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

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.
Plausible.
A reader shares their thoughts.
This commenter shares their opinion.
Another reader chimes in.
A question. (My answer is: Oh, please!)
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.

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