Born broke. Made a fortune. Broke again waiting for the next fortune. Don't do what I did.

DrPorn said:

I'm posting this because I hope it can be useful to someone. I just made a post regarding a forum member that passed on, and I realise I was wrong for doing that, and decided to spend the next 15 minutes giving something back.

I'm mature in age. Been around the marketing block a few times. I've been through some shit and managed to make a fortune in the process. Then I blew it. I want to share this story in the hope that it may help someone.

I started in Internet marketing at about 24. I had worked as a web developer for many years, worked in software development, and was heavily into phreaking and hacking in the early days. After a breakup with an ex at 24 I started to learn about making money online. I was at University at the time, just moved in to start my first year on a Software Engineering degree.

I was speaking to some folks I'd known for years on IRC and they taught me the basics of making money from Adsense. I also read Joel Comms Adsense book cover to cover twice during the train ride to University. I set up a quotes website (domain was sayin.gs ... for "sayings". Bit crappy looking back, but it worked). I took the entire database from wiki. I was making about $50 a day from adsense from regurgitating these famous quotes and saying. No SEO at all, but it was obviously being ranked.

I then learnt about classifieds sites, and how to do ewhoring. I was a member on Cash University. For anyone that remembers I would be in the top leaderboards for earnings almost consistantly. That's where I met Vito Glazers. Some of you will know him. I'd write software for him, he'd tell me some shady ways to iframe their landing pages and increase conversions. We stayed in contact for a long time and I was pushing a lot of traffic to Tank, but he moved on into acting and I lost touch.

I thought I was rich back then. I made $18k some days, which was my best days for eWhoring. I got fast payouts. Except, one Christmas they released the payment on Christmas Eve. I'd spent a bomb on presents and holidays and was relying on my next payout. I thought it wouldn't arrive on time, but true to their word they paid out. This was around the time they were halting payments and not paying publishers. Thankfully Vito got me paid up.

I started living the good life still pushing CU because I was promised to be paid (and I was). But Gumtree (the site I was using) killed their dating section. I was the reason for them closing it (and a few others). We killed it! I write software that did autoposting. I used TheBat to do auto responders and a script that write the persons email address on the image of the girl to make it look real to increase conversions.

I was showing off at uni. I got too big for my boots and quit to live in a quite village. Around that time was when I registered on here. I also made software that displayed 50 captcha codes and hired a guy to sit there completing them. This allowed me to autopost on Craigslist (not sure if deathbycaptcha was a thing back then). I was able to generate good money but no where near what I did on Gumtree.

But my money started to fade. Everything was saturated. I was struggling to find an income online that could support my new lifestyle. At one point I had to claim Government benefits for a couple of months and registered myself as homeless with the local council. I pissed money up the wall like you would never believe. I remember buying me and my friend a bottle of champagne each that cost 700GBP per bottle just to show off in a club.

Also around the time I had a falling out with HaRRo. We sorted it out in the end, but that fucker kept calling my phone from a premium rate number. I called it back and got billed a fortune and had to go through hassle to get it removed from my bill. I got to know Jeff from that incident. Jeff if you're reading, contact me, I've missed chatting with you

Desperate for money I had an idea ... to create a Facebook page that I knew people would share. This was back when Facebook was full of exploits and I abused the living hell out of them (I invented a few of the exploits that were ripped and resold on CPALead marketplace). The pages I made were clickbait. User would click the page, be redirected to the page's landing page and automatically invite all their friends. After that they had to complete a survey to see the image.

It made an absolute killing. I pulled in 80k in one day along with a friend (thanks ZS if you read this). In total we smashed it on CPALead. We was amongst the likes of Alienwoo (if anyone remembers him). Some shit kicked off and Facebook tried to make us snitch in return for cash. I'm legally not allowed to discuss what happened there so I'll stop. I will say though, I tried to bribe Joe Cutler into getting Facebook to give me a job. They laughed at me.

I blew the cash. I grew up poor, never had cash. My family were drug addicts. So I wasted it (I never touched drugs at all apart from weed). I lived in apartments amongst the rich, spending obscene amounts of money on expensive music production hardware. At one point I had nearly 100k worth of music gear and expensive retro keyboards. I was blowing cash on holidays, clothes, alcohol, furniture, gadgets etc.

Then the methods died, and so did the cash. I hit depression and rock bottom. Started drinking heavily. I was selling what I owned to live, to try and live that high life one last time in the hope that I'd find a new way to make that money again. It didn't happen. I went back to article marketing and made enough to live on.

Depression and alcohol took their toll. I tried to commit suicide multiple times. I was reckless and I got involved in a hacking group, done some dumb shit and got put in prison for a year. I got grassed up and done time.

After prison I came out and jumped straight on spamming Facebook groups. I made a good chunk of money but then got diagnosed with Testicle Cancer. That was rough as fuck! After I kicked Cancers ass I went back to marketing and back to spamming Facebook groups. I made another small fortune and made sure my sons Christmas was the best ever.

I also reported some exploits to Facebook because they bordered on the lines of illegal if I were to use them. Facebook paid me for reporting and I'm still on their hackers hall of fame.

Anyway, the aftershock of Cancer started to cause serious depression. I stopped working. I stopped programming. I spent days on end in bed, just lying with the laptop reading, and learning but never really doing anything. I was smoking an ounce of weed a week to forget about life.

I fell deeper into financial ruin. I had sold everything I owned to pay for an expensive weed habit.

We're now around a year on from financial ruin and here I am stuck in Government housing. I'm moving out in a month because I found some new clients who are paying well and this time I've decided to be very careful with money. I basically had to start from square one and use all my knowledge to build a consistent income instead of abusing churn and burn methods and burning the cash.

I've a got a few websites running, and some methods running on auto pilot, but they've only just started to become fruitful. I've spent too long at the computer over the years that I fear one day I'll die too young.

I exercise, I do pull ups, press ups, skipping and use kettlebells but my life is pretty much housebound due to anxiety.

The moral is ... if you're like me and manage to stumble upon huge sums of cash, be careful with it. Blackhat marketing isn't consistent. The income comes and goes. It's part of the job. Invest the cash into something consistent and live happily ever after.

That money seems unreachable these days. It was so easy to rape huge sums of cash. These days things have changed and either I'm out of the loop, or those sorts of methods no longer exist.

Never take life for granted. Tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Yesterday my Dad got diagnosed with terminal Cancer (we're currently making up a batch of RSO for him ... clutching straws) and shit is in the air at the moment. Today has been spent in a total haze reminiscing on the past.

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DrPorn said:

I'm posting this because I hope it can be useful to someone. I just made a post regarding a forum member that passed on, and I realise I was wrong for doing that, and decided to spend the next 15 minutes giving something back. I'm mature in age. Been around the marketing block a few times. I've been through some shit and managed to make a fortune in the process. Then I blew it. I want to share this story in the hope that it may help someone. I started in Internet marketing at about 24. I had worked as a web developer for many years, worked in software development, and was heavily into phreaking and hacking in the early days. After a breakup with an ex at 24 I started to learn about making money online. I was at University at the time, just moved in to start my first year on a Software Engineering degree. I was speaking to some folks I'd known for years on IRC and they taught me the basics of making money from Adsense. I also read Joel Comms Adsense book cover to cover twice during the train ride to University. I set up a quotes website (domain was sayin.gs ... for "sayings". Bit crappy looking back, but it worked). I took the entire database from wiki. I was making about $50 a day from adsense from regurgitating these famous quotes and saying. No SEO at all, but it was obviously being ranked. I then learnt about classifieds sites, and how to do ewhoring. I was a member on Cash University. For anyone that remembers I would be in the top leaderboards for earnings almost consistantly. That's where I met Vito Glazers. Some of you will know him. I'd write software for him, he'd tell me some shady ways to iframe their landing pages and increase conversions. We stayed in contact for a long time and I was pushing a lot of traffic to Tank, but he moved on into acting and I lost touch. I thought I was rich back then. I made $18k some days, which was my best days for eWhoring. I got fast payouts. Except, one Christmas they released the payment on Christmas Eve. I'd spent a bomb on presents and holidays and was relying on my next payout. I thought it wouldn't arrive on time, but true to their word they paid out. This was around the time they were halting payments and not paying publishers. Thankfully Vito got me paid up. I started living the good life still pushing CU because I was promised to be paid (and I was). But Gumtree (the site I was using) killed their dating section. I was the reason for them closing it (and a few others). We killed it! I write software that did autoposting. I used TheBat to do auto responders and a script that write the persons email address on the image of the girl to make it look real to increase conversions. I was showing off at uni. I got too big for my boots and quit to live in a quite village. Around that time was when I registered on here. I also made software that displayed 50 captcha codes and hired a guy to sit there completing them. This allowed me to autopost on Craigslist (not sure if deathbycaptcha was a thing back then). I was able to generate good money but no where near what I did on Gumtree. But my money started to fade. Everything was saturated. I was struggling to find an income online that could support my new lifestyle. At one point I had to claim Government benefits for a couple of months and registered myself as homeless with the local council. I pissed money up the wall like you would never believe. I remember buying me and my friend a bottle of champagne each that cost 700GBP per bottle just to show off in a club. Also around the time I had a falling out with HaRRo. We sorted it out in the end, but that fucker kept calling my phone from a premium rate number. I called it back and got billed a fortune and had to go through hassle to get it removed from my bill. I got to know Jeff from that incident. Jeff if you're reading, contact me, I've missed chatting with you Desperate for money I had an idea ... to create a Facebook page that I knew people would share. This was back when Facebook was full of exploits and I abused the living hell out of them (I invented a few of the exploits that were ripped and resold on CPALead marketplace). The pages I made were clickbait. User would click the page, be redirected to the page's landing page and automatically invite all their friends. After that they had to complete a survey to see the image. It made an absolute killing. I pulled in 80k in one day along with a friend (thanks ZS if you read this). In total we smashed it on CPALead. We was amongst the likes of Alienwoo (if anyone remembers him). Some shit kicked off and Facebook tried to make us snitch in return for cash. I'm legally not allowed to discuss what happened there so I'll stop. I will say though, I tried to bribe Joe Cutler into getting Facebook to give me a job. They laughed at me. I blew the cash. I grew up poor, never had cash. My family were drug addicts. So I wasted it (I never touched drugs at all apart from weed). I lived in apartments amongst the rich, spending obscene amounts of money on expensive music production hardware. At one point I had nearly 100k worth of music gear and expensive retro keyboards. I was blowing cash on holidays, clothes, alcohol, furniture, gadgets etc. Then the methods died, and so did the cash. I hit depression and rock bottom. Started drinking heavily. I was selling what I owned to live, to try and live that high life one last time in the hope that I'd find a new way to make that money again. It didn't happen. I went back to article marketing and made enough to live on. Depression and alcohol took their toll. I tried to commit suicide multiple times. I was reckless and I got involved in a hacking group, done some dumb shit and got put in prison for a year. I got grassed up and done time. After prison I came out and jumped straight on spamming Facebook groups. I made a good chunk of money but then got diagnosed with Testicle Cancer. That was rough as fuck! After I kicked Cancers ass I went back to marketing and back to spamming Facebook groups. I made another small fortune and made sure my sons Christmas was the best ever. I also reported some exploits to Facebook because they bordered on the lines of illegal if I were to use them. Facebook paid me for reporting and I'm still on their hackers hall of fame. Anyway, the aftershock of Cancer started to cause serious depression. I stopped working. I stopped programming. I spent days on end in bed, just lying with the laptop reading, and learning but never really doing anything. I was smoking an ounce of weed a week to forget about life. I fell deeper into financial ruin. I had sold everything I owned to pay for an expensive weed habit. We're now around a year on from financial ruin and here I am stuck in Government housing. I'm moving out in a month because I found some new clients who are paying well and this time I've decided to be very careful with money. I basically had to start from square one and use all my knowledge to build a consistent income instead of abusing churn and burn methods and burning the cash. I've a got a few websites running, and some methods running on auto pilot, but they've only just started to become fruitful. I've spent too long at the computer over the years that I fear one day I'll die too young. I exercise, I do pull ups, press ups, skipping and use kettlebells but my life is pretty much housebound due to anxiety. The moral is ... if you're like me and manage to stumble upon huge sums of cash, be careful with it. Blackhat marketing isn't consistent. The income comes and goes. It's part of the job. Invest the cash into something consistent and live happily ever after. That money seems unreachable these days. It was so easy to rape huge sums of cash. These days things have changed and either I'm out of the loop, or those sorts of methods no longer exist. Never take life for granted. Tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Yesterday my Dad got diagnosed with terminal Cancer (we're currently making up a batch of RSO for him ... clutching straws) and shit is in the air at the moment. Today has been spent in a total haze reminiscing on the past.

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sergiust said:

between 21 to 26 i made about a mil phreaking the bank by taking ids off desperate people and rolling their ids through a company issuing original documents even tax returns. leveled up with the same method but for business loands with a loan minimum of 5m upwards. Sad to say i lost everything in 6 months. was young got back up and made it doing franchise consulting and growth hacking. made it with 5 franchises in my portfolio, i got a stroke. so i went on become a partner of a organic agriculture product manufacturer. grew the company until my partner screwed around wiith my shares. been 2 years since then. but i;ve been up and about again since january going into tech startups. don't ever give up and never let ur pass be a ball chain on your knee. your past is your past. IT'S PAST! live in the present till you get urself back on your feet and then start living ur passion again. NEVER LET REMORSE TAKE YOU DOWN! KEEP ON GOING ON! YOU HEAR ME?

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BassTrackerBoats said:

Jackwagon.

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DrPorn said:

It's reassuring to know that there have been many others in this thread who were doing the same thing, and ended up in the same position.

Since making a lot of money in a short space of time I have lost all respect for money. Working hard to make $100 a day doesn't quite feel worth it when it was possible to make so much more than that is a shorter space of time. Mentally the crash and burn does something to the brain. I've read lots of stories about rich businessmen who lost it all and couldn't deal with life again. As a result they ended up committing suicide.

When friends and family seen me with so much money they assumed I'd done it. They assumed I was now successful. It didn't feel like success to me and it still doesn't. It feels dirty. When I'd be in the presence of CEO's and business owners, they'd look at me and admire what I was doing except they didn't know I was a spammer. I called it marketing, but if they really knew they'd see me differently.

There are ways to make a lot of cash again. I know there is. I know I have the knowledge and skills to make a lot of money but my mindset is totally differently. I can't dedicate a month to work on a project. If I could I'd be rich.

I've got a site online now. I developed the bots to gather content and repost. This is not Google indexed content, or duplicate content. It's a unique niche. My site gets traffic, a lot of it, but it has no design at all. Thus, my bounce rate is like 70%. All I need to do is spend 1 day to finish the design and get it uploaded and I will increase UX and SEO at the same time. Yet my head just can't get into gear.

It feels like a battle. It is a battle. It's a battle with my mind and I now need to try and unlearn everything I have learnt in the world of making money and forget about my past.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who replied and thank you to those who know how this feels. It's been inspirational to read through them and it has helped me to overcome these mental issues.

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T0NYS said:

Oh man stop with the bs . You have the skills / experience needed in order to launch new IM projects .
Stop reading about all those businessmen that once had millions and later they committed suicide , what if you instead read about those who made millions and went broke , made millions and then went broke again , closed repeated cycle , check for ex James Altucher's Blog, he is one of those guys and I like the way he blogs and his controversial style .

I was banking hard with fb back in the day ( 1-2k days were not exciting ) and all of sudden I woke up one morning with all my network down , it was tough so I started to drink a few days/weeks/months , did drugs , quit the gym , totally ruined my lifestyle and played poker as well. One night I churned 50-60k on poker,had a thread on bhw about it but deleted since the users were on troll mode. Tough times , but hey life goes on

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DrPorn said:

I love the brutality of your response. A good kick up the arse is what's generally required. I will also check out James Altucher too. Did you manage to secure your income again? The only thing I find problematic that I feel is important is finding the right bunch of people to bounce ideas off, and collaborate with. A good bunch of friends (whether online or IRL) helps a lot. Sadly, many people just want to take what you know and never return any advice/help/tips.

60k on poker though. Holy Christ! That's got to be one of lifes most valuable lessons right there.

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T0NYS said:

haha, I don't regret anything to be honest . IMO going broke at some point in life is the best thing that could ever happen to you ,that way you do value each cent, each fucking cent you've earned and no matter if you are or not financially educated,you will ruin everything one day , why ? Because we're humans, we've feelings and in certain moments we aren't even ourselves , a breakup , a loss of a relative, depression , you name it ...

My family was struggling financially all the time before I got my hands dirty on IM and we're doing really well those days .I do financially help my dad from time to time , he was on debt I took care of that ,he needed money to reconstruct the house , took care of that , he needed a car , took care of that as well,sister got married same thing. My parents have done everything for me, dad never went out to have a beer with its friends because of the struggle , he was a smoker , quit because he couldn't afford smoking in the situation we were in, I dunno man he has done everything but at least I am finally giving back , not only in terms of the money I've given him , he doesn't give a shit about that , what matters mostly is the fact that I am getting educated , pursuing a degree ,spending more time with them.His hard work is finally paying off (that's what he says) .Life is tough ,indeed,but no matter of what happens we should never , I mean never give up . A tough soul should not give up , one thing , motivation wont get you forward , motivation is temporary , a moment , a day , a week maybe but it won't last forever, discipline on the other hands will push you forward , been there , done that , rose up again , you can do it
Shoot me PM if you would like to have a convo / talk about anything IM-related you might need help with Cheers

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Alchemizt said:

Money is like a magnifying glass. ...

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