Due to the sudden surge in “Spoolies” hair curling videos, I decided to share the dark side of blogging. This is the companion article for my YouTube Video.
Let’s start with discovery.
Spoolies found me in 2015 after I unintentionally used their name to describe a different roller. They sent me a set of rollers and I loved it so much that I bought more.
Within a year, the brand was selling larger rollers, which I quickly bought. They were blue and created amazing curls.
June 2017
I got a facebook message from a college friend who said “you’re famous” and attached a link to a video. I laughed it off and said “nope. I wish I was.” Another friend shared the video and a third tagged me under the post. I could not ignore it if I tried because I was buzzing with notifications.
I took a look at the video and it was me. I clicked the shop link and there was my picture on the listing along with pictures from the original Spoolies website. I scrolled down to find a description that matches the Spoolies description, 100% 5 star reviews and one of them featured my picture with the name “Lisu U.”
This is what the review said:
I received my curlers Saturday (40 CURL) and immediatly tried them on for size (so to speak); they do exactly as advertised. The curlers are easy to use, comfortable and create beautiful curl with little or no effort. I would highly recommend purchasing this wonderful product.
That did NOT happen. This was my first time I hearing of the company and the CurlMagic Rollers.
Naturally, I was upset. The product was not identical, I was made to look like I endorsed a brand that I never heard of, and they failed to ask me to try their products. I’m a YouTuber, trying products is what I do for fun.
I was robbed and the page doing it was Awesome Hairstyles. The now deleted video had over a million views on facebook.
I reported the video to facebook to do a DMCA takedown, reported their shop to Shopify, and sent the infringing party an invoice with a don’t try me again.
This is what went down in the DMs:
How did it end?
This began a vicious cycle. I would submit a report, Shopify and Facebook would remove postings and then the company would re-upload. I aspire to be that tenacious some day. On October 19, 2017, I managed to shut down each and every fraudulent website, that I was aware of.
Beautygoodz and Slaydeals were the key players.
Slaydeals now sells clothes.
Beautygoodz; the most profitable site, is cancelled after a failed attempt to sell the website.
They also had lesser sites like bazzarrdeals for you that google flags as insecure, Bestchoicedeals which is shut down,And Goodeal which has earned itself a reputation for selling bad weave.
Earnings Report.
Back to Beautygoodz. If you do a google image search, you will find my picture with a link to a flippa listing.
When I logged onto Flippa for more details, the proof of sales from May to September 2017 was 98,000.
The site was listed for $30,000.
They spent $38,000 on Facebook ad sales, but they didn’t have enough money to pay me.
I don’t have stats on the other websites because I couldn’t find earnings reports, so there’s no way of me knowing how much money was made in total.
He is from Morocco.
Haunting of the past.
After seeing so many videos of the dupes, I decided to go back to Facebook and see if I vanquished him, but I failed.
He is still there.
There is a page called Hair Curlers – CurlMagic right now as we speak that slipped through the cracks. I will get the picture removed soon.
Apparently, he’s been making money for years. Or is this someone else? The site appears to be American.
They also have a video of Miles Kimball Rollers; a dupe that I used before Spoolies discovered me. All Spoolies videos have been deleted.
Here is the listing on Stylishair.
I’ll let you draw conclusions.
HUGE shoutout to all the YouTubers who reviewed the fakes, I never would have thought to check on this guy.
