Something has changed in this industry, and I want to name it.
Not long ago, the operators and affiliates moving toward scam projects kept quiet about it. There was still some shame attached. You’d hear rumours. See the signs. But nobody walked up to you at a conference and pitched it directly.
That’s not the world I’m operating in anymore.
People come to me now — openly, without embarrassment — pitching black crypto projects, dubious investment schemes, call centre operations. Experienced people. People who know exactly what they’re doing. The shame is gone. And when shame disappears from an industry, something has gone wrong at a deeper level than economics.
Let me be fair about where this started, because the economic pressure is real and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Look at what’s happened to the market over the last year or two. Traffic sources that built businesses are dying. Funnels that worked reliably are gone. Competition has intensified to the point where margins that used to sit at 400-600% ROI have compressed, in many cases, down toward 40%. People who built their entire lifestyle — their houses, their cars, their team sizes, their self-image — around the old numbers are now staring at the new ones and refusing to accept them.
I understand that. I’m not dismissing it.
And for a young team with no runway, no safety net, and a business genuinely on the edge of dying — the calculus is brutal. The choice between watching something you built collapse or making a dark pivot is a real choice. I’m not standing here in a comfortable position pointing fingers at people facing that from the outside. That would be too easy, and it would be dishonest.
But that’s not who this essay is about.
This essay is about the companies with resources. The holdings. The founders with years of goodwill, established reputations, real teams, and enough runway to adapt — who are still looking across the table at scam returns because a legitimate 15% profit margin feels offensive compared to what they used to make.
I know of a Facebook team who’d moved from gambling into black crypto. They told me the margins are six times what they were making before. Six times. And I watched them try to justify it as a survival decision.
It wasn’t. Their business wasn’t dying. They just didn’t want to live at the new number.
That’s greed. Wanting more money right now, in this moment, because the market stopped handing it to you the way it used to. The second Porsche. The bigger house. The unwillingness to operate a healthy business at a healthy margin because healthy doesn’t feel as good as it used to. I understand it as a human impulse. But I won’t call it something it isn’t.
And here’s the practical problem, separate from the moral one entirely. It won’t work.
These projects are attracting attention in direct proportion to the traffic being sent to them. More volume means more visibility — to regulators, to law enforcement, to payment processors. Non-payment rates will climb. These companies will be shut down in waves. The people who moved to scam chasing 6x returns will end up with no returns, no reputation, and in some cases, significantly worse problems than a compressed margin.
The trap inside the trap is what happens after. Once you’ve operated at 6x margins, going back to 40% is psychologically almost impossible. Your baseline is recalibrated. Your lifestyle expanded to meet the number. The legitimate business you left behind now looks like a step backwards even if it’s a perfectly good business. I’ve seen this play out. It rarely ends well.
There is another way. It’s less exciting, which is probably why people don’t talk about it enough.
Optimise what you have. Squeeze maximum value from the operation you’ve already built. Build repeatable processes that work reliably at the margins the market actually offers — not the margins it offered three years ago. Find the efficiency inside your existing business before you go looking for a new one that requires you to compromise everything you built.
I know people right now building e-commerce and B2B media businesses — clean, legitimate, scalable — generating north of $100 million in net profit in a year. No scam. No dark market. Just a well-built business in a well-chosen niche, operated with discipline. That opportunity exists. It requires patience that people who got rich quickly often haven’t had to develop.
For my own part, I’ll say this simply: even if I were pushed against the wall, my own code wouldn’t allow it. Not because I think I’m better than the people who’ve made different choices. But because I’ve seen enough of this industry to know that your reputation is the only asset that compounds indefinitely. Everything else — the margins, the traffic sources, the funnels — cycles. Your name doesn’t reset.
The industry’s drift toward dark markets isn’t a market problem. Markets compress. That’s normal, and it always has been. It’s a character problem. And character, unlike margins, is entirely within your control.
So call it what it is. And then decide what you want to do about it.
