How I almost got scammed on Facebook

I thought it was fishy when they offered me $2,000 upfront for a podcast appearance

$2,000 for wanging on about myself? Easy money! Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash.

Last week, I received an email offering me $2,000 to appear on a major American podcast. It said:

Dear Ariane Sherine

I'm reaching out to invite you as a guest on the "Wife Of The Party Podcast." We have 4 or 5 artists from different parts of the world joining us for a live Facebook event, expecting an audience of nearly 2 million. We are offering $2,000 for each one-hour episode.

The podcast will cover music, dance, entertainment, life struggles, and more. Your participation would be a great fit for our audience.

Please let me know if you are interested in joining us.

Thank you.

LeeAnn Kreischer

Now, this was extremely welcome news. I currently have a very complex roof leak, and $2,000 would go a long way towards fixing it.

However, I was immediately suspicious. Why was “Wife Of The Party Podcast” in quotation marks? Why capitalise ‘of’ and ‘the’? Also, ‘invite you as a guest’ wasn’t native English. My spidey senses started tingling.

I googled the podcast. It did exist, very much so, but it had 109,000 Facebook followers, not ‘nearly 2 million’. As for guests, it only had one on per episode, they were always American, and their latest guest was Whitney Cummings, a US comedian with 1.3 million followers.

I only have about 17,000 followers across Facebook and Twitter, with only 2,200 on my Facebook page and another 4,500 on my Facebook profile - and those aren’t 6,700 separate people either, as the page and the profile have a lot of crossover.

So as podcast guests go, I am small fry. I very much doubted that any major US podcast would want to pay little insignificant me $2,000 to bang on about myself to American listeners who would never have heard of me. Usually, I do podcasts for free, and on the rare occasions that I get paid, I get a token £50.

Also, though the email had come to my personal email address and was addressed to me, it came from a Gmail address. It didn’t seem very likely that a podcast of that size would operate from an address from a free email provider.

Then again, in the past, I used ariane@arianesherine.com - but for various reasons I had reverted to using Gmail myself. So this wasn’t necessarily a definite sign that the email wasn’t genuine.

And the last thing I wanted to do was turn down $2,000 if it was.

The intervention of Grandad

One of the best men in the world. And one of the most gullible. Photo by Steve Best.

Grandad is one of my very dearest friends. We’ve been mates for ten years, and in that time he’s let me live with him for months at a time; ferried my daughter back and forth between her and her dad’s house approximately 500 times; spent much of his pension on chocolate and sweets and presents for her; come round to make my bed because I’m shit at putting on the duvet cover; and generally been an amazing friend.

He is also extremely credulous. He always likes to see the best in people, which is an endearing and annoying trait in equal measure. Because even if someone is being downright bitchy towards me, he will defend them - ‘she didn’t mean it in that way!’ - even when she 100% did.

One time, a man from Freecycle came to collect my daughter’s childhood bed frame from my house, as I was giving it away and buying her a proper grown-up bed. The under-bed drawer didn’t fit in his car, so he put the rest of the bed in and mumbled an assurance that he’d come back for the drawer in his friend’s van - but sheepishly, avoiding eye contact.

‘Shit, now I have to get a private waste collection firm to collect the drawer,’ I said.

‘No, the man’s coming back for it - he said he would,’ Grandad insisted.

Did the man come back for it? Did he fuck.