This will be the first of a new series of posts where we unveal guest post scams and reveal the perpetrators.

In Today’s episode we have Brett Napoli who operates/owns/founded Ambition Insight.

He owns this website: https://www.oldhousetonewhome.net/ – and offers guest posts for a fee.

His fees are rather ridiculous for a mediocre site, he was initially asking for around $500 which he instantly lowered to $250 if I were to pay the very same day. It felt quite pushy and that’s a red flag.

I accidentally scheduled the post for a client at a sales price of $249 so clearly I made a mistake.

I emailed Brett and told him the maximum I could pay is $170.

He accepted my offer.

Later I found out he sells guest posts at Adsy for $172:

What’s up with that?? Saying he gave us a sub par product because of a steep 70 percent discount!!!

I’ve reported him to Adsy of course.

The scam

He posted the guest post in this category: https://www.oldhousetonewhome.net/category/general/

However, when visiting that category it’s empty:

In the next screenshot you can see in the left bottom corner that it indeed links to this empty category:

I had to delete the title and pararaph and URL of the post of course for privacy.

What this means is that the post is not published in that category or it would be visible there.

Brett pulled a trick to either publish it at a page and add styling to make it appear it’s part of the loop/category or he edited page files to not show content in that category.

Up on checking the loop of blog posts starting from the homepage the post was nowhere to be found.

He orphaned the post in an attempt to scam us.

His main motive is to hide the post from Google to protect his website from Google’s’ wrath as it’s against their policies to sell links.

Providing us with a post with a link that has no value as it’s entirely disconnected from the site.

He could just as well have added a noindex tag to the post.

After multiple back & forths he makes it sound like we opted for a discounted version which couldn’t be further from the truth as he accepted our offer without conditions.

Then he started to ask for $75 more to make it show up on the homepage, trying to turn it into an upsell yet refuses to refund us. Basically extorting us.

Thanks for scamming us Brett Napoli from Ambition Insight. A true gentleman.

Feel free to share this post, we will syndicate it as a press release and among our network of 30 sites dedicated to outing these scammers.

Update:

He emails numerous times that I try to blackmail/extort him while all I asked for was a refund and threatens with legal action which is funny considering he scammed us.

I told him he would have to bear the consquences of his actions. For example this blog post outing him and more to come.

This post is not just to out people, it’s to protect and educate people, these types of scams are ever increasing and often involve hundreds of dollars of wasted money.

At SERPTrust we compensate our clients when we fall prey to these scams and Paypal is becoming less cooperative by the day to counter these scams.

Perhaps site owners are warned twice by posts like these when they intentionally deceive their clientele.

No refund to be seen

If Brett had refunded us immediately or didn’t scam us in the first place none of this would be needed but now we have to dispute it at Paypal as well.

I also took the liberty to add him to TrustPilot and gave him his very first review:

It’s still pending probably because it’s the first review.

Is the Post Indexed

Of course not,

It’s entirely isolated from the rest of the website so Google doesn’t suspect it of selling links. One Google update would wipe them out most likely.

I could force index it but that’s not my job, Brett could submit it to GSC but he doesn’t want Google to know about it.

In other words the post is dead in the waters.

Now don’t think we’re the first one he scammed. He probably scammed hundreds of people the very same way, the thing is, most people aren’t capable or knowledgeable about any of this and he can just keep raking in the dollars.

Brett has probably made tens of thousands of dollars from his scam attempt which makes Brett Napoli a notorious scammer with no signs of admitting his wrong doing whatsoever. He is in complete denial mode.