Someone Tried to Phish Me. It Accidentally Revealed a Genius Competitive Intelligence Play.

Last week I got an email from a company (I won’t name them) looking for an agency to handle their SEO, paid ads, and web development. Standard stuff. Happens all the time.

But something felt off.

Not in a glaring, obvious way. More like that feeling you get when someone’s story almost adds up but not quite. I went to check out their site before responding and found a brand new website with what looked like a hybrid of e-commerce and local services: plumber, electrician type stuff, but with zero geographic areas listed anywhere. Weird. But I gave it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just got the thing up and were still figuring out a direction.

It happens.

I replied the way I always do: let’s hop on a call, tell me more about your goals, your budget, whether this is a local play or e-com. The basics.

Then the Second Email Hit

Monday morning. 3 a.m. timestamp.

No call. No interest in a conversation. Just a reply that essentially said we’ll keep this over email, attached to a six-to-eight page PDF that was, frankly, one of the most detailed RFPs I’ve ever seen.

We’re talking time to first byte targets. Heat mapping requirements. Specific PPC campaign structures. Number of pages to be built and optimized. Measurable traffic benchmarks that would be ambitious for an established domain, let alone one that was basically brand new and starting from zero.

The budget attached to all of this? Enough to turn your head, but not enough to actually do what they were describing. Not in the three-to-six month window they outlined.

This wasn’t written by someone who just needed a website. This was written by someone who understood digital marketing deeply, or at least had access to something that did. The problem was none of it matched the site. It was like someone handed a Fortune 500 marketing brief to a company that hadn’t even figured out what city they operated in yet.

I let it sit for a day. Started drafting a response: here’s what’s realistic, here’s what isn’t, here’s why the timeline doesn’t work with this domain authority and budget.

Normal stuff.

Before I hit send, I went back to their site one more time.

The Website Told Me Everything I Needed to Know

Right there on the homepage: a notification box. I’m paraphrasing, but it said something to the effect of: this company is not soliciting any marketing agencies or services. Anyone reaching out under our name is doing so fraudulently.

Marked phishing. Done.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

What If It Wasn’t Just a Scam?

I was on a walk later that day, still thinking about it, and a thought hit me that I couldn’t shake.

What if this was intentional, just not in the way we usually think about phishing?

Think about it. You want to know exactly what your competitors charge, how they package their services, where they draw lines, and what they’ll promise to close a deal. What’s the most efficient way to find out?

You send a mass email to every agency in your market pretending to be a prospect. You make the RFP detailed enough to force real responses. You collect every proposal that comes back, drop them all into ChatGPT or Claude, and ask it to summarize the pricing averages, the service breakdowns, the outliers.

Boom. You’ve just secret shopped an entire industry in 48 hours without leaving your desk.

Now, was this specific email actually that calculated? Probably not. It had the hallmarks of a more traditional phishing play. But the method, intentional or not, is legitimately clever. And it exposed something worth talking about.

The Agencies That Would Have Bitten

Here’s the part that stuck with me.

Not every agency is going to do what I did: go back to the site twice, notice the weirdness, hold off on sending a proposal until something clicked.

A lot of agencies operate like conveyor belts. Opportunity comes in, proposal goes out. It’s systematized for efficiency, and that’s not entirely wrong from a business standpoint.

But that systematization is exactly what makes them vulnerable to something like this. Template-based proposals from template-based agencies would have gone right back out the door, full of pricing and service details, with no one stopping to ask does any of this make sense?

The race to close deals fast created an industry where too many people treat every project as basically the same. Minimal research. Minimal curiosity. Just a pricing sheet and a handshake.

What This Should Mean for Business Owners

If you’re on the other side of this, shopping for a marketing partner, this story should tell you something.

If an agency responds to your first message with a pricing sheet before they’ve asked a single question about your business, slow down. A good partner wants to know your competitive landscape, what terms actually make you money, where you’re at in your growth cycle, what’s already been tried. If there’s no curiosity on their end before the proposal goes out, the proposal isn’t really for you. It’s just the one they send everybody.

Ask for specifics. Ask how they’ve helped businesses that look like yours. Make them earn it.

The Takeaway

Was it phishing? Almost certainly. Did it cost me anything? A few hours and a walk where I had a more interesting thought than I expected.

The real question it left me with is this: how many agencies handed over a full proposal without thinking twice?

And if you’re a business owner who got a similar email from a sketchy gmail address attached to a company that definitely didn’t send it, you’re not alone. And if you’re an agency owner who got the same thing, I’d genuinely love to know… reach out. I’m curious how far this one spread.

Adam Truszkowski

Adam is a digital veteran, early adopter, brand and business builder, and former unfulfilled Pog collector. (Actually, I’ve never owned Pogs.) With decades of knowledge and experience in online advertising and consumer behavior, he aims to spread the knowledge he’s collected with any and all who will listen. He’s also the creator of Painted Brick Digital in Scottsdale Arizona, an agency that helps clients push through the 8+ figure mark.