If anyone ever wants to try out crowdfunding for some personal or business project, be very careful who you get to help publicize your project campaign. After a bit of preliminary research, I contracted with TurnkeyPR myself, to help out my kickstarter campaign for a book I’m writing and talk about over at http://www.AncientNuclearWar.com book.
Oops. Wrong choice. They turned out to be very accomplished scam artists.
Their pet “angle” on crowdfunding awareness raising was to supposedly send out hundreds or thousands of TARGETED Press Releases all over the world. And they all but guaranteed that they could blanket the media with enough press releases that my campaign’s success was all but sure “Completely realistic” was their exact words.
And because I couldn’t market the campaign myself due to being out of town for almost two months, I needed help, so I decided to try their service. And now, $500 poorer and a failed campaign later, I find that their “press release campaign” resulted in one whole big whopping dollar ($1) in new funding on my Ancient Nuclear War book project.
The “kicker” (pun intended) was when TurnkeyPR then sent me a “end-of-campaign report” at the end of the failed project supposedly proving that they had somehow generated over 2,000 new, TARGETED clicks directly to my kickstarter campaign page. Unfortunately, as I studied the report, I discovered that it was full of entirely bogus data. You see, I’m already an internet marketer, webmaster, and web developer, and I already knew what kind of response to expect from a press release campaign of the size they were promising. But they didn’t just fail to deliver, they were abysmally horrible in their results. To top that off, their apparently completely pre-fabricated, boiler-plate report was including clicks that they simply could not have captured unless they had been given server or javascript access directly to the campaign site page on the kickstarter server (which believe me, I never gave them).
Then just to make sure that I wasn’t the one being paranoid, I went looking all across the internet, using multiple tools and search engines, for some of their supposed press releases, somewhere/anywhere, and some indication that they had done what they said they would do (send out press releases all around the world). And I couldn’t find a single blinking one. NONE.
So I went back to TurnkeyPR and pointed these problems out and asked for a refund. And guess what. I haven’t heard a word back from them. But am I surprised? Not really. I would expect nothing less from a scam company. So… Be ye hereby forewarned, that the folks over at Turnkey PR (Tom, Jessica, Ian) are con artists. Avoid them. Run, don’t walk, AWAY. Talk to them at your own risk.
That’s my caution of the day to anyone considering crowdfunding for some personal project. Be cautious about who you pay to help you.
-a poorer but wiser soul…
–
Oops. Wrong choice. They turned out to be very accomplished scam artists.
Their pet “angle” on crowdfunding awareness raising was to supposedly send out hundreds or thousands of TARGETED Press Releases all over the world. And they all but guaranteed that they could blanket the media with enough press releases that my campaign’s success was all but sure “Completely realistic” was their exact words.
And because I couldn’t market the campaign myself due to being out of town for almost two months, I needed help, so I decided to try their service. And now, $500 poorer and a failed campaign later, I find that their “press release campaign” resulted in one whole big whopping dollar ($1) in new funding on my Ancient Nuclear War book project.
The “kicker” (pun intended) was when TurnkeyPR then sent me a “end-of-campaign report” at the end of the failed project supposedly proving that they had somehow generated over 2,000 new, TARGETED clicks directly to my kickstarter campaign page. Unfortunately, as I studied the report, I discovered that it was full of entirely bogus data. You see, I’m already an internet marketer, webmaster, and web developer, and I already knew what kind of response to expect from a press release campaign of the size they were promising. But they didn’t just fail to deliver, they were abysmally horrible in their results. To top that off, their apparently completely pre-fabricated, boiler-plate report was including clicks that they simply could not have captured unless they had been given server or javascript access directly to the campaign site page on the kickstarter server (which believe me, I never gave them).
Then just to make sure that I wasn’t the one being paranoid, I went looking all across the internet, using multiple tools and search engines, for some of their supposed press releases, somewhere/anywhere, and some indication that they had done what they said they would do (send out press releases all around the world). And I couldn’t find a single blinking one. NONE.
So I went back to TurnkeyPR and pointed these problems out and asked for a refund. And guess what. I haven’t heard a word back from them. But am I surprised? Not really. I would expect nothing less from a scam company. So… Be ye hereby forewarned, that the folks over at Turnkey PR (Tom, Jessica, Ian) are con artists. Avoid them. Run, don’t walk, AWAY. Talk to them at your own risk.
That’s my caution of the day to anyone considering crowdfunding for some personal project. Be cautious about who you pay to help you.
-a poorer but wiser soul…
–
Painful run-in with Scammers at Turnkey PR
by Tim Benedict