The Grant Shapps guide to making money

The real scandal with Grant Shapps is not that he lived a double life as an internet marketing salesman called Michael Green while he was an MP, nor even that he seemingly lied about it repeatedly and sued an opponent who suggested otherwise, it’s what Michael Green did for a living. Shapps speaks with pride about how he “built up a business from scratch”, having founded HowToCorp in 2000 and (he says) handed it over to his wife Belinda in 2008. Jeremy Hunt seems to believe that he was helping to “create wealth”. So here’s a quick roundup of the methods that Shapps has apparently used, and advised others to use, in order to get noticed and make money.

Trick people into following you on Twitter

To be fair to Shapps, this is standard practice for any online toe-rag. You follow somebody on Twitter who, flattered by your interest, follows you back, thereby joining the audience for your tweets and making your following look larger. Once they’ve done so, you silently unfollow them again. That way you don’t have to look at their opinions, but they will still see yours. You also hide the fact that you are indiscriminately following thousands of people. Shapps seems to have done this on an industrial scale, a practice that sometimes requires special software.

Plagiarise other writers for money

Speaking of special software, one of HowToCorp’s leading “products” was an application called TrafficPaymaster. This automatically created new blogs online, filled them with bits of writing copied from other blogs, and then collected money from Google, whose own software would mistakenly place advertisements on your website, believing it to be real. Besides being obviously unscrupulous, the practice was against Google’s code of conduct, and “may constitute an offence of fraud” according to legal advice received by the police, who nevertheless declined to investigate.

Start what sounds very much like a pyramid scheme

It’s difficult to say exactly what many of HowToCorp’s products actually did, since most of the details have now been deleted from the web, and Shapps doesn’t do much explaining. One of them, the 20/20 Challenge, was launched in 2007, when he was still a director, as well as an MP, conservative vice-chairman and a member of the Public Administration Select Committee. The challenge cost $497 and promised customers a “toolkit” that would earn them $20,000 dollars in 20 days, provided they followed its instructions. The toolkit turned out to be an ebook, recruit 100 “Joint Venture partners”, who would agree to help sell the customer’s own online guide for a share of the profits. To be clear, we have no evidence that this amounted to a pyramid scheme. It just sounds like one.

Get testimonials from people who seem not to exist

In 2012, the Advertising Standards Authority opened an investigation into HowToCorp, following a complaint from a blogger alleging that it was using phoney testimonials. Michael Crick took up the theme for Channel 4, and could find no trace of several of the satisfied customers who recommended Michael Green, nor of the Wallerson Trust that one apparently represented, nor even anybody in the world with the surname “Stockheath”. Shapps insists they were genuine, but has never supplied any public proof. The ASA closed its investigation after being given promises by HowToCorp that the practice would not happen in future.

Be a master of disguise

Shapps has said that it was merely a “joke” or “normal” for him to take on the alter ego Michael Green, yet he has a long record of pretending to be other people. In 2007, during a byelection in west London, he posted a comment online pretending to be a Liberal Democrat accepting defeat – yet forgot that he had logged in as himself. Then in 2010 either he or someone else in his constituency office anonymously altered his Wikipedia page to delete any reference to the phoney LibDem incident, as well as references to HowToCorp and Michael Green. For good measure, the mysterious editor also added material about Shapps’s work on homelessness.