We live and we learn. Yogatraveljobs.com: scam?

I have very serious trust issues. That’s probably the reason why in all my travels around the world I rarely get scammed. Most of the time I’m very careful with people and if a stranger is too nice to me, it’s a red flag. It’s good to be careful when you are travelling, but sometimes I envy the naive travellers who are nice to everyone – it looks to me like their openness brings more adventure their way.

As I said, I don’t get scammed a lot. I overpay some things here and there (specially in India!) but that’s basically it. My biggest loss was 50 euros and it wasn’t a lot of money for me at the time, but I still remember how bad I felt when I realized I got scammed! It was in Shanghai, China and I fell for the famous Tea ceremony scam – you should definitely google it if you are planning to go to China, because these guys are REALLY good!

We all do mistakes, trust people we shouldn’t trust and so on. But all this is part of life and it’s all there to give us an opportunity to learn. I like to share my mistakes so others can learn from them to.

Remember my post about the website Yogatraveljobs.com? Unfortunately I had to delete it as it turned out to be a scam. Well, not sure about the jobs they post (so far I only got one reply to my applications, which I also find really strange). But a few months ago there was a posting for a writing job for Yogatraveljobs. They said they needed people to write about yoga for their blog and of course I applied. I received an email from Nicholas Schneider saying that they got around 50 applications and were in the process of selecting their writers. So they needed me to do one or both of the following:

1) Submit a personal trial piece of a personal yoga experience of yourself. It could be a yoga travel, a yoga teaching experience or something else. We will publish it on our blog and if we like it we will proceed to work with you.

We don’t pay for trial pieces and if we proceed with you we start with 30 € / article (500-700 words).

OR

2) You can publish a post about yogatraveljobs on your own blog. We will have a look into it and if we like it we will also proceed with you. We will pay you 30 € for the publishing – if we work with you or not.

Please tell is if you would do one (or both) options.

This is copied from his email. I decided to to both and emailed Nicholas several times, but never got a reply. I sent him the trial piece, I sent him the link to my blog post and a few emails to check why he is not replying. NOTHING. Even if they didn’t like my trial piece they should still pay me for it, at least this is what they said. I see they still advertise they are looking for writers, so I just wanted to warn everyone that was thinking to apply: don’t waste your time!

I don’t usually just go and write nice things about someone or something on my blog. I always do my research. Even if I was following Yogatraveljobs for some time, I still checked it before writing about it, but I didn’t find anything fishy about the website. I don’t know what happened in this case, I just know it’s very strange and I felt the need to share it with you. I don’t want other people making the same mistake 🙂

Luckily it didn’t cost me anything, but my time. As for the trial piece, I will post it on my blog very soon, so stay tuned!

Nush