I want to show you something, because I think it’ll be useful. Stay with me to the end — there’s a heart emoji in this story that turned my stomach.
For the last few weeks I’ve been getting messages from a young woman I’ve never met. Warm ones. “Hi friend.” “How are you doing?” Little hearts. She’d check in like we went way back. And every few days she’d send me a screenshot of a dashboard showing she’d made nine, ten, eleven thousand dollars using something called the “SMS bulk list method.” Simple system, she said. Real results. She just wanted me to have it too.
It is one of the oldest tricks there is, dressed up in 2026 clothes — and the same machine that targets a 23-year-old on TikTok is the one that comes for us. Same script. Different bait.
Here’s how it works, so you’ll know it on sight.
First comes the friendship. Nobody opens with “buy my thing” anymore. They open with kindness, because kindness lowers your guard. Then come the screenshots, the proof, the numbers. Except the numbers don’t survive thirty seconds of arithmetic. Twenty-nine visitors and ten thousand dollars in sales? That’s nearly three hundred and fifty dollars a head. On a digital download. It’s not a sales record. It’s a slideshow, the same screen re-shot with new dates.
Then you ask the one question that breaks the whole thing: what are you actually selling? And the answer, when it finally comes, is a course. A course that teaches you to sell the course. The money doesn’t come from a product anybody wanted. It comes from finding the next person. You wouldn’t be a customer. You’d be the inventory.
But here’s the part that turned my stomach, and the reason I’m writing this instead of just deleting.
When I went quiet, the warmth changed. “Why are you not replying me.” (That’s verbatim, grammar and all.) When I finally said I had family things going on, real ones, she wrote back: “I understand dear, family comes first.” Heart emoji. And then, same breath, “but don’t give up on yourself, just try the bulk list method.”
That’s the tell. That’s the whole thing in one message. Someone took the hardest part of a stranger’s week and used it as a doorway for a pitch. That isn’t a friend who slipped up. That’s the design. Care, weaponized into a closing technique.
This is what I mean when I say the hype machine isn’t on your side. It is very good at sounding like it is. It will flatter you, check in on you, and tell you it believes in you, right up until the moment it needs your money or your hard day.
So I made you something. It’s a one-page sheet called Spot the Setup, and it lays out the seven flags so you can hand it to anyone, your sister, your kid, the friend who keeps almost falling for these. No names in it. It goes after the trick, not the person, because the young woman running this on me is very likely someone’s earlier mark, repeating a script she was handed.
The short version, if you read nothing else: nobody who respects you will rush you, flatter you, and guilt you all in the same week. Real work doesn’t need a countdown clock or a fake best friend. And that little voice in the back of your head that said this feels off the whole time? That’s not you being cynical. That is forty, fifty, sixty years of pattern recognition doing exactly its job. Trust it.
You’re not behind. You’re not missing out. You’re awake. Stay that way.
Talk soon,
Traci
Want the Spot the Setup sheet? Hit reply and I’ll send it to you. No signup hoops, no countdown clock.
Spot the Setup is a StartSmart resource, shared free with readers of Duct Tape or Whatever Makes It Move. Pass it along to anyone who needs it.