and offers everyday from SEO guys.

Yeah these are the most boring emails I get. At least the adops guys pretend to use my website before they hit send.

Not taking issue with the overall point of the post - this is icky. Buuut, this:

>More generally, it's bad because it deceives readers into thinking this is an organic link.

This is a huge stretch. Somewhere on the order of 0% of the average blog readers would ever see the type of link used, let alone understand that “oh, that totally shoulda been a no-follow”.

Those aren’t for readers- they’re for robots.

I'd reply "maybe if you add 6 or more zeros to the price, I may consider it" and see what they say.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/?amp=1

It could be more ridiculous, they could be in this “business” for those 4$ fees you ought to send them

My interpretation is that they wanted the poster to create an invoice for the $105, plus an additional $4 to cover the fee PayPal charges on invoices. I assume this is so if the terms aren't followed, they can get a refund from PayPal. I don't think they were asking the poster to pay the fee.

Just take the money and never follow up on it.

The article mentions having the OP send a PayPal invoice...

Pretty sure the other side is not gonna pay it unless you follow through (i.e. they could always charge it back and claim you never delivered the invoiced service, heck they might do that even if you put up the link!)

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