TL;DR: A friend saw some YT ads which turned out to be under the same group that promoted the very same sketchy scheme under multiple different names over a year ago. We cannot find any info about the mastermind on the Internet other than a Vimeo account associated with two MLM schemes (InCruises and SendOutCards).

Intro

One of my friends recently ran into a YT ad promoting some "start your online business" crap again. They know that I like digging into shady ads and shared the links with me. After messing with their website, it vaguely reminded me of some other similar ads they sent me almost a year ago. Most if not all of them seem to target Asian women and try to convince them to "start an online business" with them.

Here are all the ads I got: (Warning: potentially harmful materials ahead!)

Sample screenshot of a page

Digging the Dirt

Here comes the fun part if you know where to get some burner email addresses. I always try to "sign up" for those shady "webinars" when I get something like these. All of them land on a webinar replay, showing some people presenting on the exact same set of slides, but with different presenters and groups of people. All the pages also lead to the same SamCart checkout link hosted under the subdomain name "success team". The payment page shows an email address [email protected] and asks for $149 to access their "risk-free online courses". Now I know these schemes are definitely run by the same group.

But who is behind this scheme? It's certainly not the people promoting them with their names on that. There are too many of these, and one of the links is already offline.

Into the Darkness

It turns out there are far more people trying to promote the very same stuff! I found this by using a popular website scanning tool originally designed to check malicious activities, urlscan.io, which comes with a handy feature that lists other webpages showing similar structure/appearance. Here are some scan snapshots of the mentioned URLs advertised on YT.

https://urlscan.io/result/afe6f5ae-90cf-4c25-b09e-d701b46b734b/

https://urlscan.io/result/18274431-5b26-4e92-b013-da8b3be81a90/

https://urlscan.io/result/22bf43d8-e336-4af8-8c66-28fe9ec3b666/

https://urlscan.io/result/e8f8a17d-9c97-45de-8530-fa8ee9791ec3/

Even more intriguing, the email address on the SamCart payment page has its domain name digitalbusinessprograms[.]net pointing nowhere. Googling either the domain or the copyright claim, "Digital Business Program", comes out empty. The WHOIS record from ICANN says that the domain was created at the end of 2021, which means whoever is behind the scheme has changed it after the scheme was launched since I already saw those ads from the same campaign in the summer of last year. Not sure if they are trying to evade something.

Furthermore, there is no actual website about the whole "program", and the ToS statements are the same on all promoted stub pages with no mention of the entity running the scheme. The only things I found on Google are negative reviews on third-party websites like TrustPilot or some Facebook review posts on even more promotion pages I didn't find through the webpage scans. There is some miscellaneous information in these reviews such as one claiming that those people asked them to purchase a jaw-dropping $12,000 package after the initial $149. However it seems to be a dead end here.

Currently, all I can get is that the webinars are uploaded by the same account named "Online Coach", with its public profile showing 2 MLMs, InCruise and SendOutCards.

I vaguely remembered that they used to have all the weekly "webinars" public on their Vimeo profile when I checked it last year, but now they're no longer showing up. Below is the list of links I still got access to. (Warning: potentially harmful materials ahead!)

Does anyone know what entity is behind this campaign? It seems like a huge composite of scams and MLMs to me.