John Khem's Facebook PPC Secrets - Beware This Copyright Thief
When purveyor of copyright theft John Khem and his Facebook PPC Secrets website are in business, everyone needs to watch out. Running any kind of business successfully is difficult - as the co-owner of a copywriting business as well as owner of my own boutique PR agency, I know only too well how difficult achieving and maintaining success can be. When you have the likes of John Khem, who will quite happily use a stolen sales letter for which he hasn't paid the writer, then maintaining a successful business can be even more difficult.
My colleague, Samantha Cummings, was contacted by John Khem to write a sales letter for a new PPC campaign he was about to run. Using the social network craze as a medium, John Khem launched the Facebook PPC Secrets campaign, where you could make money from the advertisements on Facebook. He contacted Samantha through the GetAFreelancer website, using the email address tdkc66@gmail.com. Agreeing to pay Sam $250 for the sales letter, everything was rosy until the letter was finished. Then John Khem disappeared from the contact radar.
Samantha constantly tried to reach Khem and ask for payment - to no avail. A little later, Samantha's stolen sales letter for the Facebook PPC Secrets campaign that John Khem was running turned up online, advertising the money-making service. Not only that, but John Khem is promoting the Facebook PPC campaign through an entrepreneurial website, and happily taking money from buyers of his product. Yet still no money to Samantha. This is disgusting.
Writers have a hard enough time running a successful copywriting service at the best of times - it's a very competitive market. However, this problem is multiplied a hundred-fold when you have the likes of John Khem who is quite happy about copyright theft violation that he will use a sales letter that he hasn't paid for to advertise his product. This isn't right.
So, John Khem of the Facebook PPC Secrets profits-by-theft product. Will you do the right thing and pay Samantha for your ill-gotten gains that you are making on your no-better-than-a-scam website? Or will you continue to ignore Samantha's legal request for monies paid for her service to you? I wonder how honest people that want to make money online will view your product, if they realise that John Khem's Facebook PPC Secrets is a front for a scam artist? Of course, this is just my own opinion.
Danny Brown
Well, what do you know? John Khem has come clean (of a sorts). Following myself and my colleagues' various SEO-enhanced blog postings (and the support of numerous fellow bloggers and writers everywhere with Digg, Technorati and more - thank you all) he emailed Samantha. He insists that he "bought" her sales letter from a third-party and that he didn't know it was "stolen work". He has also paid her $100 (not the full $250 but it's better than nothing).
Whether this is the truth or not is by-the-by; what this whole episode (and the one with my good friend Fery) goes to show is that if you take on skilled SEO experts and copywriters, the whole world will get to know about it and it will quite probably come back to bite you.
Someone stealing from your corporate or business content? Have a word with Priceless Writers, unofficial Internet police! 
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Reader Comments (4)
This really upsets me! The majority of freelance writers that I know spend a lot of time working hard for others without recognition, but to add insult to injury - some don't pay???? It makes me want to scream....I hope this client does the right thing!
I hope he does the right thing as well. Sure, $250 is not that big a deal, but the disrespect stings. The nerve of someone to use a stolen project to increase their own profits...shameful. Thanks for the post. :-)
Hopefully his new Google rankings will shame him into doing the honourable thing, Samantha... We'll see :)
Love the update ninjas!! Yes, internet 'karma' so to speak can really leave a sting. It's better to do things legitimately to start with.