How I Make $200,000/Year By Writing Messages To Strangers

This is our story: how we’re making 6 digits as a 17-year-old and a 23-year-old, authenticating items for strangers

I make $200k/year writing one-off messages.

And it looks like this, to be precise:

Somebody paid $20.00 for that message. And that’s it.

What is it that we do?

People pay us to tell them if their item is counterfeit or real. We tell them. That’s it.

Sometimes they pay $100.00, some other times they pay $50.00. It depends on the product. In the screenshot below, somebody paid us $100 to authenticate their $12,000+ bag.

Fun fact: after paying $100 for this message, this person later paid $60.00 to turn this message into a Certificate of Authenticity, to use it in court. Uhm… in court? Yep, in court. Legal battle. Yikes — this felt… scary, but interesting

But this $100 purchase is an outlier. It doesn’t happen on the daily.

Our bread and butter is the $20.00 service. Sometimes there’s more to it: if our customer’s item is fake and they paid via PayPal or a Credit Card, we can issue them something that looks like this for $60.00. That gets them their money back.

Finding out that Amex, Chase, etc trust a piece of virtual paper that we wrote felt… weird in the beginning. Later we got used to it.

But I jumped the gun telling you this.

One last thing I have to show, however, before going into the body of the post, is some proof to the claim:

And it’s a bit more than $203,000 actually, given B2B deals (a few, with 4 and 5 digits) + some other income. However, most of those $203,138.80 comes from us writing one-off messages to strangers

So how did we get here?