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🤑🥳😎Going down the youtube tech guru hole or how you can spot scam artists

Michael "lampe" Lazarski on February 16, 2020

I find it fascinating what you can find on youtube these days. People are selling you shortcuts to your dreams and a secret that only they know! ...
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Bartosz Pietrucha • Edited

An important reflection on the topic of online courses. While buying online course, you are not buying just the knowledge (it's available online for free in scattered, distributed, fuzzy, ambiguous forms). When buying (a good) online course you are buying knowledge that is curated, systematized and delivered in an interesting, easily digestible way (a system).

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

It is not about the content of the courses it's about the marketing and tricks used to market these courses and the false claims.

If someone comes to me and says that my company in 8 months will be worth 10 000 million euros without knowing what I'm doing.

It is the same as what these scam artists are doing. in 30+ hours you will be a 1 million euro developer.

I don't know anybody how is that good smart.

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Bartosz Pietrucha • Edited

Agreed. But, I believe you (and most people) are smart enough to know that "get rich overnight" is a scam by default. Isn't it? :)

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Sadly not.

Just google "onecoin scam".

Also, these scam artists don't target developers but people who want to become developers and don't know anything about development.

Again I don't want to post any links here in public.

But basically they are on the same level as some other famoues youtubers with millions of followers.

They are just normaly not in the filter bubble of 'normal' developers.

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Filip Ilić

This. I bought such coure before because I like having course structured. Because I always have FOMO on some technology and souch course makes me feel like I am learning all that I will need to create particular app.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Hmm I'm a friend of learning the basics not how to fit example create a specific type of app.

A login is a login. Of course with different authentication strategies

Almost all lifecycle routines are the same they are just member different.

And so on.

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techPackets • Edited

"From knowing nothing about development to becoming a millionaire in 30+ hours. Sorry but that is not reasonable for 99% of people." - I think it's unreasonable for 100% of the people. Just setting up everything took me 30+ hours when I was a newbie let alone getting down to writing some code.

Most of the social media campaigns target newbies who have zero knowledge of the industry and eventually they end up buying the product :)

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Yes you can see that scam in a lot of things

For example "onecoin"

Just google "onecoin scam"

juicy story :D

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Yes, it is amazing how people are still behind that scam.

But yeah I think once you believe in that lie it is hard to change your mind after someone is telling you that you lost your money and the money of your family.

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Filip Ilić

They do it always in new places(ex. new country or even city). They had a conference in my city and my frend being aware of their scam asked me to go with him to learn how they scam people. It was hilarius watching them jumping with examples of succes on one guy who seemed interested.

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NEKIO 💙

TechLead YouTube channel, greatest scam I have seen.

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Hoang Trinh

I have to login dev.to to like this :D

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Haha 🙌🤣

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Priyab Dash

Very true I remember following a Tech Youtuber who said he is Ex FB, and gave gyan on how to do freelancing and do web development and bragged about his some softwares how he became rich. But soon his videos became weird. Completely unrelated to tech and more to do with his personal life.

I feel while its easy to run a scam running a genuine Youtube Channel is a very hard work especially having a continuous running Theme and building a useful audience.

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Hamida

I think I know who ex-Facebook and ex-Google engineer, I initially followed him for the tech talks, than with time the content became personal, aggressive in nature and just felt scammy since his other promoted buisness was nothing but another Leetcode replica

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Just to make sure: This post is not about one specific person :)

Also not saying that that person is not usuing these tricks ;)

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Hamida

Yeah that's clear, I kinda just figured out the above commenter reference since I almost fell for that specific scam.
I appreciate your article though, it's sad seeing these scammers feeding on people's hopes and dreams.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Goog to hear that you did not fall for it!

Your welcome :) I hope that i can help some people to not fall for that scam!

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Oh don't get me started on the Bootcamp and copy and paste online course buisness.

This is a topic that could be its own blog post series...

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Abdisalan

I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm really tired of all these scam videos, its a shame they actually work on a lot of people though :/

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Yes, it is a shame :/

I hope that people will find this blog post and see through the scam!

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林子篆

I also feel not good with such courses but on the other hand, there always has enough information to prevent not needed buying. Those courses mostly won't make someone has any problem with keeping alive, they just waste their time. I think in case they should take responsibility. Of course, I think that change the business model would be better: All content could be access, when a user feels those stuff are helpful, pay for it. The problem would be: How many people would pay money in this situation? I have no idea.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

It is not that I'm against paid content.

It is just that they are not selling education they are selling dreams that can not be fulfilled by the claims they are making.

If they would market the course more reasonable I would have nothing against it.

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Kalaiarasan Pushpanathan

I can see this post has implicitly referenced one guy more than few times. I am not sure why people would want to follow his content or any other person who refers themselves as millionaire in every other video without it actually being the topic of the video.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

I did not have one guy on my mind while writing this :)

And people are following them because they project themselves into them and even sometimes they know that this is fake they still want to be like that person.

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Alex Turner

Wow! Great tips. If I send you all my money would you be willing to teach me?

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski • Edited

No 😂🤣

Most of the information I can teach you are for free online

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Oliver

That expensive car isn't theirs. They've only rented it for the hour. Same goes for the luxury apartment.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Also the woman and a lot of things ;)

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Shiraaz Moollatjie

I feel the same about conferences as well at times. It's just a sales pitch for these same reasons.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Conferences or webinars could be its own blog post :)

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Branislav Petrović

Great post Bartosz!

Finnaly someone who unmasked those scammy "authors" that sell their recipes for easy and happy developer life to people who are naive and submissive, switching career or are in bad financial situation and want to only get food on the table.

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Andrew Reese • Edited

that's how you know it's fake, even the biggest wallet only holds 9999 Rupees

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

🤣🤣 true at least in all the Zelda games I have played 🤣🤣

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MurrayVarey

Don't trust any chart you haven't faked yourself

Love it! I should hang this quote on my wall ...

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

It is inspired by a German saying:

"Trau keiner statistik die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast"

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Syed Faraaz Ahmad

"Hey, I'm ... I'm an ex-googler, ex-facebook, and ex-Netflix employe."

I see what you did there haha!

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

I did nothing 😉😚😙

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Vladislav Guleaev • Edited

Cool topic to be raised, nowadays very actual since we have a lot of educational content but not most of it is from really professional teachers/engineers.

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Michael "lampe" Lazarski

Yes sadly that's also true