Sophie Howard – Scam or the greatest ever advice?

Sophie Howard – Scam or the greatest ever advice, if you are like me maybe you have seen advertisements appearing on your Facebook feed, promising that “There is a little known secret that you can use to make $$$$ from ebook writing”, or better yet you can be the next big “Amazon drop shipper with this little known secret”.

Who is Sophie Howard

One of the ‘entrepreneurs’ touting these courses who also regularly known as ‘contrepreneurs’ due to their frequent claims of a “paid for service” that will return the purchaser untold wealth, is Sophie Howard, an English born New Zealand citizen living her best life, possibly at the cost of many others cash to learn what is fundamentally free information available with YouTube and many other sources on the internet.

Is Sophie a Scammer

There is of course the other side of the argument, which is very valid – this being that having someone you are accountable to (like the trainer or mentor) will help with your building a ‘six figure income’. In this first blog post I want to focus on one of Sophie’s businesses and that is “Bluesky Amazon” or Blue Sky Amazon”, a ‘course’ (using this term loosely) that helps people like you and I to become re-writers of old content like ‘Moby Dick’ – yes seriously one of the strategies is rewording other peoples content and publishing yourself – along with a huge marketing budget behind the published title so that it is seen and sells.

Interesting that her website boast 700+ positive reviews yet has been taken down from Trustpilot now, I assume she was getting too many positive reviews!

The experiences and successes shared on this page are not typical. They are simply an example or guide of how the products and services offered may be used and the results that may be achieved. Please note, what is achieved by one person is not guaranteed for another. Each individual will see different results. The level of your success and the results you achieve will be subject to a number of wide-ranging factors which include (but are not limited to) your background, your education and skill level, your experience, your effort as well as market factors. We make no promises or claims, and we provide no assurances as to your income potential or lack thereof. While there may be opportunities, every business has some risk involved. We ask that you weigh up and give due consideration to the opportunities and the risks involved before registering.

The above disclaimer is probably the most important part of Sophies’, or any other ‘Educator’ selling services on the Internet, using Facebook advertising or Youtube ads.

internet Scams courses

Almost NO ONE doing any of these courses will ever see any difference in their incomes, ever – Sophie even says so in the above disclaimer!

Starting a profitable side hustle is not something that can be taught, or at least it can not be “only taught”, being successful is not a ’30 minute per day’ exercise whether in your primary job or business and neither will it ever work with online education.

The problem is that this is not made clear to the people paying up for the courses that Sophie Howard produces and even the money back guarantee is not a money back anything, from what I can determine, almost no one has been able to get through all the required ‘hoops’ to ever see their money returned to them, what is worse is that ‘one course’ is not enough to learn how to make money with Sophie, in fact after $15,000 one person I have spoken with did not have the right content or support from the paid for mentors to be able to make any form of success from Sophie’s Platform.

Just think about this for a moment, if you are running a business to ‘help’ other people become successful, do you, 1. Provide inadequate business support or, 2. Go above and beyond what is needed to keep a customer happy?

This is the insidious side of these internet scams and the many ‘educators’ teaching people how to improve their lives online, mostly they do not have any proven business experience themselves, including Sophie, yes I am sure she has a very good income but that income is based off others desire to better themselves believing that she is an experienced entrepreneur (she is, just not in an scaling business sense).

For an internet educator like Sophie, once you have a sale, you need to develop that buyer to follow your journey towards more purchasing of courses that will ‘help’ them further their business, where the reality is that the method behind this is simply to ‘milk’ the wallet dry of the buyer of the education service, this is because it is easier to ‘develop’ an existing customer than paying to acquire a new client.

This added course necessity needs to be provided upfront while people are still on the ‘free’ course, which is obviously just a ‘lead-in’ to paying for more, it is misleading and means that people will end up suffering the “sunk cost fallacy” , this is that I have spent this much money so far, I need to keep going to the end.

Through the training course it will be made very clear that “the next course” will go much deeper into the details of what is being explained as well “side channel” courses for ‘marketing’ and other aspects of this new business that we begin to feel are necessary to continue our growth.

simple questions to ask

I work in sales and I find the easiest question to understand someones motivation is to ask how they get paid, recognised for what you are working with them on, this works with vendors of products etc, if they are truthful you will pick it immediately, if they are not then you will also pick that out. Ask for specifics about some successes that they “quote” when they say something about scaling up a business etc, use this to see whether they are telling the truth and dig in further, they should provide a name of their successful business and from this do your research – don’t just believe information that agrees with what you believe, I want to be challenged in learning and I want the educator to have done many times what they are teaching me to do.

Blue Sky Amazon

The first business of Sophie’s that I wish to dig into is Blue Sky Amazon, it may or may not be in existence in 2025 but it is the least predatory of the businesses that I am investigating, wait for a follow up on “Knowledge Source” – there you will find all the one star Trustpilot reviews!

Blue Sky Amazon is an online training program managed by Knowledge Events, aimed at helping entrepreneurs source profitable products and build successful Amazon businesses. The program, created by Sophie Howard, a 7-figure Amazon seller and online business coach, offers a step-by-step process for finding and selling products on Amazon.

However, Blue Sky Amazon has received mixed reviews. Some customers have reported issues with the website, including duplicate charges and difficulties accessing services they have paid for. Additionally, there have been complaints about the lack of clear information on financial investments and how to access and review reports.

For those interested in the program, it includes a Quick-Start Course that costs $7 and provides guidance on finding profitable products to sell on Amazon.

Sophie Howard also offers coaching services and invites her students to join her on trade show trips around the world to source unique products.

The program’s TrustScore is 1.4 out of 5 based on 321 reviews, indicating significant dissatisfaction among some users. This alone should tell anyone to stay away from Sophie’s businesses.

Reddit has some differing opinions on Sophie Howards courses and like anything, both positive and negative reviews are individual opinions and this will always vary, the weight of evidence though is that a course on “Amazon’s secret that they don’t want you to know about” is probably not a course worthy of paying for, neither is there a secret – because if there was it would not be sold on Facebook!

positive reviews

It is hard to ignore positive reviews of the Blue Sky Amazon platform, though the lack of any endorsements from third parties who are not affiliated is worrying, so let us look at a few:

Positive reviews

My opinion below is based on research into Candice and Sophie Howard, I am not claiming that anything Candice has stated is untrue or inaccurate, I am simply reviewing the information that I have found and identifying where there are discrepancies with what I know of Sophies Programmes. 

Candice has a positive review on Sophies Youtube channel, 6 months to market admits that it was harder than she had thought  – probably realistic but is this due to Sophie and the money spent or is this an individual who was able to succeed because of their own drive. Candice is a Senior Sales executive at Forrester Research and I would assume to be a person of high integrity and professionalism.

All four products are less than 1 month in age and Candice gives no product names just their industry vertical (Ebook etc), this seems unrealistic to not use the platform as a marketing opportunity as she has 25k vies at the time of writing.

The other part that struck me is the lack of excitement from a woman who is clearly being successful after a month of launching products that she can not mention, nor can she allow comments on her video – this is not how business works unless this is an endorsement for a program those of us in sales know that we use these opportunities to market what we are doing and create awareness – this appears to be incongruent with using the opportunities provided to us. 

All evidence that I can find shows that Candice is not running any current businesses, Truesooth.com seems to have been shut down.

And next we have Andrea, a lovely friendly lady who seems to have a problem remembering how Sophie’s courses have changed her life.

I could not help notice her eyes move as she reads from a script and her speaking is disjointed and affected by the brain reading vs speaking issue that we all suffer from when we are not speaking from experience.

LinkedIn Too!

This article on LinkedIn is from an “online marketing agency” called Newman Marketing with ‘1’ employee – as there is no detail about the employee it may well be Sophie herself though my guess is that a “Ghost writer” has created this on her behalf, these are paid for and should not be necessary for a good product with the amount of successful clients that Sophie Howard claims to have:

My advice

Always look at the company behind any article you read because this will provide the motive for the article, in this case it is a paid promotion, so the motivation is very clear as to its intent – that is to contradict the mass of commenters and reviews that do not rate Sophies business practises. 

And further reviews

A further website that discusses Sophie Howard is here and also is not favourable.

Some of the images are no longer downloadable but the comments and the reviews section certainly align with the general experience of people who pay Sophie Howard for expert advice, that is that her courses are not worth the price that she charges, that the outcome is not what Sophie advertises and that she will continue to upsell unlucky people to the next course aggressively.

This review is from Reddit and probably summarises the most polite version of Blue Sky Amazon, it still points to many other ways of being successful without paying for multiple courses to learn what is essentially freely available on the internet.

Do it for free

Blue Sky Amazon is close to a scam but not quite, it does provide a service just not a service that anyone should buy, seriously, YOU DO NOT NEED WHAT SOPHIE SELLS! (or any other online trainer).

There are many ways to do for free what Sophie is ‘teaching’, including also this guy is over the top, but take what you can for free because that is Sophie’s $7,000 AUD course:

Or on Substack there is an another free article here, do not every pay for something from the internet without doing your research even with these resources, trust no one! Just like Temu, that item you purchased may not be exactly what you ordered!

Blue Sky Amazon summary

In summary my advice to people looking to any “quick way to make money without any effort” is to think again, those who have discipline and drive will succeed with training from anyone, Sophie or otherwise, but not because they spent the money to learn, rather they already had the drive within themselves. 

Where these “entrepreneur’s” are taking advantage is by talking up unrealistic outcomes and generalised advice that has not been gained from “much” real experience and are selling these as courses which cost upwards of $7000 AUD. 

The YouTube video above is a little long but it demonstrates how these people work to encourage us to spend our money with them when there will be no benefit for us except that we may feel as if we are part of a family, this is the scam – feeling like there are others you are working with takes away the loneliness and having others buying additional ‘courses’ and a sense of urgency and clever ‘$997’ pricing makes wealth seem within reach.

Please send me a message if I can help any further with this, my next blog post will be focused on the more predatory of Sophie’s businesses as this is probably the most “customer friendly” of her ‘work’.