People may remember Tai Lopez from his "Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here" YouTube ad, subject of several parodies such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko
I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about him and I hope to keep it that way.
He also ran a series of now-defunct scam dating sites with fake profiles around 2010-2015, and has been quite consistent at only operating scam businesses in the past 15 years. I know nothing about the people who hand over money to this guy, and I hope to keep it that way.
> For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong."
Clearly if someone tells you their stonks are "on fire" that's all the due diligence you need to do as a buyer. Some people just really deeply believe that there exist risk-free get-rich-quick schemes.
I find it difficult not to do at least a little bit of victim blaming here...
What is a "scam dating site"? A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
If you mean just a "dating site where all female profiles are fake, generated by site itself", then well, it's just called a "dating site".
Whole dating sites industry - with hundreds if not thousands of companies, downstream industries providing them traffic, payments, and services of all kinds, industry associations, conferences, rich networking and whatnot - is doing just that. Always did. The few "real" dating apps/sites like Tinder are just a tip of the iceberg - no one tries to really imitate them - it's not possible.
Almost everything viable on the Internet today, is a "scam" in this (to my taste, extremely strict and old-fashioned, definition). Just because all available real attention has already been harvested a long time ago, and cost of traffic, which is extremely high now because extensive way of attracting it - by having people spend more time at the screen - is no longer available as people already spend glued to the screens all day - so every time to have them visit your site you have to pay more than the other guy pays to have them visit theirs - it's an auction and prices are through the roof.
Thus, if you sell people something which isn't fake, you aren't going to turn a profit. So all who did, are out of business - with the exception of yes, "big tech" monopolies that can exploit the shit out of people in a way no run of the mill scammer like those two poor hapless chaps can even dream of.
> A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
Why do you think you need AI for this? You don't even need Indians for this, Americans will do it. I remember someone showing me a site a couple years ago that recruited for the job, and there was a Reddit where they talked about working it and how the rates paid were changing.
In a manual mode these days it certainly can't work. People are no longer that gullible. But to think, in 2010 it likely could! So that could be a thing.
It still works in manual mode and it is still mostly done manually, despite AI. This is the "chat" model powering 6 billion dollars of annual OnlyFans revenue and billions of dollars to dating sites advertising "girls in your area" on porn sites. Armies of mostly Filipino chatters pretend to be women and do what is essentially a soft romance scam.
Governments have essentially never looked into it, despite it having gone on uninhibited for 20+ years and at the scale of billions annually for at least 16+ years.
Fun fact: outside of the Anglosphere it's mostly people who pretend to be men, siphoning money off lonely women. Typical fake profile is a handsome American colonel deployed to Iraq (i met several women who flirted with "him" lmao), that was like, 10 years ago.
Uhh that's just every dating site since at least the 2000s.
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do.
The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
Many if not most scam companies scam the consumer, which is indistinguishable from profiting off a consumer.
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies
> I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos.
E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).
This is an example of the fact that while only 1% would watch the whole thing, they just raised their hands as the marks, to be worked on through the whole funnel.
There are armies of bad parents or babysitters that just hand baby an Ipad, not on child or restricted mode, and just let youtube literally Clockwork Orange a human being.
It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of YouTube's user base at the time was served that ad at least once.
Reminds me of Todrick Hall who gave a "tour of the $7 million house he just bought, OMG can't believe I'm a home owner in Beverly Hills!" on his youtube channel then got evicted for unpaid rent and sued for $100k of back-owed rent money. https://people.com/home/todrick-hall-ordered-to-pay-100k-in-...
I never saw his videos but his name still came up a lot as a know scammer in many forums. He was prolific in his reach toward vulnerable populations who were desperate to get rich quickly. There are a lot of young people who feel that their only chance at having a decent life is to strike it rich from something big. People like this person prey on those thoughts.
> There are a lot of young people who feel that their only chance at having a decent life is to strike it rich from something big.
Yup. It was bad enough 10 years ago, but now... IMHO the despair has gone exponentially worse. On one side, you got big name YouTubers/Twitch/Kick streamers getting absurdly large deals to shill VPNs and supplements of questionable utility and safety, then for young women you got OnlyFans and its various copycats with excesses like Lil Tay making 1 M$ in 24 hours after turning 18 (problematic in itself - it seems like almost every female child/juvie actor has to cope with absolute weirdos doing countdowns to when they "turn legal").
And on the other side you get an entire generation of people who know that they will never even have the chance to own a home even if they work their entire life.
I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about him and I hope to keep it that way.