On the 28th of April 2020 we received a contact from a lady called Stacy Seaman. Not delving into her name too much I immediately searched for her online. Straight away it came up with a scam website. Normally I would just ignore and block these emails but this time I wanted to see how long they would play with me. Lockdown was a bit boring so this was a little bit of fun to help pass the time.
In the interest of other people searching here is a copy and paste of her original email. If you’ve landed on this page after Googling the company then I’m sorry, it’s a scam.
Sorry for the late response.
I’ll like to know if I got the right contact to a promotional videographer. I want you to create for me a promotional/instructional video for my new company, based on production and sales of organic foods (plant based food and drinks). The content created will be used on the company website and also displayed on installed HD TV in my restaurants.
1. Company Name: AMERICAN ESSENTIAL NUTRIENT INC.
2. My website is under construction which would be registered soon.
3. Full text content, background music and pictures for this design contents will be submitted to you by my project consultant. You just have to handle the layout and the design
4. I want you to add our core values, mission and vision (This information will be provided by the consultant)
5. My budget for the 3 videos is not more than $6000
6. I want this delivered in 2-4 weeks to the latest.
7. Videos will be animated
My Goals and about the project:
You will produce 3 videos, each featuring a different templates as selected by me (see below), with an approximate segment time of 120 seconds each. You will deliver 6 videos (1080p); 3 original raw videos and 3 edited videos, one for each original video. Below are the inspirational video templates below:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8xRBTvbA0U
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEdam6FgZfA
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5w1OGknhlc
All videos will have background music and company logo which also be delivered to you by the project consultant.
AMERICAN ESSENTIAL NUTRIENT INC. is pet project and same time a business avenue for me. I will be 10 years a vegan in June and I hope to expand the business (and my brand then)
To my customers, AMERICAN ESSENTIAL NUTRIENT INC. should be able to provide over 500 plant-derived minerals that can improve the value of foods, liquids, nutritional formulations and cosmiceuticals. That way also improving value of life. Whoever purchase our products would have a guarantee of good living and relish.
Our uniqueness will be privilege of our 5 locations around Indiana and online store. Our products are also 100 percent plant based produce under strict standards from International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). Our brand and style would also stand us out.
Other project essentials:
I want you to know that this is the first time I will be doing a promotional/informational video so I can only give you little details but you can give a better price quote and work based on the sample templates given above. The videos provided are our inspiration and how the preferred promotional videos should look like.
Kindly get back to me with:
(1) a price estimate/quote based on the inspirational videos :
(2) your cell phone number:
(3) And will like to know if you are the owner ?
Keep safe and protect yourself from the virus.
So now the story has been set. Here are the screenshots from my barrage of emails. Hopefully you enjoy this as much as I did. (There are a lot so you’ll need 10 minutes or so)
Unfortunately, this is where the story ends. I was hoping that they would plead with me to take payment another way (there are a few ways this scam works) but they never bit. We once had a guy called Abdul who accidentally transferred £69,015.00 for a job with £5889.60 (yes, mental I know). That was equally as fun but only lasted 5 days or so.
Got any funny scam stories? Comment below so we can all have a hood laugh.