How I Got Scammed By a Lexus Dealer

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day. I’m also explaining why I walked away from ClickBank and I don’t promote ClickBank offers anymore, as well as the five things I look for in the perfect affiliate offer.

I’m even going to show you the one page website that I used to make over half a million dollars in affiliate commissions this year and I’ll even drive you to attend this workshop by giving you a $497 value course that it shows you how to cherry pick high converting affiliate offers for your next affiliate promotion. In addition, I’ll even give you the three offers I’m promoting right now that are making me money as we speak. All that and more at Igor.ac. And now, it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor Kheifets. So, my daughter attends a karate class on Mondays and Wednesdays, and with her, there is another kid that goes to school with her that attends those exact classes as well, and his dad and I got talking the other day just outside the dojo. Now, as I’m kind of overseeing how my daughter’s doing pushups and practicing her kata, this guy, he starts grilling me about what I do because see he sees that I’m driving a nice car, he knows that my wife is also driving a nice car and we live in a nice neighborhood and so on and so on.

And he’s also an immigrant like me, but he’s been in Canada for 30-some years. He’s from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and he immigrated over here, became a data analyst for a big conglomerate. That’s actually very common here in Toronto, a lot of people do work for these huge corporations like banks and insurance companies and things like that. And most immigrants that I know and most immigrants that come from that time span usually end up being IT people, right?

So again, it could be analysts, it could be that you just write the code. Some of them are working on software and data. Whatever the case, they’re all pretty much the same. They wake up in the morning, they drive to the head office or their local office and they spend the next eight hours behind their computer, bored out of their minds doing the same thing they’ve been doing for 20 years. And they like it because they make six figures, they get to have their vacations and they get to live this really boring yet well paid lifestyle. And for now, I would assume for the next 10 years or so, it’s still going to work for most of them. But then, of course, the inflation will catch up with them and the whole idea of making six figures won’t even be enough.

But until then, me and him were chatting. And when you talk to me, just if you’re a stranger and I’m a stranger to you, we just meet on the street, you start talking to me, you understand that I’m different. You can tell I’m not your average Joe because of the way I talk about demanding things and the perspective I bring about things like money, success, freedom, what’s right and what’s wrong and what you should or shouldn’t do.

So this guy starts really going deep into what we do and he’s not getting it, and so eventually I have to say the words email marketing. I say, “I’m an email marketer,” and this is, at this point, I regret saying it because, at this point he boxes me into this spammer persona or spammer identity. And then from that point forward, that was the only thing I said, “I’m an email marketer,” from that point forward, I became a spammer to him. Right? I had that nod like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I know who you are now.” And that’s it. There’s nothing that I could tell this guy, neither that I tried, to be honest, because I really don’t don’t care what you thinks about me, but I noticed that the moment I said, “Email marketer,” I immediately got labeled as a spammer and “a bad person”.

Now, this sort of thing, well, I’m used to it because it used to happen to me in Israel all the time. A a lot of the times when I would have conversations with other dads, and I also told you about that one conversation I had with the guy who worked for Intel who said that he would rather be healthy than rich, as if being rich is like a trade off. And so I’m used to that kind of stuff happening to me, and usually I alienated people who work average jobs and who really don’t understand the growth mindset, right? Who don’t really understand the game we’re playing here and the reasons why we build businesses and build businesses online, for that matter, to be free. Right? Because they’re perfectly fine working their jobs and that’s cool.

I mean, most people are really fine with that. I used to think most people wouldn’t be, but they are. And so, why am I sharing this with you if I don’t care? Well, I’m sharing this with you because it seems to me that, in this day and age, in this society, people seem to be okay with scams in general and they seem to be more okay with one type of scam than the other, and they sort of assume that scams are everywhere. And I am the same way, to be honest with you. For example, I had the “pleasure” of getting a new lease, a new car lease, a couple of weeks ago and I had to go in into the dealership, I’m not going to name the actual dealership I went to, but it was a Lexus dealership and that was my` fifth dealership that I’ve tried, not specifically for Lexus but in general the fifth dealership in the span of a month.

I spoke to BMW and Volvo and Volkswagen and, I mean, a bunch of them. So in this particular case, it was a Lexus dealership, here local, and I go in, going in, I already know that these guys are going to try to scam me, right? So going in, just like that other guy who found out that if I’m an email marketer it means I’m a spammer and a scammer, right, going into the dealership, I know. I expect to be somehow taken for a ride. I expect to be lied to, I expect for them to cheat me and I’m coming in with these defenses. And for the next three hours, I’m picking a car and then I’m negotiating with the sales guy. A nice sales guy, his name is Archie. Really nice guy.

Still though, still, his job, I believe his job is to take me for a ride. And so, this negotiation process takes three hours and I have to waste, and I truly believe that was a waste of my time, but I have to waste three hours of my life that I never get back on negotiating that price. So eventually, I get down to a price that I feel comfortable with knowing that there’s probably a little bit more margin, but at the same time, I know that the Archie has to eat. So I’m like, “Okay, I’m good to go.” But then, they walk me to another office, it’s called the financial manager’s office, where you get this really nice lady who’s really nice to you and she’s almost apologetic about everything she’s saying, yet she’s there to scam you too.

She’s there to get you to spend another, maybe $100, maybe $200 per month with the dealership for things like gap insurance and for all sorts of ad-ons. And the moment she mentioned anything about any sort of upsells or any additions or anything like that, I call off the deal. And here’s what happens then: I call off the deal and I say, “You know what? Screw that. I’m not buying the car. Cancel. Just give me my $1,000 deposit back and I’m out of here.” Now, she’s panicking. She never had someone go back on a deal that fast apparently because she probably never dealt with Russian Jews.

But then, so she says, “Okay. Can you give me one sec?” She goes out, she tells Archie what’s happening, salesperson, and Archie comes in, he barges in, closes the door, and he basically goes on to explain to me that her job is to upsell the crap out of me and that I shouldn’t take any upsells. So even Archie knows that she’s there to scam me with some obstacles that I don’t even know. So eventually, we continue the negotiations and I did not call off the deal. I keep the same price. I take no add ons. But you see, the whole experience is very stressful, yet it is widely accepted that that’s the way things are.

And this sort of scam, people are completely fine with. And so, this is the kind of scan that’s been going on for like, what? 50 years? I didn’t know when car dealerships started. Maybe even more, maybe 80 years. Point being is that if you get on YouTube and you type in car dealership scam, you will get a ton of material, a ton of footage of people who either work or own car dealerships or work in car dealerships or maybe used to own car dealerships who start sharing with you the things that are going on.

In fact, after going through all of this, I actually called up a buddy of mine in New Jersey who owns several car dealerships and supplies cars for several of them. And I asked him, “Is this normal? Is this what’s going on?” And he said, “Yeah, the industry is dirty.” Now, the conversation I had with him reminds me a lot of the conversations I occasionally, not as much anymore because I’m sort of past that point, but I used to, especially when I was selling things on the phone a lot back several years ago, I used to have these conversations with people, people who succeeded, people who were capable, people who were really good at marketing, who used to run big businesses, who used to own a lot of money and had big affiliate businesses and big infoproduct businesses, who just quit.

They walked away because they were not happy with the state of the industry and they couldn’t handle the fact that people were always complaining. Now, they themselves did the best job that they could, but they couldn’t handle people, their customers complaining to them and accusing them of scams because, just, they weren’t fine with the idea that scams are everywhere and that they are doing the best they can and even in spite of that, they’re still going to get complaints.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

You see, but that’s the kind of thing you have to remember, is that the world isn’t black and white and the internet marketing niche isn’t black and white either. And quite frankly, if yeah, our industry is full of scams, that’s cool. That’s just a state of being, a state of the industry I guess. But if you look into other industries, if you open your eyes and pull your head out of your ass and stop being so ignorant sometimes and so close minded, then you just look around and go talk to people from different industries, talk to people from the pharmaceutical industry, talk to people from IT, talk to people from the car business, talk to other people in different industries, you’ll see that this is a never ending and ongoing conversation that’s always, always, always there.

In fact, there’s industries out there who just literally build on top of this one thing, on top of scams. Go look into the financial advisor industry. Nobody trusts them. Some people do. Some people who really don’t understand anything about investments, et cetera, they kind of go talk to financial advisors. But the financial advisory business or the investment business or any of these heavily regulated businesses, they’re all full of scams. I mean, we don’t even have to go looking. Think Bernie Madoff, the most trustworthy dude on Wall Street, turned out to be the biggest scam in history, embezzling so much money, stealing so much money as well although he was really, really trustworthy.

So I guess where I’m going with this is if you’re even thinking about becoming a full time internet marketer, regardless of the actual skillset, if you’re going to be building funnels for people using click funnels or if you’re going to create your own software or if you’re going to provide some sort of a service or if you’re going to sell memberships and coaching programs, especially, by the way, if you’re going to sell memberships and coaching programs, if you’re going to do any sort of health stuff, you better get kind of used to the idea that some of your customers will be calling you a scammer and a lot of the people who won’t be buying from you, they won’t be buying from you because they won’t trust you. And you’ll have to work a lot to earn their trust and to build your credibility to a point where enough of them will trust you and decide to do business with you.

And this is, no one’s immune to that. Nobody. Nobody’s immune to that. You’re just always questioned, that is the nature of the beast, so if you can’t handle it, if you don’t have the stomach for it, you better go looking for a different industry because even if you choose to hide behind someone else’s product, let’s just say you bind to a franchise or you get a licensing deal like you could with my buddy Dean Holland for example. Right? You can get a ready-made business and you can find out more about that at Igor.ac, but even if you get a ready-made business, you still have to be the one looking at the records, you still have to be the one getting the customers and you will still be exposed to people saying, “Oh, you’re a scammer and you’re evil,” et cetera.

Just this morning when I woke up, there were four people disputes and waiting for me. There was one customer who has been paying me for four months on a subscription that now thinks I’m a scammer. I don’t know why yet. We haven’t been able to contact them. But point being is that even at this point when I’m walking around the industry, proverbially walking around the industry, I usually just walk around the desk in my office, but when I walk around the industry with my pockets full of video testimonials from people who are beginners from superstars, when people tell stories to each other about me, when they can attend my webinars, they can look into all the proof I’m providing, they can pretty much see that I’m a real person with a real intent to help them, with the real knowledge and real skillset and doing a pretty good job at it, too.

Even then, I still get tons of people emailing me and attending my webinars who just say mean, nasty things about me because they box me into that category. And I used to really, it used to bother me a lot and I believed that it would cause me to put just the foot on the brake. But I’m coming to realize in the last couple of years, just talking to more and more people as well as looking into other industries just because I have to, not because I want to, but just because I have to, I’m coming to realize that a lot of that stuff is really subjective and that no matter the industry, you’re always going to have to deal with it.

You’re always going to have to deal with some sort of negativity, no matter what you do. So if I can choose, I would much rather choose the business or the industry that allows me to work from home, spend time with my kids, make a really, really healthy profit from the services that I provide, make a difference in the lives of my family and my friends and just overall, just a much, much easier decision to make knowing that every other marketplace, no matter what, is still going to put me through the same scrutiny and through the same bullshit that the internet marketing marketplace will too.

Now, that’s one part of it. The other part of it is you really get to decide, and this is up to you, I can’t do it for you, but you really get to decide how much positive feedback from one customer gets to outweigh dozens of negative emails you will get from people who aren’t even your customers, but rather people who just don’t buy from you because they don’t trust you. Meaning that, to me, having one video testimonial from someone in Europe sharing that they’re now making money, they’re now following what I taught them to make money. That outweighs, for me personally, that outweighs at least 200 angry emails that I would get with people saying, “Oh, you’re just an evil scammer. You’re trying to sell me stuff. You should help me for free because that’s what good people would do, yada, yada, yada, yada.

So you see, but that’s not an even scale. You can’t have one testimonial for every angry email you get. That just doesn’t work. Especially considering that a testimonial from somebody who bought your products and services, it should have more weight than an email or feedback from somebody who’s just a tire kicker or a biz op junkie or just chasing shiny objects, it’s not the same thing. So you have to remember that and you have to weight these elements accordingly.

So as far as I’m concerned, if I had a scale, every testimonial I get outweighs a bunch of assholes, basically, at 200 to one. So for every one testimonial, my emotional wellbeing gets credited with 200 points, and then for the negativity to build up, I have to get 200 people saying to me that I’m a scammer. And that’s actually really hard to do. If you’re doing a half decent job, you’re going to have a hard time finding that many people, unless you’re selling 1000 units a day. In that case, just from the standpoint of ratio, it’s going to be like that.

But if you’re average and you’re doing 50 units a month of some kind of product for 100 bucks, then you’re probably going to have 10% of them, maybe 5% of them, kind of express negative feedback. And if you just talk to most of them, you’ll see that only maybe 1% of the 10% is going to be really evil, like the kind of people you’d really don’t want to hang out with. But for the most part, these are going to be normal, regular people that are just kind of frustrated and also confused.

Which brings me to my last point, and that is a lot of these people, they aren’t really evil. They aren’t really assholes per se, but they are really confused and they feel in the dark. So they’re making decisions and they’re assigning value and their ability to judge the situations they’re in as well as your character and in your work is very limited. They don’t have enough life experience. They don’t have enough industry experience, they don’t have enough knowledge, their reference points are completely different to yours.

So you can’t really go and ask other people to tell you how good you are. You kind of have to understand that yourself, looking at your results. And you also have to be really, really careful about not letting other people dictate your value points or your value leavers, if you will, the things that you use to judge the value you provide. Okay? That’s actually very, very critical and that’s something that will come with experience.

So anyway, I wanted to share these thoughts with you because I know that a lot of you, tons of you guys out there and gals, I know you’re not starting your business in a big way. One of the primary reasons actually, you’re not starting that business, that dream, you’re not really doing anything to facilitate your dream outcome precisely because you’re afraid to be exposed as a scammer or exposed as not doing a good job. The good old imposter syndrome thing.

Well I’ll tell you, you will be exposed either way. You will be exposed either way. But the question is, would you like to be exposed when you’re making a lot of money and helping some of your customers because they’ll just be normal, adequate people who will be able to work with you and have some of them complain to you because their situation will be different, their value, judgment will be different, et cetera. And maybe just go refund those people and let them go.

Or would you rather be judged as a loser and not do anything with your life or stay in a really bad place where you are right now? That’s really up to you. So, when I had to make the decision of whether staying where I was or having to risk my emotional wellbeing and risk “being exposed” if you will, but still doing something with my life, I chose that because I felt there was more risk in staying where I was than there were in attempting to make something happen. So think about that as the music fades away.

So this is Igor. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the List Building Lifestyle, and until next time we chat, have a good one. Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Ned Baysak, John Christiani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others.

In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote, as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people, promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac. So go ahead, claim your seat right now and I’ll see you there.