July 4, 2025 at 12:45 am

Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

by Mila Cardozo

Man programming on computer

Freepik/Reddit

Some people are so shameless it’s almost inspiring.

In this case, a web developer created a landing page for a jewelry seller, but she ghosted him when it was time to pay.

Luckily, he found a way to scare her into paying him.

Read the story and see how things unfolded.

She ended up begging me to stop hacking her website

This is my freelance-revenge story that happened about 8 years ago, and it was one of the first times I was ghosted without pay.

I created a landing page for her Elven symbol jewelry store (a bunch of esoteric nonsense, but I was young and trying to break into copywriting, so I took any deal I could).

We agreed on a pure performance deal, so I got nothing upfront, but we settled on a 5% performance fee.

He wasn’t expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised.

Her wordpress store was really small, and I was aiming to get $300-800 out of it, but honestly at some level I would have been happy to just do it for practice & my portfolio.

Long story short: I wrote the landing page & built it inside her wordpress site. She started running some Facebook ads to it, and I was shocked to see that it was actually converting.

$120 on day 1, $200 on day 2, $150 on day 3, $360 on day 4, etc.

It was about to pay off more than he imagined.

By the end of the month that landing page brought in $6,000 in revenue.

I honestly thought I struck gold. $300 in royalties in the first month??

I was going to make bank from two days of work.

But she was also a magician who knew how to vanish.

Well, predictably, she disappeared the moment I mentioned “first invoice.”

3 months go by. Nothing. No replies to emails, calls go unanswered.

She’s still running ads (I can see all the sales coming in, because I still have access to her website).

Then out of nowhere I get a panicked message. “My site is down! Are you doing this? Please stop!”

Not exactly.

Now, I had NOTHING to do with her store going down. Probably just her cheap hosting. But after being ghosted for months while she made thousands off my work…

I knew this could be my one and only shot at getting paid.

So I decided to play along…

But I had to be careful. I couldn’t just “admit” in writing that I’m the hacker and threaten her to pay up, what if she went to the police and showed them the messages?

No, I knew I had to make her THINK I was… but not admit to anything at the same time.

He had to be careful.

So I replied:

“Sorry, but I’m not going to talk to you until you pay me what you owe me.”

This turned out to be the perfect level of vague.

I never said I hacked her site. I never threatened to keep it down. I just looked suspicious as hell.

She immediately called me and asked me what I want.

The audacity.

I told her I still have access to her website & google analytics, I can see what she made off of the landing page, and that I want what we agreed on: 5% of sales from that landing page.

It ended up being just shy of $1,500.

She said she’ll take care of it. We got off the call, I sent her the final invoice, and she wired the money immediately.

Wasn’t that difficult, after all.

She then messaged me with a payment confirmation from her bank and asked me to enable her website.

IT WORKED!!

I was shaking when I typed back this reply:

“I had nothing to do with your website crashing, you should talk to your hosting provider.”

I never heard from her again.

He saw an opportunity and took it.

Let’s read some Reddit comments.

Simple like that.

Screenshot 1 aaff89 Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

Plausible.

Screenshot 2 e9cae9 Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

A reader shares their thoughts.

Screenshot 3 1ecf4d Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

This commenter shares their opinion.

Screenshot 4 af7372 Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

Another reader chimes in.

Screenshot 5 0c4555 Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

A question. (My answer is: Oh, please!)

Screenshot 6 65b0aa Jewelry Seller Ghosted A Web Developer Who Made Her Website, So She Shut It Down And The Jeweller Magically Appeared

She didn’t even apologize or show concern.

You have to be a dangerous kind of brave to mess with the person who made your website.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.