Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Liz Jostes. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Liz, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers

Yes, I think I have a crazy business story that might be one for the record books. In July of 2020, I received a peculiar email from a stranger. She said that she had a charge from my business showing on her credit card transaction list, and she wanted a refund because she had never done business with me before. Since I own a service-based business that does no online transactions, I felt she must be mistaken or the email was some sort of phishing scam.

But then, a couple weeks later, I received the same type of email from a different stranger. And this time, the woman sent me a screenshot of the transaction.

You know how you can read the charging company’s name next to the transaction amount when viewing your bank or credit card statements? Instead of a business name, it was my website URL.

As dozens of similar emails and phone calls came in over the coming weeks and months, it became clear what was going on: There was a scammer that built a sham e-commerce site on Shopify with stolen pictures of a high-end mini-projector, and the scammer was using Facebook and Instagram ads to advertise these incredible projectors at a clearance price to entice people to buy.

When the scammer created their merchant payment account, they placed my URL in the field where your business name or charging company should go as a way to direct people looking for their projector (that was never coming) to me and allowing them more time to continue pulling off this scam.

Even worse, this scammer somehow figured out how to hack into the Shopify system because they were able to somehow capture the credit card info customers were using to buy their discounted projector, and run brand new charges months later to the same cards.

This continued for nearly a year and a half.

Shopify’s Support was incredibly frustrating. It would take months to get them to take down one site, and the scammer would pop up with an identical one the next day, and I’d have to fight with them for months again to get the latest (identical) scam site taken down.

All URLs the scammer was using were registered with GoDaddy, but GoDaddy’s stance is that they are only a domain provider (in this case) so they can’t/won’t do anything about it.

In addition to individual customers contacting me, I was getting calls from banks large and small, and at one point, Mastercard had received so many reverse charge requests that they hired Ethoca, a company that works to prevent fraud and fight chargebacks, to investigate what was going on.

Eventually, the scammer gave up continually rebuilding sites on Shopify, but attempted to build the same site on other platforms. I knew this because I had been able to piece together URLs the scammer was using from talking to customers and finding the many Facebook Pages they were using to run their bogus ads, and would periodically check to see if those URLs were in use.

Thanks to my Google Alerts, I finally discovered the scammer had gone so far as to duplicate MY entire business website and change all of the contact info and social media links to theirs (or ones they wanted to use). The scammer also bought 2 URLs that were almost identical to mine, and was using them on the copycat sites.

That finally gave me what I needed because hosting companies have to act on DMCA takedown requests.

Once the copycat websites were investigated and those takedown notices honored, it seemed like the scammer decided it was too much work to continue their scam with my URL.

I didn’t and still don’t understand why payment processors allow a merchant to list anything other than their business name as the charging company. With the many security steps and verifications we have to do just as individuals, it is pretty mind-blowing that something as important as this can be so easily exploited.

Throughout this year and a half-long ordeal, I responded to every email or call I received from a scammed customer. I attempted to contact every involved business I could to get them to help. I spoke to multiple lawyers. I submitted several complaints with IC3.gov. And I constantly feared one of these scammed customers would decide to leave my business a negative Google review.

When you’re the little fish in the big pond, it’s just about impossible to be heard.

Liz, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I sure can! Eli Rose was founded in 2011. Born out of the idea of helping those who need it most and desire to work with clients where we can make the biggest impact for the good of their businesses, the mission and goals of Eli Rose Social Media have always been centered around providing simple, straight-forward, and affordable online marketing strategy, training, and management to small business owners and solopreneurs.

Eli Rose offers social media, online marketing, SEO, business blogging, social ads, and integrated marketing strategy services to small business owners who want help establishing and growing the online presence of their business.

Flexibility is key for small business owners. We pride ourselves on working with our small business clients in whatever capacity you need us. We are very flexible with how we work, and are happy to be as hands-on or hands-off as a client needs us to be. We have small business clients across several industries, from coast to coast, and each with their own needs – some who want us to help them set up their online marketing strategy and they take it from there, some who want us to strategize, implement, and manage it all on an ongoing basis on their behalf, and some who prefer some combination of assistance in between.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

For the first six years that Eli Rose was in business, I co-owned it with a good friend who I happened to meet online! She was in the Chicago suburbs and I was in TN. We were both bloggers when our kids were very young, and ended up not only finding a lot in common, but we also discovered that we grew up a couple towns apart and attended rival high schools.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Because the overarching goal has always been to serve small business owners, flexibility in working with us has always been a hallmark of how we do business. This is also something that we hear a lot from clients…that they like that we offer our services in whatever way best suits them, and that we can work at whatever pace is best for them, too.

The other recurring feedback that we receive is that our clients appreciate that we offer multiple marketing services to help them. Small business owners have small staffs or no staff, and limited time, so if they can partner with a firm that can help them with 3 or 4 of their social media or online marketing needs, it saves them trying to manage separate firms for each of those individual marketing tasks.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.elirose.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elirosesocialmedia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EliRoseSocialMedia
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2035780