Some time ago I applied for a copywriter role with Legacy Online School, which positions itself as a fully accredited school based in Florida, USA, but hires workers in the CIS (former Soviet Union) region. That isn’t a crime in and of itself, but the hiring practices they use border on a full-on scam.

It goes like this: once you apply for a role with them via a job board like HeadHunter, they send you a Google form asking to provide examples of your work and explain in detail your working process and experience. Then, their employee messages you on Telegram to offer you a “paid test task” for 2000 rubles, which is around $25. The test contains a 700-900 word SEO-optimized article with meta tags, AI overview, and image descriptions. Once you submit it, they pay you… and delete the entire chat history for both you and them. I’m guessing the job isn’t real and they just use it to obtain a bunch of cheap content for their marketing machine.

This made me curious about the school as a whole and I learned that its founders are Vasilii Kiselev from Russia, who is a tech entrepreneur of some kind, and Peter Crawford Valentino, who describes himself as a musician and actor and even teaches acting workshops in Russia. Neither of them have much to do with education.

Now, if you take a close look at their website, you can see that it is low-quality slop that is designed to catch as many keywords as possible to optimize for search engines, but doesn’t actually look very legit. They do seem to have a lot positive reviews online, but I don’t know who wrote those reviews and what kind of education they provide based on their hiring practices. Based on the nature of my test task, I am guessing their main target audience is wealthy parents from foreign countries who want to buy their kids an American high school diploma.

What makes this especially scammy is that they’re exploiting copywriters, who have been hit very hard by ”AI” layoffs and unemployment. So yeah, stay away from Legacy Online School and don’t fall for their online reviews of dubious origins!