I was a professional scammer (guest email)

The Girlbossiest Story You Ever Did Read

Today I’m handing the mic to my friend Kendra Hoffman (who is also a former client — dual relationships are a conversation we should have some other day).

Kendra told me this salacious story a couple of weeks ago in our hotel room in Nashville, where I wore her pajamas and ate her snacks. That’s the kind of friendship we have. 

Singing with Kendra at Kate Northrup’s Relaxed Money Live  📸: Monica Justesen

It was a car crash of a girlboss story, the kind you can’t look away from. 

“You have to write about this someday,” I told her. 

Well, she did. 

So today, instead of writing to you myself, I thought I’d just send you hers, with a huge plug for her newsletter Earthcare Matters if you want to hear more like this. 

“For just $500, you can shadow my life of freedom, bliss, and play in Hawaii!”

That was a real pitch I sent my friends, and I believed every word of it, FIRSTNAME.

I went to Hawaii to live out a dream, but instead, I became an internet scammer.

Yes, once upon a time, I actually scammed my friends (and I wish that was an April Fool's joke).*

How did I get there?

Back in 2014, I was studying “mindset work,” reading a book called Busting Loose from the Money Game, and following a woman named Chandra Nicole (a real world Girl Boss) online.**

That spring, I was working as a gardener on an island off the coast of Maine for a woman I deeply respected. She was the first woman I met who ran a landscaping company and spent days alone in the wilderness.

That job planted the seeds of what would eventually become LadyBug EarthCare.

Around the same time, Chandra and I were co-hosting virtual sessions on breaking free from limiting beliefs (guru lingo alert). I was writing articles on what I called “spiritual permaculture” (before I heard anyone say that phrase haha), teaching how to cultivate “joy-fruit” and “peace-fruit” and other magical-thinkings you may recall, if you’ve been around my voice on the interwebs for that long, haha.

Chandra really took me under her wing, seeing the potential in me (yellow flag sometimes), and told me if I put my intentions into the universe, an opportunity would bring me to Hawaii, where I could live with her and help build her business, Rebel Academy, as her first Freedom Guide. Wowee!

One fine day, as I was planting pansies along a garden edge, I got a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in years. He offered me extra airline miles to join him on a surf trip… in Hawaii.

It was too magical not to follow through. So I flew to Oahu the next week.

Little did I know I was about to pull a minor internet scam that summer! Haha

After my surf buddy went home, Chandra returned from Colorado (unbeknownst to me, she was scamming another woman who would later become a dear friend and my first death educator), and we started working on Rebel Academy.

It wasn’t working out (hmm haha), so we pivoted to a new idea: Lifestyle Shadowing – The Honolulu Venture.

Read the rest of Kendra’s email here →

Written by a human – Kendra Marie Hoffman

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*This email went out April 1. Isn’t that smart?

**Kendra chose to name Chandra, as is her right. On The Girlboss Apology Tour, we specifically don’t name names. This is a great example of two people making different decisions about the same issue, for our own reasons. 

Subscribe to Kendra’s newsletter, Earthcare Matters.

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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