Website ATM Reviews – Is It a Scam?
The Website ATM site has an interesting concept that could be applied to many business models, but today I want to talk about whether the program itself is a scam, or if it is a legitimate way to make money in the online world.
Among all the Website ATM reviews that exist on the internet, this article is the only comprehensive review to date.
In this Website ATM review, you will get to see the inside of the training, learn how it works, and where I spotted several fake testimonials and red flags that might have you thinking twice about purchasing the material. Finally, you’ll also read a real conclusion based on my findings.
Of course, any decision is ultimately yours, and every course will have its pros and cons, but at IBuyIReview, I believe that the best decisions are made with all the facts, both good and bad in front of you.
Table of Contents
Website ATM Reviews - Can You Make Money Online With Website ATM, or Is It a Scam?
The money-making site does not appear to be a scam from the outside. In fact, when I started this review, I thought their branding is quite clever from a marketer’s perspective.
The main website itself looks promising, though there are the usual tactics placed on urgency, such as multiple countdown timers, and a quip urging you to purchase right away because “spots are limited!”
On their front page, their tagline reads “If you could install a bank ATM into your business, would you?”
The headline then goes on to pitch you on how you could, in just 10 weeks, make your website dispense money on demand.
It’s clever branding, but if you really think about it – which of course I did for my review – I think the branding has fallen short. Any ATM requires that you already have the money in the bank. Often, they charge you a fee to withdraw money that you already had!
In reality, the training is based on affiliate marketing, which is a popular and legitimate way to make money in an online world, so long as it is done correctly.
A large portion of the Website ATM pitch to aspiring digital entrepreneurs is that they will do all the work for you. No more hassle on your end, only dolla dolla bills.
All for what?
Previously, the base material was priced at $47, but this was just for a single access piece of software. Now, they are boasting that you can get 9 premium training materials, from coaching calls to books, lifetime accounts, and the base training system for $997 up-front.
Alternatively, their pay-it-out plan has you spending a few hundred dollars more to pay $297 over four months, starting on the day of enrollment.
Unfortunately, if you have been around the block once or twice with digital marketing scams, then you know for certain that this is a scam. There’s no way that a $47 product is going to make a sustainable income for you, especially if they are doing all the work for you. Where’s the profit for the course creators?
This system is pitched as a money-making wonder that will help you make money online even while you’re asleep. Call me a fool, but every real, legit course I know online requires you to put in hard work and dedication, at least in the beginning.
Website ATM wouldn’t be the first scammer to try this sort of tactic. (1) Hundreds of people are scammed out of their hard-earned money each year by this sort of online scam.
Affiliate marketing isn’t going to work this quickly, and if you know me at all, it’s not a great way to make money online either. (Check out my About page to learn more about this.)
Of course, they have up-sells inside the training as well. For example, if you pay them $1,000 then you will gain access to their “Secret System” that supposedly helps you make money online. Or, at least, it used to when it was online, but it has since been removed.
Definitely not something that I was willing to spend my money on even if I were an affiliate.
First of all, let me tell you one thing that you might have missed in Avoiding Internet Scams 101: if someone tells you that you can get rich immediately or overnight without doing any work, all you have to do is purchase their online scam, then they’re trying to take your money and run.
(They probably wouldn’t tell you it was a scam.)
Sure, you could charge back your card, but a large number of chargebacks are dismissed, so you’re not guaranteed to get your money back if you buy into an online scam. Technically, they did provide their service: they gave you the program they promised they would.
Inside Website ATM (A Review)
If you have looked at any other review, you might be wondering why some sources say that the website ATM course is about affiliate marketing and others say that it is about building websites.
While it’s true that the online Website ATM course has changed over the years, affiliate marketing and website building do play a role in it. The basic training helps you learn how to make a website from scratch, convert traffic into customers, and build your marketing funnel to acquire new customers.
This isn’t a new online idea, and in fact, the number of times that it has changed over the years is a big red flag that the training material doesn’t work.
You’ll see this if you go through any other review as well – the online presence is outdated, the affiliate links are outdated, and the people are calling the case closed before they dive into the nitty-gritty.
It leaves you wondering whether you can really make money with the course, or if it’s a scam that people are trying to revitalize.
I’m not talking about it changing as in new material has been added – the base concept of the course has shifted. The current website leads me to believe that they have recently changed their material from affiliate marketing to marketing your website so long as you are a business that actually has products to sell.
That doesn’t help you if you’re there to learn how to make money online; that only helps you if you’re attempting to make money from a business you have already started.
Previously, the software was bashed for making claims that you could make $500 overnight.
Lots of digital marketers jumped quickly, as those were bold claims that no fly-by-night marketing scam can get away with. Shortly after, Website ATM changed their marketing to say otherwise, removing the claims that people could make money online so quickly.
There are very few positive reviews of the material, and what you get for the price today feels like a variety of mish-mash books that were written with the express purpose of selling them, rather than imparting some valuable advice.
As a part of their $1,000 price, they boast that you will get 9 different bonuses, including the base training. Unfortunately, in a world where your reputation can be the difference between success and failure, Website ATM seems to miss the mark entirely. (2) There’s no additional goodies, no real support (other than the consultation call that you win when you enroll) and no verifiable claims on the website.
The software once claimed to help affiliate marketers by helping them automatically generate websites that would sell their affiliate products for them in no time. This is an oasis in a desert for many, as the bottleneck for many affiliate marketers is that they cap out the sales for one website, and it takes time to build and rank a new website.
Having an automated website builder that would build several websites for you from scratch would be a lifesaver in the time it saves alone, but unfortunately, this wouldn’t work in the real world, where SEO algorithms are specially crafted to remove spammy websites like this.
These time saving tactics might have worked once upon a time when Google was first establishing itself, but now the Website ATM reviews will reveal that the software is just seeking to nickel and dime unsuspecting people who are too new to the space to know they can’t become profitable creating and using scam affiliate websites.
I couldn’t reliably recommend this even in the case that I were selling it. It takes more than a month to make money online through affiliate marketing, or really, any way.
How Does the Website ATM Program Work?
Supposedly, the base training teaches you a way to push a button and create a website through a builder than ex-accountant Harvey built to sell.
The existence of Nick Harvey is also questionable, and we’ll dive into that in a moment. First, let’s talk a little bit about how the software works.
What can be so good about a website builder that you have to pay out of pocket for it, when there are other services online? This website builder does more than simply allow you to build websites; it builds websites for you.
These websites are intended to rank quickly and start generating traffic, earning money for you within minutes, all without any real work on your end other than pushing a button.
If you ask me, this is one of the spammiest tactics that you could possibly use to make money online, and I don’t have much faith that it could even do that.
In all of my years as a marketer and entrepreneur, not once has an “overnight success” or “push-button system” truly been as simple as it sounds. Typically, those are words that scammers use to try to lure in unsuspecting students who just want to make enough money to replace their income.
Every legitimate pitch that I have encountered over the years takes real hard work and dedication to make money at it. Any real business will – and should. You have to want it enough to get legit traffic and earn the trust of your customers. Maybe you throw out an affiliate agreement yourself, eventually, but you have to get there first.
If a business model was so good that it could make you hundreds of dollars a day without any additional work from you, the economy would be broken, and we would all be trillionaires.
It’s as simple as that.
You can make lots of money marketing online, but at no point will you be able to make that money without any effort. Everyone will want this to be the case, but there is no legit program I have come across that will work like this.
Now – let’s get back to what the program is about.
Website ATM is built so that you enter some information into the box and it begins automatically generating websites based on your selections. At first, this program was marketed as a complete secret. Everything about it was black box software, and the owner Harvey even requested that you keep it a secret or else the authorities would want to come after you.
Yikes. That’s another red flag for me.
Anytime you ask me to keep your super-secret course a secret, that tells me you might have something you want to hide.
In all likelihood, this software was built to help Harvey provide links to help rank his own websites in a time where more backlinks were better than quality backlinks. Sort of like an affiliate, but without the bonus of you getting any traffic kickbacks.
Needless to say, those methods are also outdated, as Google has caught on to these kinds of practices and actively discourage them by preventing these kinds of sites from ranking.
Maybe that’s why the program has changed so much over time?
Unfortunately, the current website gives relatively little information about the course as it stands. The base training could have changed since I last reviewed it, and Website ATM could be an entirely new course.
At least, that’s the trend of this site to date.
About The Owner
Originally, the Website ATM site was founded by a man named Nick Harvey. In his About page – which no longer exists – Harvey was an ex-accountant who happened to create software that anyone would want, solving the bottleneck of every affiliate marketer: the inability to create new websites fast enough.
The goal of affiliate websites is to get more traffic. With more traffic, the more people will want to click on your affiliate links. Unless you are working with a large, legit website, you cap out on traffic at some point and it becomes easier to start another.
While it might have been a good idea at the time, there is no proof that this Harvey character was an ex-accountant. Likewise, there is no proof anywhere online that he has expertise in building systems or even knows what he is doing. Who knows, he may have even done it to capitalize on the site’s traffic himself.
Now, Harvey is a thing of the past.
Now, the Website ATM website is run by a woman named Marisa Murgatroyd, a popular branding expert who seems to have a legit website. The traffic to the original Website ATM site now redirects to a page on her branding site.
Of course, you can’t see her information on the Website ATM page, either, but her personal branding of “live your message” is pasted all over the new Website ATM content. I had to do some external digging to find out who she was.
If the traffic you generate can’t figure out if you’re legit, you might not be legit…
Furthermore, there’s a link to her masterclass “A blueprint to create courses that get people results.”
What that tells me is that she’s a digital marketer and branding guru who has been focusing on courses for a while. She was either behind Website ATM all along, or she purchased it off of this mysterious Nick person to try to generate traffic and make it work.
In either case, there’s no clear information about who you are giving your money to on the Website ATM course.
There’s no guarantee that Marisa is running the course herself, or responsible for the quality of the course material. All she has done is endorse it, generate traffic, slap her branding on the sales funnel, and probably cash in a paycheck every month.
Without any clear information about who is actively running the Website ATM course, it’s difficult to make a positive recommendation for the program.
This mysterious Harvey showed up, claiming to be an ex-accountant who would make you an overnight success, then disappeared, replaced with Marisa.
Admittedly, she prettied-up the content and website design plenty, but even after reading the full funnel (which is not something anyone does) I still couldn’t tell you what the program is about without purchasing it or going to another source.
Scam Signal: Fake Testimonials
Many scammy courses tend to use fake testimonials as an easy way to show “social proof.” This fake social proof is the equivalent of giving yourself a fake endorsement on a resume or having your friends vouch for a new business model you haven’t made legal yet.
It’s not the best way to start off a business, but for some people, it’s the only way they have to jumpstart the business and get people to trust them without having to give the product away for free and provide a real test trial.
Anyone can go onto a website like Fiverr and purchase testimonials for a small sum. Grab the testimonial text, paste in a fake name and fake image on the page, and you’ve got yourself some (not-so-real) social proof.
Now, it’s always hard to prove that a review is fake. I was not able to find examples of this on the current website by Marisa, but another reviewer at sproutmentor had caught it on the last iteration of the Website ATM program, where he found the same profile picture of someone who had just purchased on a stock photo.
Now, it’s always hard to prove that a review is fake. I was not able to find examples of this on the current website by Marisa, but another reviewer at sproutmentor had caught it on the last iteration of the Website ATM program, where he found the same profile picture of someone who had just purchased on a stock photo.
That’s a difficult thing to backpedal from as a website owner. It’s things like this that could have been what sunk the original version of the program. Nick Harvey might have had the best of intentions, but shady practices like that can undermine the trust of your customers.
In a digital world where everything is relatively anonymous, customer trust is an important factor. A lot of people I ask wind up rating credibility and trust of a program above any other factors like price, branding, or sustainability.
That’s a lot of weight to put on a single purchase factor. If Nick wasn’t doing these things right, there’s a chance that it wasn’t algorithm shifts that tanked his product, but rather a lack of credibility in a space where he was completely new and un-established.
A Course with Too Many Red Flags
So, we’ve talked about how Website ATM has gone through several iterations, changed hands at least once, and no longer sports the same claims that it once did thanks to a new lack of visibly spammy tactics that try to trick the unsuspecting buyer into purchasing the program.
I think one of the biggest red flags of the original program is the disclaimer about how buyers shouldn’t tell anyone else about the program. That reeks of red flags to me.
In fact, Nick Harvey claimed that if buyers leaked anything about how the program worked, the authorities were likely to come after them. Luckily, that disclaimer is no longer present on the website, though Nick is not the owner anymore.
Another red flag is that there are many websites with the same or very similar program, all at different price points. These websites all have the same features, and while many of them have since been taken down, others now redirect to the current website held by Marisa.
It sounds like a lot of Nick’s strategy to marketing his program was to utilize the very program he was attempting to sell. It can’t be a coincidence that there are so many derivative websites selling a program which automatically creates websites and attempts to rank them for the benefit of a product.
Of course, if one of these platforms work and you purchase the course from these spammy-looking sites, then that’s all the proof you need that Nick’s software wasn’t all that bad.
Unfortunately, these websites also look like they haven’t been updated since the 1990s, making them look incredulous all by themselves.
Website ATM Review: Are They Trying to Copy Other Scams?
There is some talk about the program copying other scams.
Unfortunately, a lot of these websites were taken down before I had the chance to spot them and take a look myself.
When this Nick Harvey character was the founder, he had a nice photo of him and his family posted up on the About page of the website talking about who he was and why he founded the program.
That same photo and name supposedly appeared across multiple websites with different stories, different programs, with different price points.
Sounds like someone was attempting to re-use a persona.
It seems like a lot of these websites have either been taken down or modified, including the original Website ATM website. Now, the Website ATM program is branded as “With Marisa Murgatroyd”, but there’s no way to learn more about this shady character who “took over” the site from the main page.
Unfortunately, this is a common practice, and it is only getting more common as technology advances. With websites like ThisPersonDoesNotExist, it’s easier than ever to create a fake persona. In just a few clicks – and this time for real – you can download an AI-generated picture of someone who does not really exist.
From there, all it takes is creating a fake name and fake biography with the magic of writing.
I am certain that somewhere down the line, another work from home scam will pop up with Nick Harvey’s name, and the site will be exposed as another fly-by-night way to capture traffic.
Or perhaps it won’t happen, and Nick Harvey was a legitimate person who eventually sold his share when he realized it wasn’t making as much money as he had hoped and Google was inventing ways to circumvent his ranking strategies.
Either reality is a possibility, but that doesn’t mean that Website ATM is a legitimate program now that it has swapped owners. If anything, the “new” training is more suspicious than the first iteration, because now there is only vague information about all the goodies you’ll receive with your purchase, and not enough concrete details, facts, and figures.
Final Verdict - Legitimate Or Not?
There’s no doubt in my mind that Website ATM is a complete scam.
In fact, I did some digging into similar reviews after this was written, and it seems like a lot of other marketers agree with that assessment.
Regardless, the fact that the website is still up means that they are getting traffic from some source, and they are making enough money from poor, uninformed students taking a risk on a new business model to keep the website running. (3) In fact, a statement directly from the Federal Trade Commission has a better way of putting it:
(Yes, it costs money to keep a website up!)
The truth is, success takes more than an automated website builder, and even with dedicated hard work, it often takes more than 10 weeks to achieve.
Remember that Website ATM was previously boasting that their software would make you an overnight success. Now they’re recommending you wait for 10 weeks until you see if it works for you.
Conveniently, this is the same window that most small banks will stop accepting chargebacks for an item that you purchased as well, meaning the company will get to keep your money uncontested if you try to get a refund with the bank’s help.
Most disputed charges must be made within 60 days of the statement date which the purchase appeared. 10 weeks happens to sit right at the 70-day mark.
Website ATM is not only difficult to find, but it is also shady, has changed its training, changed owners, and it’s not even BBB accredited.
Plus, many of the testimonials – when you can find positive reviews – are above and beyond happy with the material (which does what, again?) and most are not written well.
I’m not saying you have to be a perfect typist to give a credible review, but they should realistically be better than this for so-called entrepreneurs.
There are too many red flags for me to realistically consider it anything other than a scam.
Furthermore, I did some digging, and there are several websites with a “websiteatm” domain, all selling some sort of handbook. This makes me hesitant to give any information to the site, even if its just my email address.
Not the Right Choice for You? There's Another Option...
If Website ATM isn’t the right choice for you, I want to introduce you to another option that has personally made me more money than a lot of other courses I’ve reviewed.
This course is one of the most legitimate business models I’ve encountered, and now I find myself comparing every course to it.
Its name?
Local Marketing Vault – or LMV for short. The owners truly care about their tight-knit community of students.
They are still active in the group, doing personalized coaching livestreams several times a week, even though the training has been around for years. If you find yourself stuck in a rut, they will work with you to figure out where in the process the system is breaking down for you, and personally help you fix it.
References:
- Nancy LeaMond, The 15 Things That Make You More Susceptible to Online Scams, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/online-scams_b_4904171
- Shannon Doyne, Have You Ever Tried to Make Money Online?, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/learning/have-you-ever-tried-to-make-money-online.html
- Kerry Hannon, Danger Alert: Avoiding Work from Home Scams, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2020/01/23/danger-alert-avoiding-work-from-home-scams/?sh=39dd68f6628f
I buy and review courses so you don’t have to. Sometimes, I even find courses that are legitimate and worthwhile; and that’s how I accidentally came across one that led me to building a 6-figure business in a little under 5 years. Now, I still review courses because it’s my favorite hobby. 🙂 Learn more about me here.
Thanks for the honest and detailed review. This practice is all over the internet, all the scams people run and get the gullible public to buy into. Sad, really sad. But thank again and keep up the good work.
I have an idea for you, but most likely you are already implementing it. It would be to offer investigative services
into anyone preparing to purchase as on-line course that provides insight and analysis of the “entity” they are planning to purchase from. What would they pay and how would you get them to understand the value? I think you already know the answer to that one. Thanks again.
Best,
Don