A bad dream

It sounded perfect. I was responding to an email sent to me by somebody who had found my name through the National Union of Journalists’ Freelance Directory. The guy wanted me to conduct a number of interviews with executives providing financial services for “high net worth individuals”.

The process was simple, he explained, as we talked on Skype for the best part of an hour. I’d bounce questions back and forth for a while until we had the basis for a structured interview. Then, at a pre-arranged time, I’d talk to the financial adviser and the interview would be recorded by “Wealth Mic” (www.wealthmic.co.uk) and edited into a downloadable format.

I’ve been doing this sort of thing for near enough 30 years, so I should be pretty proficient. But, to be honest, I wasn’t listening to Jon Cooper that carefully. He’d told me I’d be paid £500 for each interview, provided that was acceptable. I’d have been happy with half of that for a day’s work, which is what this would probably be by the time all the questions had been agreed.

After the initial conversation I rushed to tell Barbara, my wife, about the stroke of luck. It was the ideal sort of work, all done over the phone, so it didn’t matter that I was actually in Ibiza. The money was on the high side, but financial services spend considerable sums on marketing so it wasn’t totally implausible.

The following day I started work. I read out the introduction to an interview that had been completed, but where Jon wasn’t too happy with the voice of the interviewer. He stressed this wasn’t an audition. He told me I already had the work and just had to agree which people I wanted to interview. My main concern at this point was doing too many and over-using my voice so I’d be dropped for over-exposure.

Jon and I had tentatively agreed to speak the following day. We were both busy so left it fairly vague. I could see from Skype he was spending quite a lot of time in front of his computer. Anyway, we didn’t make contact although I did listen to a couple of the interviews on Wealth Mic, well, the beginning of the interviews to be honest. They seemed okay, dull, but this is personal finance.

I started to look round wealthmic.co.uk to try and see where it was based. A trip to London seemed in order and I wanted to see where I’d have to get to. There wasn’t an address, just a phone number for an exchange I didn’t recognise.

So I went to www.whois.net and searched for Wealth Mic. It was for, some reason, registered in Barcelona. Oh well, I’m in Ibiza and there’s no reason why the web developer shouldn’t be in Barcelona. It made more sense when I looked at Jon Cooper’s profile on Skype which gave his languages as both Catalan and English, although I wasn’t aware of any accent.

His Skype profile also gave a website www.iwtv.tv as his home. Unfortunately the website seemed to be unobtainable. It happens. But I still wanted to know more.
Putting the full site name into Google produced nothing. However, “iwtv” brought loads of results. That was because I’d unwittingly stumbled on one of those anorak acronyms, in this case for “Interview With The Vampire”. But if I paired iwtv with Cooper there were loads of hits on Google.

From those it was clear that Jon Cooper’s last big project was the grandly-named “Internet World Television”. His master plan was to get sports experts to video themselves. The clips would be put up on a website and pay-per-view income would be split between the sportsperson and iwtv. Most of the material seemed to have come from anglers and martial arts enthusiasts.

I’ve heard far worse ideas than this for making money. It’s a shame, perhaps, for Jon Cooper that YouTube came along.

But I still didn’t know where Wealth Mic was based. I Googled its phone number. Nothing. So I Googled it with just the first seven digits, 0207 and the exchange. It was clear from the other businesses showing up on Google that this was not a physical exchange but the number allocated to Skype to represent central London. Jon Cooper could be anywhere.

Of course, there could be plenty of innocent explanations for all of this. It’s hard to start a business and you have to talk bigger than you are. The sample interviews on Wealth Mic sounded genuine even if the picture of the interviewer looked suspiciously like David Cameron.
So I emailed Jon Cooper:

Hi Jon

Sorry we haven’t managed to link up today as I did have a few questions
to ask you.
Can you tell me who is behind Wealth Mic? It’s just I know how
expensive it is to promote as well as produce marketing materials.

Where are you based? All I’ve got is a London phone number and I think
it’s a Skype-In one.
Your Skype profile shows www.iwtv.tv as your website, but it doesn’t seem
to work. What happened?

The profile also shows your languages as Catalan and English. Is that
why wealthmic.co.uk is registered in Barcelona?

I’m obviously happy to work with you, but I need to be sure that the
business is bona fide. I do have a wife, mortgage and professional reputation to
support.

Speak soon

Nick

A little later he replied:

Nick

Out of principal I'm not going to jump though (sic) hoops to offer someone
work.

I suggest you keep on eye on what's going on with WealthMic, and when
you're are (sic) satisfied we are credible enough to work with, get in
touch.

Kind Regards

John

I did email him again, apologising for anything I might have said to upset him. He didn’t reply. So I guess I’ll probably never know why his name changed from “Jon” to “John” or what “Carrot & Stick Media” is that he referred to in his initial email.

But I will keep an eye on what happens to Wealth Mic. I know I did the right thing, but there’s always this nagging feeling that maybe I turned down the opportunity to make quite a lot of money.