Is this a email about a collaboration real or fake?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A user received an email claiming to be from Joyce Howell, a marketing manager at Shopify, proposing a paid video advertising partnership.

The email describes Shopify’s platform and mentions endorsements from major brands and Mr. Beast. However, a significant portion of the email text appears reversed or scrambled (backwards text), which is a major red flag.

Key suspicious elements:

  • Reversed/garbled text throughout the message
  • Unusual formatting and encoding issues
  • Contact signature appears corrupted

The user is seeking community input to determine if this collaboration offer is legitimate or a scam. The backwards text strongly suggests this is likely a phishing or fraudulent email rather than a genuine Shopify partnership opportunity.

Summarized with AI on November 6. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi,

My name is Joyce and I’m a marketing manager at Shopify.

On behalf of the company, I would like to offer you an advertising partnership in one of your upcoming videos.

About Shopify.

Shopify is a complete commerce platform that allows anyone to start, manage and grow a business. You can use Shopify to create an online store, manage sales, market to customers, and accept payments across digital and physical locations.

Shopify serves millions of businesses in over 175 countries and is trusted by brands like Mattel, Gymshark, Heinz, FTD, Netflix, Kylie Cosmetics, SKIMS, Supreme and many more. Also, our platform has been recommended by Mr. Beast in many of his videos :slightly_smiling_face:

About our offer.

We would like you to integrate advertising with our platform into one of your future videos for a monetary reward. We can offer you ready-made ad integrations, or you can voice the necessary information yourself, your creative approach to advertising is also welcome! If you are interested in discussing a potential partnership further, please contact me and we can discuss what benefits we can offer you.

We look forward to hearing from you

Best regards

–

Joyce Howell

© Shopify, 151 O’Connor Street, Ground floor,

Ottawa ON, K2P 2L8