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The 7 Most Common Kinds Of Scammers In Start-ups

May 23
4 min read

This week’s This American Life episode really got me thinking. It’s a story about a guy named Ken who unknowingly stumbled into the NFT gold rush. Ken was working a regular job at Amazon, and in his spare time, he created a site called Pixelmap. He built it to practice a new programming language. Ken forgot about it until he was contacted by an online influencer named Adam McBride, who informed him that Ken had created one of the first NFT sites in history. Consequently, he was sitting on millions of dollars' worth of digital real estate. From there, high jinks ensue. With so much money at stake, Ken agonizes over whom he can trust among the myriad scammers in start-ups.

You may want to read: Release Planning and Honest Bidding

However, the problem is that the receiver of that message has probably received five similar marketing messages that day, and three of them are probably bad apples– either start-up scammers or incompetents who will cause more harm than good.

Who are these startup scammers, and what harm do they cause?

Mr Faux Investor

How To Spot One: They put “Start-up Investor/Advisor” (or something to that effect) on their LinkedIn profile.

What’s Their Angle?: Similar to the Faux Investor, they say they want to help you grow your business and get you more customers. The Growth Hacker will also ask for a percentage of your business and a cash payment. They will probably also do nothing other than tell you to make more social media posts.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Demotivates new entrepreneurs. Even if you don’t fall for the scam, it can be soul-crushing to even be selected as a “mark”.

The So-called Growth Hacker

How To Spot One: They show you a resume of businesses that they supposedly brought from obscurity into a household name. The word “ninja” appears somewhere in their LinkedIn profile. Perhaps they worked as a digital marketer for 1-2 years somewhere, but haven’t had a steady job in a while.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Makes it near-impossible for honest freelance marketers to survive.

The Litigious Slacker

How To Spot One: When you Google them, their name shows up as a plaintiff in multiple lawsuits.

What’s Their Angle?: They apply for jobs at startups that can’t afford HR departments. Then, when they get hired, they intentionally get themselves fired so that they can file wrongful termination suits.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Causes startups to be overly cautious in hiring decisions, making them less likely to hire outside their personal network, which contributes to equity gaps.

The All-Sizzle-No-Steak Marketer

How To Spot One: These are the guys who send you the most unsolicited marketing messages.

What’s Their Angle?: They focus more on selling than on delivering. So instead, they message as many people as they can, as often as they can. They figure that if they cast a wide enough net, eventually they’ll catch something.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Makes prospective clients tune out all marketing messaging, making it hard for the rest of us to find leads.

The Lowballing Outsourcer

How To Spot One: When you're looking to outsource a project, they give you an enticingly low bid for your project before they know exactly what it entails.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Causes honest service providers to lose business. Incentivizes dishonest behavior in bidding. You can read more about this in a previous blog post.

The Idea Vampire

How To Spot One: VC's or investors who drag out the pitch process longer than normal. You get a "creepy feeling" from them.

What’s Their Angle?: They steal your ideas. Shamelessly. This situation was parodied hilariously in HBO's Silicon Valley.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Adds an additional level of discomfort to all pitch meetings.

The Ax-Grinder

How To Spot One: Companies in which the execs have big personalities, and middle management is afraid to make decisions.

What’s Their Angle?: They focus on fulfilling personal agendas and proving themselves to be right. Winning is more important than finding a win-win solution.

Harm Caused To The Rest of Us: Working with them will increase your employee turnover.

Perhaps in a future post, I’ll devise some solutions on the best way to handle the aforementioned scammers in start-ups. For now, however, I just wanted to raise awareness. We should all unite in our best efforts to prevent these bad actors from causing any further harm to honest members of the business community.

In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you if you'd like to discuss Zoho Integration, custom software development, or fractional CxO services.

Originally Posted 5/3/2022

Updated 5/23/2026