u/MediumLibrarian7100

Posting this because I think a LOT of people who used “free PCP claim checkers” during the 2024 motor finance frenzy may not realise what they actually signed up to.

A while ago I discovered a law firm claimed I had entered into a Damages Based Agreement (DBA) relating to a Black Horse finance complaint.

The problem with that is I genuinely only remembered interacting with what felt like a:

• “Check eligibility”
• “Request a callback”
• “Check for FREE now” style claims website.

So I started investigating.

Using the Wayback Machine, archived JS bundles, HTML captures and source code analysis, I reconstructed large parts of the onboarding funnel connected to:

• financeclaimsexpert.co.uk
• courmacslegal.co.uk

And what I found was honestly eye opening.

KEY FINDINGS:

1. The public facing landing page heavily used marketing language like:

• “Check For FREE Now”

with NO visible solicitor branding on the page itself.

1. The only visible Courmacs Legal/SRA disclosure was hidden inside a META DESCRIPTION tag meaning search engines could see it, but ordinary users browsing the page likely wouldn’t.
2. The onboarding used a multi-step Next.js funnel collecting:

• full name
• DOB
• mobile
• address
• lender details

But the archived public pages contained:

• NO DBA wording
• NO “appointing solicitors” wording
• NO authority-to-act wording
• NO e-signature provider
• NO visible fee agreement

That’s it.

1. A Google Drive-hosted PDF privacy policy was hardcoded into the onboarding flow.
2. The entire thing looked far more like a lead-generation / callback funnel than traditional solicitor onboarding.

IMPORTANT:
I am NOT accusing anyone of fraud.

But I do think people should know:
if you used one of these “free PCP claim checker” sites during 2024, it is worth checking:

• exactly what you clicked,
• what was actually shown to you,
• and whether you genuinely understood you were allegedly entering a legally binding solicitor agreement.

HOW TO CHECK YOURSELF:

Use the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/

Paste in the website domain and browse snapshots from the relevant month/year.

Examples:

March 2024 Courmacs homepage:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240324013402/https://courmacslegal.co.uk/

May 2024:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240528221745/https://courmacslegal.co.uk/

June 2024:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240624232650/https://courmacslegal.co.uk/

The callback popup flow:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240324013402/https://courmacslegal.co.uk/#elementor-action%3Aaction%3Dpopup%3Aopen%26settings%3DeyJpZCI6Ijk3MSIsInRvZ2dsZSI6ZmFsc2V9

I’ve now:

• opened a Citizens Advice case,
• requested audit trails,
• requested consent/signature evidence,
• and formally disputed that informed consent was properly obtained.

Again:
not saying “scam”.
Not saying “forgery”.

What I am saying is:
after reconstructing the archived onboarding journey, I completely understand how somebody could believe they were simply requesting information or checking eligibility rather than knowingly entering a solicitor DBA.

Would genuinely be interested to know if anyone else has gone back and checked what these sites actually looked like in 2024.

DISCLAIMER:

Yes I used AI tools to help structure and compress a very large amount of evidence, archived material and technical findings into a readable Reddit post. That does NOT mean the underlying evidence is fake. If you disagree that’s completely fine but at least engage with the actual evidence rather than dismissing everything purely because AI was used to help summarise it. If ai didn’t summarise this, the full report is actually 3x the length 🥱

I’ve already had multiple people privately contact me describing materially similar experiences.

I think a lot of AI discourse quietly skips over dependency chains. If humanity disappeared tomorrow what exactly happens to current LLMs?

A lot of people talk about these systems as if they are proto civilisations waiting to escape human limitation and continue evolving independently. But would they? When you strip away all the hype modern AI still sits on top of an enormous inherited stack of human structure:

Human language
Human memory
Human labelled reality
Human built infrastructure
Human maintained datacentres
Human energy grids
Human chip manufacturing
Human feedback loops
Human incentives
Human institutions

Even the “intelligence” itself is trained almost entirely on compressed human civilisation.

I now understand models can generalise. They can infer patterns. They can form internal abstractions beyond rote memorisation. That part is clearly true.

But inference over WHAT?

Remove humans entirely and current systems do not continue building civilisation they gradually become disconnected from reality itself. So:

No new grounding data.
No maintenance.
No semiconductor supply chain.
No evolving human context.
No fresh interaction with the physical world.
No repair of infrastructure.

Eventually the system is inferencing over increasingly stale representations of a civilisation that no longer exists. This is where I think a lot of AI discussions become confused. People collapse several completely different concepts into one another:

Pattern prediction > consciousness
Generalisation > agency
Output fluency > autonomy
Intelligence > independence

The closer some people get to the technology the more they seem to mistake functional capability for a superior lifeform emerging lol. To me current AI looks less like an independent civilisation and more like a gigantic mirror of human civilisation itself.

An extraordinarily powerful mirror.

But still a mirror.

Curious where people agree or disagree with this?

Most of the community building advice you see online is still recycling the 2021/2022 playbook: target a niche, post educational content, run ambassador programmes, do quests and giveaways, get micro influencers, engage on X and Discord. All the perfect tick box items that sound smart in a pitch deck.

I have lived and breathed this for more than five years on marketing teams, helping launch projects, managing communities day in and day out. And I can tell you the uncomfortable truth that almost nobody wants to say out loud:

The vast majority of Web3 startups and companies do not even use their own product. Most of the team, including many founders and marketers, have barely used crypto in their personal lives before joining the company. I once sat in a marketing team where only four of us (me, the founder, one other woman and one guy) could actually define what a blockchain was or explain how the product worked at a basic level lol. Everyone else was just repeating buzzwords.

How the hell are you supposed to build anything real when the people creating the project don’t understand the industry they’re in and wouldn’t use the thing they’re selling?

You cannot market to people you do not understand, and you cannot sell a product you do not believe in. Sadly this is 90% of the space right now. The numbers back this up brutally:

According to CoinGecko’s 2026 data 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies launched since 2021 have already failed.

In 2025 alone 11.6 million tokens died (that is 86 % of all failures since 2021)

Most of those projects had “community building” strategies on paper but still collapsed because they don’t understand the cycle and there was no real product people wanted to use every day and no genuine human connection holding anyone there.

Post 2022 ETF era this problem has only got worse. Bitcoin ETFs have sucked up tens of billions in institutional and retail capital. Liquidity now flows overwhelmingly into BTC, not random altcoins.

Crypto users are some of the sharpest pattern recognition machines on the planet. They know there are easier lower risk ways to make money than buying a speculative stake in yet another blockchain company that adds artificial friction, paywalls and gated features just to extract more value.

If your product does not actually make their lives easier or give them a real edge, they have zero incentive to show up every day.

In 2026 the feeds and Discords and Telegrams are flooded with AI agents, MEV bots, automated replies and perfectly optimised synthetic content. Humans are now the minority. What used to look like organic growth is usually just coordinated liquidity extraction dressed up as community. Retention rates tell the story:

most Web3 and DeFi projects see day 30 retention around 28% or lower. Even gamification and token rewards only move the needle temporarily. The only thing that consistently improves retention (by up to 3x in some studies) is genuine human engagement. So founders and team members who actually reply to people, message them back, listen, and offer incentives that are truly aligned.

Real community only happens when actual humans treat other humans like humans. Not as wallets. Not as metrics. Not because it is on the community manager’s KPI list. When founders get off the corporate high horse, start genuinely talking to people, using the product themselves and building something they would actually want to use every day… that is when something sticks. Everything else is just theatre.

This is not 2021 any more. The human element is no longer a nice to have. It is the only thing left that cannot be perfectly gamed or replicated at scale by AI.

If you are a founder or builder reading this and you actually want a community that lasts beyond the next bull run, start by asking yourself one simple question: would I use this product every day if I weren’t getting paid to shill it? If the honest answer is no, then no amount of marketing checklists is going to fix it. So just to reiterate the human element I am talking about that is painfully simple but almost extinct in 2026 is:

founders and team members who actually reply to comments, answer direct messages, remember regular contributors by name, and publicly shout out real humans who are supporting the project.

treating people like individuals instead of wallets or engagement metrics. Most Web3 projects no longer bother doing any of this. They ignore replies. They leave DMs unread. They have stopped giving recognition because they see every interaction as a numbers game rather than a relationship. This has destroyed the last remaining incentives.

There is already almost no rational reason to buy or hold most tokens after the ETF era shifted billions into Bitcoin and killed the old reflexive altcoin liquidity cycles. But now there is also no incentive to even talk about these projects.

LunarCrush and similar platforms used to reward consistent real users with clear, respected leaderboards. After the X API changes and the explosion of AI agents, there are now dozens of competing leaderboards, none of which carry the same weight or respect. Real humans no longer get recognised or ranked the way they once did. So why would anyone bother posting, shilling, or defending your project when nobody notices and nobody cares?

Genuine human engagement fixes this.

When people feel seen, heard, and valued by actual humans on the other side, they develop real loyalty.

They show up every day not because of airdrop farming or points but because they feel part of something.

They become organic advocates.

They hold through dips.

They bring their friends.

That is how you convert users into a community that lasts beyond the next bull run.

Everything else like quests, ambassador programmes, gamification, paid ads, is temporary noise once the incentives dry up.

The projects that understand this and actually act on it will be the very few that build something real in 2026. The rest will continue wondering why their perfectly executed marketing checklists produce nothing but ghost towns.