There is no such thing as a Gracillia Nut! Search it and you’ll only find posts like this one talking about a popular internet scam that targets web developers.
It starts as an email from a potential client, with a budget! AND content and a logo already produced! And did I say a budget? A good budget, one I could definitely work with. An import company that wants to pay a fair price for a custom website and sign on to my maintenance program. YES! The perfect client.
Being the curious type I wanted to know a little more about this import business and what products they were importing which were going to be nuts and herbs.
I have a small scale business which I want to turn into a large scale business, now it located in your country and the company is based on importing and exporting of Agriculture products such as Kola Nut, Gacillia Nut and Cocoa so I need the best layout design for it.
Kola nuts, cool. Cocoa, yum. What the heck is a Gracillia Nut though? I googled it and voila, what a let down. All I can find are posts about the scam containing word-for-word copies of the email I received. The budgets and names varied but pretty much everything else was exact.
Obviously I will terminate communication.
Reading other articles about this scam I was able to connect this to another type of scam that hit me a few years back. 3 years ago I was contacted by someone who needed a design made into a website, I said sure!! He then said he was in the hospital and could not pay the designer to release the Photoshop files. She could only accept cash and he could not go to the bank. So… his brilliant plan was he would send me a check for the cost of the website PLUS the designer’s fee. I of course would have to do the wire transfer to the designer. HA.
That was pretty easy to spot. However it now seems that they’ve been working on this!
As I was investigating the Gacillia Nut thing I became a bit curious about how this request for a website turns into thievery.
Turns out that after everything is settled, after the project is a go and you have a contact name and an address, THEN comes the “I’m in the hospital” bit. Designer can’t take credit cards or whatever, send them this and I’ll send you that etc…
Had I not been curious about what a Gacillia Nut is and searched it, I would have missed this first warning sign!
I would have seen through the scam the second they requested money however I think that would have been 2 or 3 more emails or even a phone call down the road. By then I would have made a local and a staging area, loaded up WordPress and a starter theme on each, sync up my development area with GIT, etc… HOURS of work. Busy work, setup stuff but still, it’s hours AND you’re all excited about it because we love this stuff!
Serious bummer, dude.
Ted Theodore Logan
Yep, same email here too. I’ve actually had emails going back and forth with a “Kenneth Wood” about the website he wants at ‘bestfarmproduce.com’. No more time will be wasted on this dope!
They’ve dropped the tell-tale fake nut…
On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 11:56 AM Nicolas Romano wrote:
I have a small scale business which I want to turn into a large scale business now located in MI and the company is based on importing and exporting Agriculture products such as Kola Nut, peaNut and Cocoa so i need a best of the best layout design for it. Can you handle that for me ?
So glad I read this post. I received the same text as those above, almost word for word, except that I got it from a retired US Lieutenant! I’m done with this; no more communication. Thanks!
Yes….this was the perfect job…..big budget, they have all the content, and they want the care plan……but I did google Gacillia Nut and found you! Thank you! Do you just ignore, blast them, or just fake them out and say “sorry….I don’t have the bandwidth to start a project like this”?
I would recommend just ignoring it. This is one of those tactics that have been around for a long time and hundreds if not thousands of scammers have used it and more will try it in the future – any effort you expend would just be a waist. PLUS if you respond it could flag your email address as “valid” which makes it valuable on the spammer/scammer email address market. Ignore, delete, sigh and wonder why humankind treats itself this way.
“Had I not been curious about what a Gacillia Nut is and searched it, I would have missed this first warning sign!”
Same here!! Just got one of these emails today and it seemed super off…so I started Googling the nuts as my first suspicion was that this kind of importing business might be illegal…only to find that this type of nut doesn’t exist at all and found a bunch of blogs about this scam (including this one), haha. Thank goodness it got no further than 1 email response from me to their initial email!