| It's very common. This is what many self proclaimed 'business people' are like. In places where aspiring business people congregate (like this site) it will be dressed up with euphemisms about 'social hacking' and 'disruption'. Go to some local startup/entrepreneurial meetups and you will find plenty of people like this. If you are a developer you won't need to be there very long before these types will be offering you all sorts of 'opportunities' and 'partnerships' that mostly just involve you investing your time and money on the promise of getting rich quick, but with very little ever written down. Plenty of kids fresh out of university get burned with these scams. For an example, here in the UK the chairman of the current ruling party used fake identities to run his dodgy web marketing/scraping/consulting business and most people in the UK startup scene didn't think there was much wrong with what he did. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/sep/21/grant-shapps... >Grant Shapps, the Conservative party chairman, posed as a "multimillion-dollar web marketer" named Michael Green who spoke to reveal the secrets of his trade at a $3,000-a-head internet conference in Las Vegas while he was the Tory party candidate for Welwyn Hatfield. >The pictorial evidence of his double life, revealed online by a fellow conference speaker, will pile pressure on Shapps to explain his links to a network of websites which have been blocked by Google for breaching its rules on copyright infringement and encouraging customers to plagiarise content. >But at the age of 35, Shapps claimed already to have established "the world's largest internet marketing forum". A few years later while a member of the shadow cabinet, he also had time to run phone lines where for $297 an hour Green would give tips to aspiring entrepreneurs. >Casting himself as an internet marketing guru with products and coaching services guaranteed to generate income, Shapps owned and ran until 2008 a series of websites making claims that still dog him despite attempts to downplay his personal role. Using the website MichaelGreenConsulting.com, which operated from 2004 until it was removed from the internet in 2009, Shapps claimed to run the "world's largest internet marketing forum" with his company How To Corp. |