Neil Patel

Neil Patel: Fraud who earned $8 Million by deceiving innocents

I used to be a fan of Neil Patel and his works. The guy has really built an empire when it comes to online businesses, but unfortunately, he is not one of the good guys even though he tries to act like one.

Neil Patel portrays himself as the internet entrepreneur who “made it” in the online marketing space by working hard and earning honest bucks. But after digging up some hidden data, I found out that he is a scammer.

Surprised?

I know it comes as big pie in the face but don’t worry, I’ll explain everything today in this review and by the end of it we’ll know why Neil Patel is a fraud. So without any useless banter let’s get right into it.

Who is Neil Patel?

Skip this section if you know who the guy is already, in case you don’t, here is a brief summary of the “top influencer on the web”.

Neil was born on 24^th April in 1985 in London. He claims that he has been an entrepreneur ever since the beginning. He is from Indian ethnicity. Just like every other online entrepreneur he also claims that he used to clean toilets to make a living. But he has claimed that his uncles owned dozens of businesses and were obviously very rich, so this fact is quite contradictory.

He is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, Ubersuggest, Quicksprout and Neil Patel Digital. Other than these ventures, the guy has made a ton of money using other methods, which I’ll cover in-depth later in the post.

Neil Patel is an online marketer and has a big influence on the industry. SEO professionals and marketers listen to his advice blindly. He is extremely good in networking and thus has been listed in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, etc. I won’t say the guy is not clever, but he has not used his genius in the most ethical ways.

What other SEO experts think about Neil Patel?

SEO and internet marketing is a broad and well-studied subject. Thus, there are dozens of Search Engine Optimizers who unlike NP, don’t like to sell fake products. Below are a couple of posts from Reddit which show what Patel’s fellow experts/ former students/ customers think of him.

Is he even an expert?!

This section might blow your brain, but it seems that Neil Patel is not much of an expert when it comes to SEO. You expect a professional online marketer to know the basics of human psychology. When Neil said that you don’t need an SSL certificate for your site if you are not selling a service or a product, I almost spit out my coffee.

In the video, he says that SSL certificates don’t help much with the security and if you are not collecting information, then you don’t need it. In theory, he might be correct, but in the real world, Google Chrome warns the visitor if the website doesn’t have an SSL certificate and the site is literally marked as “Not secure”. This is utterly dumb. There were quite a lot of people who pointed out this stupidity but just like always, Neil deleted those comments.

Tory Hunt pointed out the big flaw in Neil’s opinion on SSL certificates in his post. He made a compelling argument as the benefits of getting a certificate outweighs its cost. After seeing the post, Neil deleted his video from YouTube and Facebook to avoid any further backlash. He didn’t even bother to reply to Troy or even send a tweet. He obviously wanted this issue to be swept under the rug.

Reddit is one of the biggest social media platforms and it has many communities referred to as subreddits. r/SEO is a community of SEO experts who ask/answer questions and help out their fellow professionals. I found an archived post with 219 upvotes here. The user u/Actual__Wizard attended Neil Patel’s Sales Webinar and shared his experience.

The user got intrigued by the title of Neil’s email which claimed to tell how he can generate 1.7 Million visitors per month on his site. Patel was pretending like it was a live webinar even though it was obviously a recorded version. Neil was pitching his services during the whole seminar in an indirect manner. He talked about his life story and how he came from rags to the tiches.

Patel was claiming that he was the brains behind the success of ICanHasCheeseburger, while in reality, the company hired him after their cat pic went viral on social media. He also accidentally mentioned one of his failed ventures where he invested $100k in a fish oil pill project which turned out to be a nightmare.

Things get more interesting as u/Actual__Wizard talks about the famous Quicksprout. It used to be nothing more than a paid course but after the reality was revealed that it was a scam, Neil started giving it away for free. On top of that, he said that he paid Brian Dean a hundred thousand dollars for creating the course. However now the website is dead and the comment section is filled with spam content like fake HIV doctors, loan scammers and other dirty stuff.

The user exclaims that he learned nothing about SEO or anything of value from the whole webinar. All he got was a PDF file which he eventually deleted. His opinion of the webinar is that it was curated as a lead magnet and its only purpose was to attract companies for buying Neil’s products. He ends the post in a sarcastic manner by saying he gives a “9 out of 10” to the webinar.

If you think this post was cruel enough, then the comments will blow your mind.

u/boostedgts requests that Patel’s name should be banned from the subreddit. While another user thanks Actual__Wizard for his “sacrifice” of enduring the webinar so others did not have to. If you want to check out some of the other hilarious comments then just see the attached screenshots down below:

The subreddit r/SEO seems to have a liking for Neil and in this post; the user wants to know why real SEO experts don’t really like Neil. The top reply to this post has 44 points and it states that Neil might be good at marketing himself and selling his product, but he is NOT good at teaching SEO.

Another comment bluntly says that he is a joke and talks about how Neil claims to have tricks for building backlinks and he himself has been caught buying links red-handed.

Not only this but Neil also deletes any comments or posts that expose his mistakes or the questionable quality of his product. This is definitely not an ethical way to do business. Patel believes in hiding the flaws instead of fixing them.

No SEO expert uses his tool Ubersuggest anymore as it has been proven to be subpar to its competitors. One of the guys say that Neil is misleading the new bloggers and content creators by giving them cookie-cutter SEO tips which are common sense, but his shady marketing strategies make sure that he has a good following on the internet.

The $1 Marketing Program scam

It is possible that you might have heard about Patel’s $1 Marketing Program. He says the value of the course is $9000, but we all know that it is some Tai Lopez level BS. The program was available for $1 for the first month after which the student would be charged a hefty fee of $190 per month. After a couple of hours of research, I found out that the user could only access one lesson a week and the whole course was of more than 60 lessons. By doing simple maths we can calculate the cost of the Marketing course comes to more than $11,400!

To make things even worse, the first dozen lessons were too basic and covered the obvious details, so you cannot get any value out of your investment for the first few weeks of buying that course.

People quickly realized the truth about this so-called $1 course and Neil took it down to avoid any controversy. This is a common pattern for Patel, whenever he sees people figuring out his scams, he quickly shuts them down.

QuickSprout University: How Neil Patel Betrayed his fan

In his early days as the “SEO guy”, Neil released his infamous QuickSprout University which led to being one of the most hated education websites ever. He launched this product for new bloggers, small businesses and those who wanted to become professional online marketers. There were around 100 video tutorials along with some eBooks however, they aren’t quite useful especially when there are great free resources like Backlinko in the market.

QS University did not have enough material to make the student a professional marketer and with a price tag of $97, it was just not worth it. He marketed this product to people who were already in the field of online marketing and for that targeted audience, it provided ZERO value.

It did not have any community or forum of any kind which made discussions impossible. And the icing on the cake was Neil Patel wasn’t even teaching anything himself. The course was advertised by Neil Patel and it seemed obvious that Neil himself would be teaching the stuff. However, there was a different guy who was the main teacher. The students who ended up paying for the service felt betrayed and some of them even shared their experience on the internet.

Most probably Neil paid some random agency to put together the whole course and then used his marketing skills to promote it. He was essentially betraying his own followers by doing such false advertising. But as we’ll see later in the article, this is not the first time Patel is using shady methods to make thousands of dollars.

Fake Website Analysis scam

When I was researching about the guy I couldn’t believe the number of illegal/misleading things he has done for generating revenue and filling up his pockets, the list goes on and on.

On his website Quicksprout, Neil used to offer a free website analysis tool. He claimed that he spent thousands of $$$ in the development of the tool. After you put your website’s URL and the analysis is done, a pop up like such will show. This will lead you to another analyzer where when you enter the URL, it will show that your website has 11 errors. Apparently, you could type anything in the URL section and the result will be the same, 11 errors.

After some research, we found out that Patel was using basic Javascript to make a fake website analyzer. This analyzer did not do anything and it always showed 11 errors. After you see the bogus analyzer’s result, a form will popup where you enter your contact details and monthly marketing budget. This proves that Patel was only trying to get money out of innocent people’s pockets. In simple words, Neil was defrauding his audience to get money out of their pockets.

In an article on his blog, Craig Kelley has exposed this very scam tactic. Craig even contacted Neil but he did not even reply. In the comment section of the post, other people state that they tested out the tool and they got the same result.

It is just sad to see that people like Neil Patel are earning millions while honest and hard-working marketers are struggling to make ends meet. He has proven again and again that he doesn’t care about giving value or helping the world. By using deceptive business methods and scam tactics Patel has erected a multimillionaire empire.

By the way, I found who is Neil Patel wife/girlfriend

Even though he is an internet influencer, Neil has a very private life and he doesn’t seem to reveal much of it in his posts. Discussions about his girlfriend/wife have been going around on the internet but to no avail. However, after doing some extensive research I and my team might have found who this mystery woman is.

Aleisha C Faggiolli

Now, I won’t say that I guarantee that this girl is Patel’s SO but the evidence that my team has collected seems to say otherwise.

In his hundreds of posts, Neil has only elaborated about Aleisha in one of them where he talks about the most important people in his life who helped him become rich. In the post, he claims Aleisha Faggiolli is his “nanny”. He also says that she is a valuable asset and a talented member of his team. This mention was probably done so that his girlfriend doesn’t break up with him.

Neil and Aleisha live together. They have the same address and they were in a relationship for quite a while. After taking one look at this woman, you can understand how Patel fell for her.

Both of them are in their mid-thirties and you don’t just “live together” with a girl (if you know what I mean). One thing’s for sure, Neil has ruined the term “nanny” for me, thanks for that Patel.

Made millions by defrauding innocent people

Before he became the co-founder of CrazyEgg and Neil Patel Digital, Patel was already making millions from his other shady ventures which I’ll be explaining in this section.

He has bought Instagram accounts and paid models to promote it. He sold various high margin products on his Instagram and made tens of thousands of dollars every month. Even though Instagram’s ToS clearly states that buying, selling or transferring your account’s details is not allowed, but NP doesn’t really care about respecting the laws. He’ll do anything to make a few extra bucks.

I haven’t met or seen anybody like Neil, this guy is extremely greedy. It doesn’t come as a shock that he has used and still uses a ton of unethical practices to keep the money flowing. I wouldn’t have written this post if he were just some guy on the internet, but he definitely has quite a lot of followers around the web. And this behaviour not only promotes youngsters to do illegal things for money, but it also damages society.

Please share this post with your friends and family. Spread the word so this scum can be stopped.

Why isn’t he in jail for fraud already?

Why does he hide his girlfriend’s name? Is he ashamed of their relationship?

Does he have no moral ethics?

Maybe he is a sadist.

References:

Here are some links you might want to check out:

1. www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/9g6c99/i_survived_neil_patels_sales_webinar_and_lived_to/
2. www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/a82ben/is_neil_patel_any_good/
3. www.affiliateresources.org/quicksprout-university-review/
4. www.troyhunt.com/dont-take-security-advice-from-seo-experts-or-psychics-neil-patel/
5. www.estateagenttoday.co.uk/News/Story/?storyid=1038&title=OneMove..
6. avoidonlinemarketingscams.com/quicksprout-university-review-neil-patels-baby
7. www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/49s70w/shots_fired_at_neil_patel_failing_at_marketing/
8. 5minaday.com/index.html%3Fp=2408.html
9. www.truepeoplesearch.com/find/address/737-olive-way-2006_seattle-wa-98101
10. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neilpatel.jpg