One of the reasons I started this site is to share and explore how people try to take advantage of you and me on the internet.
We all use the internet in our everyday lives. We shop, share pics, and engage in services. It’s ingrained in every facet of our lives. What I don’t like about the internet is that it’s become a race to the bottom. Attention scores internet votes, which results in us moving quickly from app to app to find the next interesting piece. The trade-off is that some people exploit the instant-gratification pace of the internet, and our collective inability to pay attention to anything for long, to hide in the noise. Coupled with the veil of anonymity, some people use that noise to take your hard-earned cash or take advantage of you in some other way.
Now, if you’re not picking up on it already — I’m quite paranoid about scams on the internet. Hypervigilant, even. So when I nearly got caught out in an apparent scam attempt, I was kicking myself. If this can happen to me — hypervigilant, tech-savvy, and paranoid — it can certainly happen to you. For that reason, I had to pull on this thread and find out everything I could.
The Ad
It started with a Facebook ad served up to me for gutter cleaning. I was sitting on the couch “googling” gutter cleaning services in my area, and of course Facebook — the invasive species living on my phone — had to get involved. It quickly picked up that I was browsing for gutter cleaning services and, unsurprisingly, started serving me targeted ads. You all know the feeling of getting targeted ads right after searching for holidays or your favourite clothing brand.
Anyway, the ad came in for “roofing.gutter.solar.” The price seemed about right at $249 for a gutter clean — cheap enough to be reasonable, not so cheap it sounded scammy — an Australian phone number, and an Australian domain for the website. On first glance, it seemed legit. It passed my first test: at a glance, it was plausible and credible. As an Australian, I know you can’t have a .com.au domain without an eligible Australian Business Number (ABN) attached to it, and having an Australian mobile number alongside it lends credibility to the brand. The fact that it was a “sponsored” ad on Facebook also suggested someone had actually paid for it. A scammer wouldn’t pay for advertising… would they?
I pointed my browser at the domain, and a text pop-up box invited me to send a query for a gutter clean quote.
The Bot
The answer came back immediately, from an Australian phone number, direct to the mobile number I’d supplied. It was straightforward, and at first seemed human — but it was definitely giving off bot vibes. It read like it was trying to spell the way a tradie would if they were in a hurry, driving, or otherwise occupied — complete with a spelling mistake and a reference to having “fat fingers.” There were spelling mistakes and casual emojis throughout.
I wasn’t concerned at this stage. I was making an after-hours enquiry (around 9pm), so I wasn’t expecting a polished, scripted reply from a receptionist — a casual, straightforward interaction felt about right. But I was fairly certain early on that it was a bot, and I even said to my partner, “I think I’m talking to a bot,” pointing to the deliberate mistakes and the slightly forced, inauthentic rhythm of the answers.
After answering a few prompts about my state and address, I supplied some fake details and eventually booked an appointment. The workflow — from landing on the site to booking a time — was extremely quick and intuitive. If you didn’t have doubts or a lingering natural suspicion, you could easily have called it good customer service.
First Doubts
After booking the clean, it struck me as a bit odd that a company I’d never heard of apparently had the ability to organise and deploy a nationwide army of gutter cleaners on short notice. It started sounding too good to be true. I told myself I was probably overthinking it, but the unease stuck around.
Sitting back and thinking it through logically, there were a few tell-tale signs. The website almost immediately pushed me toward SMS only, with the bot (or person) stating they were “a text-based business.” That’s worth remembering as a general rule: it’s a red flag when someone tries to shift you off the platform or medium you started on and onto one of their choosing. If you’re chatting to someone on Facebook Marketplace about an item and they try to move the conversation to Telegram, that’s the same pattern — and it can be a sign of ill intent.
Anyway — I was given a price for the gutter clean, booked in a time and date, and then got cold feet and pulled out.
What happened next was a rabbit hole I went down for a few hours, because I just had to find out whether this site was legitimate or a scam. It wasn’t immediately obvious either way, so I dug. Here’s what I found.
The ABN Rabbit Hole
A simple WHOIS check revealed an ABN ending in ****. That ABN had a historical record showing 18 registered business names going back almost 20 years — including party hire, an electrician, jumping castle hire, and now, most recently, roofing.gutter.solar. The name of the business owner was there too.
From there I pivoted to Facebook, located the ads for roofing.gutter.solar across Facebook and Instagram via the Ad Library, and made a note of them. The ads had all the hallmarks of legitimacy — an Australian domain, a paid placement, a relatively clean design with a logo. Nice, tidy presentation.
Interestingly, though, I couldn’t find any other reference to this business anywhere — no hipages listing, no Google reviews, no vendor page on social media, nothing beyond the ads themselves. No hits on the email address, the phone number, or anything else that would suggest an established business with a track record. The fact that it barely existed anywhere online was a bigger red flag to me than anything on the site itself — no legitimate company wants to be completely anonymous. If you want people to engage your services, you need some kind of presence.
I also made a note of the Australian mobile number I’d been receiving messages from — useful for later.
Still not satisfied, I went to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — for the uninitiated, this is a site that keeps historical snapshots of web pages, letting you view what a website looked like at different points in time. I couldn’t pull up any history for roofing.gutter.solar itself, so instead I looked at some of the entity’s earlier businesses.
The relevance of this step can’t be overstated — it let me find further pivot points: social media pages, first names, and historical email addresses tied to earlier businesses run under the same ABN. Trawling through the Wayback Machine directly is slow going, so I used its CDX API instead — an index built into the Wayback Machine that returns every URL it has ever crawled for a given domain, rather than making you click through the calendar view one snapshot at a time. A basic query looks like this:
http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=DOMAIN*&output=text&fl=timestamp,original&collapse=urlkey
That returns a flat list of timestamps and URLs, which you can then plug into https://web.archive.org/web/[timestamp]/[url] to view the actual archived page. I focused on pages like “about us” and “contact us,” since those are where names and emails tend to live. That’s how I found further references to what looked like a party hire and jumping castle hire business, previously operating out of South Australia, under the same ABN.
A Word About the Website
Looking at the source code of the site itself, I found a lead-generation funnel. There wasn’t much depth beyond a single cover page — no real “contact us,” no linked social media profiles, just fake-looking reviews and vague claims about working alongside “Ray White” and other third-party vendors, presumably to borrow some credibility.
Understanding the lead-gen funnel model mattered here. If you’re standing up a cheap website on a cheap domain wired into a lead-generation funnel, there’s still a cost involved — and the incentive is to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible, because you don’t want to outlay real money for what might turn out to be a small payday with very few bites.
So I ran the numbers on what this whole setup would actually cost to stand up:
- A .com.au domain — roughly $15–20 a year.
- The lead-gen/CRM platform running behind the site — the kind of tooling that powers the SMS bot, funnel page, and booking calendar — offers a 14-day free trial, then starts at around $97 a month once you’re past it.
- The Facebook ad spend itself looked minimal — the ads I found were flagged with “low impression count,” meaning under 100 views each. Realistically, that’s a test budget of maybe $20–30 total across all the ad variants running.
Add it up, and this entire operation — domain, funnel platform, and the ad campaign that put it in front of me — could plausibly have cost under $50 to set up and test. It doesn’t take a criminal enterprise or serious capital to look convincing enough to nearly get a hypervigilant person to hand over their address.
To be fair, this entity never tried to get money out of me before or during the booking, and it didn’t attempt any obvious rip-off. But it didn’t sit right with me, and I wanted people to understand the workflow: an ad runs, a person enters their details, and the entity harvests those details — then either (a) on-sells them as a lead to someone else, (b) shows up and does a rubbish job, or (c) tries some kind of scam outright. What I can’t tell you, even after all of this, is which one of those it actually was. That’s the honest answer.
Despite hours of poking around on the internet, it was never immediately clear to me whether this was outright fraud, a legitimate business gone about in a clumsy and misleading way, or something in between. That’s the duality of the internet — plenty of what lives on it is genuinely opaque, and no amount of digging always gets you to a clean, provable answer. What we can do is look into things, peel a few layers back, and make our own determination about whether we’re willing to deal with that company or entity based on what we actually find. In my case, I wasn’t willing to deal with them — it was too opaque, too misleading, and too disconnected from anything I could verify. Whether that makes it a scam in a legal sense, I genuinely don’t know. But people need to be equipped to dig for themselves and make their own call, and for me, this was a hard pass.
I hope reading this has shown you how easily your attention can be leveraged and funnelled into a sales pipeline where your data ends up in someone else’s hands, without you ever really knowing whose. It might not sound like an issue to you, but for me, it’s a reminder that not everything online is always what it seems. For me, the most useful thing I can do in circumstances like this is simply walk away from it.