[hackish]

> His resume said he'd worked for a company called "Data Service Group" (https://dataservicegroup.com/) for the last 5 years or so. Their website contains this sentence: "Over the past decade, our customers succeeded by leveraging Intellectsoft's process of building, motivating."

> Turns out, if you Google the quoted sentence above, you get TONS of websites for other fake companies that all contain that sentence

It looks like that text is part of the default template for a commercial WordPress theme named Engitech[1]. If you check the live preview and browse to the "Main Home" template, you'll find it there.

I wonder how many of these "companies" paid the $59 licensing fee? :^)

[1] https://themeforest.net/item/engitech-it-solutions-services-...

[hnbad]

I noticed something similar when I looked into a "website optimization agency" offering their services to one of my customers. Their website was a nearly 1-to-1 clone of the content of another website whose company name they accidentally left in the footer. That company's website however in turn used a slightly different design and after digging a bit I found that it was a vanilla copy of a themeforest template down to the stockphotes and everything. So it was a copy of a copy of a template.

Their tactic seemingly consisted of running the website through a free tool like Lighthouse, picking one or two low hanging fruits and then presenting them as world-ending problems they can fix for cheap. I'm sure the follow-through would have left the site in a worse state and suspect they may actually have a backchannel income via SEO backlinks or malware as the price they would initially quote seemed low even for a country like Pakistan.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are actually layers of these Potemkin company websites used for various purposes.