25 Jan 2026 - AJ
I went back and forth on whether those Scottish title sites count as scams, and therefore are something I should cover.
When I was checking Pleasant Green’s old videos, I saw that he’d done essentially a “Mea Culpa” video because he’d unknowingly promoted one of these sites. Which reminded me of their existance. They were really big a couple of years ago, sponsoring dozens upon dozens of YouTube videos. For a while you couldn’t avoid them! Pleasant Green is usually pretty good at these things - I am one of his subscribers and enjoy educating myself, and it was really cool for him to acknowledge he was wrong and educate himself and others on the whole thing. I wanted to do the same, except without the accidental promotion of a scummy website.
And full confession - I own one of those certificates. Not because of a sponsorship, but because a well-meaning relative got it for me years ago. I remember being amused and putting it away because even then I knew that I didn’t really own land in Scotland. I’ve never gotten rid of it, to be honest, because again, my relative meant well and it meant something to me that they made the effort to get something they though I’d like. It outlasted the company they bought it from, in fact, pre-modern internet.
Sometimes I joke to my coworkers that know the story that I’m a Laird, and we all laugh. We can’t imagine anybody who would take it seriously.
As I note in the actual page, if this is done as a fun gag gift with the full knowledge that the recipient doesn’t own land, it’s absolutely not a scam. It’s just the way that the companies advertise that brings it into scam territory.
Not related to me being an imaginary Laird, but I ran across a different scam that may also make its way onto my scam pages someday. This comes from r/scams, where somebody got an emailed “letter from the FBI” saying that because she didn’t pay a transport company the $800 fee for “free” gold and jewelry from a supposed admirer. A native English speaker would immediately recognize it for the word salad it was, but her native language wasn’t English so she came for help. In any case, it’s a variation of the “Free PS5/Switch/Piano” where you’re supposed to pay a “shipping company”, except they used a variation of the Jury Duty/Illegal Items scams where suddenly a Law Enforcement agency was available to respond to something and wanted to charge you with breaking the law (unless you paid something in non-retrievable funds, no doubt)
Another one that came on my radar came to a Canadian, from supposedly a Canadian Law Enforcement agency, about supposed child porn. The recipient was instructed to email a hotmail address - fortunately, again, stopped to ask before sending information. Unfortunately, that meant that we didn’t get to see the tail end of that, but I suspect it would have ended the same as the scam above, where you send money in an unretrievable way to “Law Enforcement”.