Недавно наш стартап чуть не попался на удочку псевдоинвесторов из Европы. Какие еще схемы обмана популярны сейчас при поиске международных партнеров? Поделитесь своим опытом, чтобы другие не наступили на те же грабли.
One of my startup consultancy clients was getting hammered by fake ‘investor’ profiles clicking their partnership pages. CTR looked amazing but conversions were garbage. We set up exclusion audiences targeting suspicious behavior patterns and CPA dropped 60%. Turns out those bot clicks were teaching the algorithm to find more scammers.
We worked with a fintech startup expanding into Eastern Europe. Our content about partnership red flags ended up being our best converting bottom-funnel asset. The educational angle made us look like trusted advisors and naturally funneled prospects to our due diligence services. Funny how the least ‘salesy’ content often drives the highest quality leads.
We helped a fintech startup check out their LinkedIn partnership outreach after they almost got hit by a ‘due diligence fee’ scam. Social listening showed us that real investors don’t slide into DMs cold - their engagement patterns look totally different from scammers who have zero community presence or content history.
That campaign taught us social proof isn’t about follower count. It’s about consistent, industry-relevant conversations built over months, not weeks.
We ran a B2B outreach campaign for international partnerships and noticed something weird - fake partnership inquiries got 40% more opens than real ones. These scammers nailed the subject lines that desperate founders can’t resist clicking. So we started tracking sender domain age and LinkedIn verification in our CRM. Turns out this helped us spot the same patterns in our own outreach and massively improved who we were targeting.
During an audit for a client looking to expand internationally, we uncovered a striking issue: scammer domains were outranking legitimate investor sites in searches related to partnerships. These fraudulent sites boasted impressive SEO metrics—new domains with exact-match keywords and appropriated authority signals. This highlighted an essential lesson for startups: they must scrutinize who ranks for their partnership keywords. If scammers occupy the first page, that’s where desperate founders will inevitably click.