There's a new VO scam in town. Please watch so you don't fall victim!

The classic Game Show scam is still around, BUT, there is a new scam in town, and they might not just be coming for your money. Let's break down what exactly happened so they don't get you.

There's a new VO scam in town. Please watch so you don't fall victim! - 8:07

Hey guys, it's Gabby. Okay, this is crazy, the weirdest thing happened to me yesterday. I had to do a video and tell you about this—hang on 'cause I'm about to spill the tea.

I don't really spill tea 'cause here's the deal: I'm a coffee drinker, we all know that, right? There's no tea in my house.

I got contacted a couple days ago by a company on LinkedIn. Usually LinkedIn is pretty legit; it's businesses, it's more corporate engagement when it comes to voiceover, that sort of thing. This dude—let me see here, I'm going to find his name—Mark Donner. Mark Donner. So, Mr. Mark Donner contacts me on behalf of a brand called Beauty Bakery, and it's spelled B-A-K-E-R-I-E, Beauty Bakery.

He basically tells me that they're looking for a voice actor, he found me, blah blah blah blah blah, can he email me some information? Sure, of course you can. And then the madness ensued. It's a scam, it's a scam job, I am stunned. So I led them on about the company for as long as I possibly could to get as much information as I could.

I was sent this sort of dossier about the company, about who they are, about what they do. Like, this all sounds super legit; it's pulled right from the Beauty Bakery's website. They had it on, like, fun, like a background that sort of matched the company website. Everything's labeled to San Diego, California, which is, I think, where they're out of. This job description—this is where it gets crazy.

25 hours a week of remote voiceover work for $39 per hour and you multiply that by four weeks, especially under a retainer contract, that's a salary for somebody, right? The per hour rate kind of sucks, but there's a lot of work to be had there in the volume. But here's the issue, none of it makes any sense. Why would a beauty company need that much voiceover with that kind of consistency? Even if it was for, like, a YouTube channel or something that they were doing with their socials, it's still really, really excessive. And as we all know, most beauty brands today rely on influencers to help them do most of their marketing, so this was all, like, super, super sketch from the get-go.

But it gets better because I apparently passed test number one in their search for talent. Then I was directed to speak to a woman named Brenda Prous and that I needed to go ahead and download Wire secure messenger, which is just basically, you know, like a conferencing app, and have an interview with this person and I'm like, what in the hell is this, right? No voiceover job works this way. It gets even better.

So, company-sponsored equipment. Then there's also information about the company's sponsored equipment. What a weird way to word it, right? But company-sponsored equipment includes an Apple MacBook Pro M316 and a Neumann TLM. And I'm like, okay, okay, these people have done their homework. So I go ahead, I put in this interview code and I connect with Brenda and Brenda proceeds to ask me the strangest set of questions I have ever been asked in relation to my voiceover career—things that just make no sense.

I strung her along for as long as I possibly could, trying to gain as much information out of her. And really, what it comes down to is it was very obvious, they're asking all sorts of weird questions, like what do you do to warm up your voice, and what would you do if a client was dissatisfied with your recording? So then, at the end of the interview, she asks me to go ahead and record an audition script and the audition script almost read like bad AI instructions, you know, just random phrases and I was like, yeah, yeah, sure, I'll do that. But hey, um, can I ask you a couple of questions? How do you guys assign the workflow? Who are the producers on the project? When do I get to converse with them? Like, all sorts of things that she literally just couldn't answer or kept deferring and saying things like, well, you know, the producers will go over that with you later while I was in my interview with Brenda.

'Cause we all know Brenda's—I went ahead and jumped on Google and I typed in 'Beauty Bakery voiceover scam'. Lo and behold, there is a post from the owner of Beauty Bakery Cosmetics brand. This particular post came from LinkedIn and she says, 'Hi sweets, please beware of a recent scam using our brand's name and logo for a fake voiceover role, a position we do not require. Even if it were a real role, please note and remember our legitimate job postings can be found only on our LinkedIn social page and the LinkedIn job board. When hiring, we've always posted to both, never just one or the other. How stupid are these people?'

In addition to that, I also found a Reddit forum with quite a few people talking about the job and similar stats, different names throughout the company, right, but all the other details are identical. The end goal of the scam is one of two things: it is either to go ahead and have a voice actor record a bunch of fake nonsense that they're never going to need or use for anything, only to receive an invoice for services and then they're going to pay it but pull the whole 'we paid you too much' scam, and that's going to result in a check that bounces, and right, it's a whole just cluster that we've seen in other scam situations.

Or, and this is the one that worries me, this is the one that is super potentially nefarious for today's voice actors—they could be getting us to record all of these weird audition phrases in Gobbledegook because it's an AI company who is then going to try to take those recordings and clone our voices.

Yeah, be safe out there, kids, look very, very closely at details and when the details don't look right and the language looks off, don't do it, don't engage it. Instead, whistle-blow, do stuff like this, bring it to other voice actors' attentions, make sure that the industry knows. Chances are, this whole Beauty Bakery thing—that's the company that they're using today and right now, it's not going to last long especially after this video, but the same format of the scam is just going to be reused with another company name so just be on the lookout for it.

Somebody who wants, you know, 25 hours of voiceover work for 39 bucks and is offering all these phenomenal benefits and it all sounds too damn good to be true, I don't understand, I don't understand why they do this to us, why it's such—anyway, be safe, be smart, I hope this helped and um, take care.

704-674-8294 / GabrielleNistico.com / gabby@voiceovervixen.com

Gabrielle Nistico, Gabby Nistico, The Voiceover Vixen, The Business First VO Coach, #VoiceoverVixen #VoiceOnFire #BusinessFirstVOCoach Voiceover, Charlotte, North Carolina, Voiceover Demo, Voiceover Coaching Advice, Working Actors, Los Angeles, New York, Linkedin, scammers, don't fall for scammers, how to avoid scams