Real Quick Before We Get Started
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Three posts a week (Free every Friday): lead sequences, AI prompts, enrollment emails, surveys turned into marketing, and the systems we're running right now.
$199 for the year. If all of it doesn't get one more kid to your camp, your money back. No questions asked. No worries at all.
All right, on to the show.
A couple of weeks ago, the old inbox started lighting up with Shopify sale notifications.
The product: Post-Summer Reflection Questions Flash Cards. Five bucks. It's been sitting there in The Summer Camp Society Shopify store.
First one, cool. Then another. Then somewhere between five and eight of them. Then 25. Ok, now we're cooking.
Somewhere in the depths of the internet, camp people were finding this thing and deciding it was worth five real whole dollars.
Camp people were reflecting on the summer.
Maybe we should remind people it exists! Maybe we should charge more!!!
Then We Opened the Orders
Doug and I checked the dashboard. About $110 for the week, roughly $150 by the end.
Then we actually looked at the orders, and the mini-buzz or potential market signal wore off.
Shopify was flagging them as potentially fraudulent. And the buyer emails were all the same flavor: name, dot, last name, string of random numbers. Nobody real.
So it was fraud. Which was annoying for a second, and then mostly just confusing.
What kind of criminal mastermind steals credit cards to buy $5 summer camp reflection flash cards?
Turns out this has a name: Card Testing.
Fraudsters get a batch of stolen credit card numbers and run tiny purchases through small online stores to find out which cards still work. The ones that go through get used for real damage somewhere else. Your store is a mini test lab.
We're refunding all of the purchases. The cards probably belong to real people, and that part completely sucks.
Quick Break for our (very good!) friends at
Campminder
My camp runs on Campminder. We've got families signing up for Summer 2027, health forms, staffing, all of it.
If you're running camp, definitely give Campminder a call and tell them Jack Schott (that's me!) sent you.
Even the Scammers Knew
Now the "funny" part.
Of everything in that store, the criminals picked the single most seasonally correct product. It's late August. It is exactly the time of year to debrief a summer at camp. Even the fraud bots knew.
And weirdly, the scam kind of worked on me. All those fake orders got me thinking about the actual summer, which is what the cards are for in the first place.
If you're going to think through your summer, this is the time. You're still close enough to remember what actually happened, and just far enough to not be drowning in it.
Believe me, by October most of it fades.
So consider this your reminder too, courtesy of some criminals with stolen credit cards.
We made the flash cards free in the store: Post-Summer Reflection Questions Flash Cards. Go grab them, or just ask your team some questions. Or just sit for a couple of hours and think back on the summer.
If you get the cards, use a real email though. Little jumpy about fake ones now.
You got this
Jack
PS - We're going to start running free webinars each month.
First one: The 5 Emails Every Camp Should Send This Fall.
We'll walk through all five, the actual versions we're running at K&E and other camps right now, and outline how to write your own. More details to come. Sign up for the waitlist here.
