Is This Magic Brand Breaking The Law?

This week I'm covering a story about deceptive and potentially illegal marketing practices a long-standing magic brand employs. Regardless of the conclusion you draw from this story, I think it shines a critical light on the Wild West mentality of the magic industry when it comes to marketing.

From bizarre movie-like trailers to deceptive wording and sometimes completely wack marketing campaigns. The industry is missing a place for accountability and self-regulation. All we've got is Craig Petty chastising people on YouTube when they screw up their marketing campaigns. And as much as that seems to work surprisingly well, do we want magic brands to act in fear of Craig Petty?

We've written about how Murphy's Magic Supplies dominates the magic market with no accountability and how it can lead to massive stories like the one we wrote about Mr Blonde's secret identity. In that story, a genuinely faulty product made it to customers without Murphy's checking or cancelling the launch. Customers continue to wait patiently for refunds on that one.

We've written about magic pirates and theft within the industry and how a total lack of regulation or accountability allows those to sore rampantly, too. Wow, I'm testing my mental thesaurus here.

Anyway, we've never covered a story about marketing quite like this. And unlike all the other debates on magic ownership and deceptive wording, this story is different. The thing this magic brand is alleged to be doing is, well, illegal. Like, actually unlawful, black and white illegal.

If it turns out they're doing what they might be doing, it won't be Craig Petty they'll be afraid of getting a chastising from.

Part 1. Ashley Summers is a Real Person

I'd tell you this all began when I received an email from someone calling themselves "Ashley Summers," but that's a lie. Yes, technically, that's when the subject of this story first appeared in my inbox. But it's not where the story started for me.

This story kicked into gear when I received a WhatsApp message from a magician I know who has a background in scams, marketing, and the law. We're going to call this person Source 1. It read in part:

They then immediately added a second message:

I replied pretty quickly. I'd received the email, too, I said. I had. I remember getting it and thinking it was weird that the magic brand was doing cold outreach emails. I'm pretty sure that when I received it, I just replied with a link to One Ahead's advertising page.

In fact, at the time, I remember thinking how lazy it was of them to realise I was not a performing magician. The email said they'd found me via Instagram, and the only Instagram account I own is the @oneaheadclub branded one. So it was weird to receive a very personal email as though I was a performing magician and not a reluctant magic writer and brand owner.

One week after I received the email, a well-known magician also submitted the story to One Ahead. They sent me their email from Ashley Summers, which read pretty similarly, and they told me what Copeland Coins was doing was a breach of GDPR rules.

EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) governs your data rights, including how companies handle your data and the compensation you can claim for data misuse. It puts your privacy first and makes it more challenging than ever for brands to get your information or add you to a mailing list without your explicit consent.

In my haste, I told that well-known magician that Ashley Summers wasn't breaching GDPR rules because it looked like they found your email in the public domain and contacted you directly.

So long as they don't add you to a mailing list, I said, and it's difficult to prove whether they're using illegal ways to get your email, it's probably not illegal.

Morally questionable? Sure.

Right – so at this point, I look like a bit of a tit, having dismissed story submissions about this only to be sent the same story by a much more reliable source.

I took a closer look at the email I was sent from Copeland Coins. And then I realised my email wasn't from Ashley Summers; mine was from someone claiming to be Vanessa Holloway. That's weird. How many people can a brand this size employ? Even mega brands like Murphy's or Ellusionist tend only to have one person running their marketing.

And then, I saw something I hadn't seen before. Something Source 1 highlighted in their email screenshots. Right there – at the bottom of the cold email from Copeland Coins was some clickable text; it reads:

Holy shit. A mailing list! You can unsubscribe here.

Part 2. "I sEE YouRE FoLLowING @EllUsionist."

Alright, what the hell is going on here and is it illegal? There are two questionable elements to this story.

1. How are they getting our emails? Is it a legitimate and legal method or something more automated and dubious?

2. Are they adding us to a mailing list without consent? An unsubscribe button isn't a clear-cut answer.

Let's start with numero uno. How are they getting our emails? Well, it looks like Copeland Coins are telling us at the top of their cold-outreach email:

Okay – so they're going to magic brands on Instagram and ploughing through their followers. I'm guessing they find followers who have their contact info public on Instagram – many brands and professional magicians have the contact button in their bio, and then they email them.

For some clarity, here's the rest of the email I received:

So there's nothing inherently illegal about sponging off existing brand's followers and emailing them one by one. Cold outreach is a thing, and it's how many magicians find clients. You might email people following a wedding account to ask if they've considered hiring a magician for their wedding.

Heck, when I launched my voice journaling app, one of the best ways I found early adopters was to slide into people's DM's with a personalised voice memo message. It was on brand, and I did my best not to sound like a total creep.

But what Copeland Coins is doing is pretty crude, especially when your target followers are followers of a rival competitor brand.

It's worth noting in screenshots other readers sent us, different accounts were referenced, like @ericjonesmagic.

But here's the thing. If Copeland Coins is not doing this manually, one email at a time, it's a different story. And judging by the fact the email was addressed to "One", I will assume this is automated.

"One" is the first name of my Instagram account "One Ahead". The automated software likely fills every email with what it believes is the first name of the person it's reaching out to. I want to think a human being would realise my account is A. not a personal account, and B. does not belong to someone called One.

Imagine they are using a bot. Well, that's something called email address harvesting. This is the process of obtaining email addresses in various speedy ways, almost always used by spammers, such as bulk buying them or trading lists.

A common method is using special software known as "harvesting bots" or "harvesters", which target online sources like websites, directories and social media to obtain email addresses from public data.

You know, like the contact buttons in the Instagram bios of people who follow similar magic accounts...

Is it illegal? Actually, yes – in a lot of places, it is. In Australia, the creation or use of email-address harvesting programs (address harvesting software) is illegal, according to the 2003 anti-spam legislation, only if it is intended to use the email-address harvesting programs to send unsolicited commercial email. New Zealand has similar restrictions contained in its Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007.

In The United States of America, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 made it illegal to initiate a commercial email to a recipient where the email address of the recipient was obtained by, amongst other things:

• Using an automated means to extract electronic mail addresses from an Internet website or proprietary online service operated by another person, and such website or online service included, at the time the address was obtained, a notice stating that the operator of such website or online service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.

Well, shit.

Still – Maybe Vanessa Holloway and Ashley Summers and doing this all manually. Maybe they're in a backroom at the Copeland Coins offices scrolling Instagram and emailing everyone individually.

By the way, I agree with you – their names sound fake, as fake as possible. I initially wrote a joke about how they sound like made-up porn star names, but then I Googled their names. I don't know what I thought I'd find – maybe an OnlyFans account or a LinkedIn profile for their Copeland Coins jobs.

The top result for Ashley Summers is a 14-year-old who went missing in Ohio in 2007. Her whereabouts remain unknown. The top result for a search on Vanessa Holloway is an author who goes by Vanessa A. Holloway, who wrote a book titled "Getting Away with Murder".

Oh, for god's sake.

On to numero two. Bet you forgot there was a second part of this mini-investigation. Are they adding us to a mailing list without consent? This is crucial because, unlike numero one, this one is a lot easier for us to prove.

First of all, the subtle unsubscribe button says a lot. But is it real? I tried clicking it and was taken to a legitimate-looking unsubscribe page.

Another thing we can do to check if we are getting added to a mailing list without our consent is to look at the timing of the emails. I was emailed quite a while back and only received one email from Copeland Coins.

Ashley emailed most readers who submitted the story to us later, and their emails have something in common. If you look closely at the first and second emails she sends, not only do they have the same generic tone, but they have the same timestamp.

Email 2 arrives precisely seven days later at the same time of day. It's pretty unlikely Ashley is sitting in that backroom with a countdown timer to manually send that second email at precisely the exact moment seven days after the first.

What's shocking about looking at all these email timestamps is how long this has been going on. My email from Vanessa is the earliest I've seen, timestamped on the 5th of May. But I've seen emails received as recently as mid-June.

Have Copeland Coins been operating a "regular illegal" marketing system for months without anyone calling them out or realising how big the ploy is? How many people have they emailed? Could it be hundreds? Thousands?

Ellusionist has 112,000 Instagram followers. How many of their followers have their contact info in their bio? Were all of them added to a mailing list without their consent?

Part 3. ARE WE GOOD

This story has us questioning our marketing practices. I'm an anxious guy, and shit like this makes me nervous. Magicians are challenging to find, and I can understand how frustration might lead a brand to employ morally questionable marketing practices. I believe most magicians have never met another magician. This makes them difficult to find.

Sure, there are Facebook groups, magic clubs, and magic conventions. But there are only 1,500 members of the magic circle and 15,000 members in the most prominent magic groups on Facebook. There's got to be 100x that many magicians keen to buy and learn magic tricks – where the heck are they?

In examining what we do, I've concluded there's nothing we do wrong when it comes to finding and capturing the attention of magicians. I realised I need to clarify more clearly that the ad placements on our website are indeed ads, a mistake on our part, which I'll be sure to do this morning (I got up early and wrote this section the day it goes out). We tend to be pretty good at labelling affiliate links as affiliate links in emails – something I see many creators skipping.

So how does One Ahead capture emails? We're pretty explicit about what we do and how giving us your email leads to valuable emails arriving in your inbox. We've been known to run the odd giveaway. At Blackpool Magic Convention, people could subscribe to our email address in exchange for a chance to win a bunch of rare magic items like a bent Uri Geller spoon or a signed Derren Brown book. This worked well – the cost per sign-up was £1.50, and we did consider doing the same at every magic convention.

We later cancelled our booth at Magic Live when we found a more efficient way to find new magic readers. Facebook Ads. Yep, that's right, I've sold my soul to the devil, and his name is Mark Zuckerberg.

We copied and pasted the format of other non-magic news-based newsletters like Morning Brew, Daily Upside and MilkRoad. We set it up with tracking and hit go on Instagram and Facebook ads. It's a simple graphic with an accurate description of what we are, what we write and why you should subscribe. At its core, it converts well for three reasons:

1. The graphic has magical items which quickly capture the attention of magicians.

2. We tell you exactly what the newsletter is and its value proposition. It's a 5-minute weekly newsletter keeping magicians one ahead.

3. Finally – we use social proof in the form of reader counts, likes and comments to encourage you to take a chance on us.

Today, the cost per free subscriber from the ad campaign is £0.45. This means every time we spend 45 pence on the ad; we get a new free subscriber.

The free readers who love us enough to become paid subscribers stick around too. In all our time as a news site, our paid subscriber churn rate is 1.09%. Our paid subscriber lifetime value is currently £779.16.

We're doing something right. We need to keep doing it. Yes, there's a temptation to speed things up, and with that comes the dodgy shit. But we're happy taking it slow and steady, paying columnists a fair rate and expanding the value we provide as new subscribers join the community.

Though I did just manually add [email protected] to our mailing list.

Shhhh, don't tell anyone.