Gabriel Beltran moved from Uruguay to Miami with the dream of becoming a great drummer.
Five years ago, he was struggling to pay his rent and was living on his girlfriend's student loan.
He then made over $ 20 million (£ 15 million) through a little-known online retail technique: dropshipping.
And in bedrooms around the world, other knowledgeable people get rich in the same way.
Sellers never see their products. They generally remain completely anonymous. And their marketing reaches hundreds of millions of people.
Chinese goods
The process is simple: the dropshipper goes to an online Chinese market and identifies a cheap product.
The seller creates a flashy website, suggesting that the product is made in the United States or Europe and adds a huge margin.
The dropshipper uses social media for promotion, often paying influencers to add legitimacy.
When an order is received, the seller collects the customer's money and only then buys the product.
Finally, the product is shipped directly to the customer from China.
In practice, salespeople act as intermediaries or virtual women.
All of this is legal and often done well.
But the anonymity it confers means there is also abuse. Selling counterfeit products is a common practice, and customers often don't get their orders.
Gabriel started selling fake NFL products and made $ 50,000 in just one month. He says he hasn't sold counterfeit products since.
"Shops come and go and literally steal money from people," he told the BBC.
"Those stores make millions of dollars a month and then disappear and don't even ship a product."
Sometimes the products aren't outright counterfeits, but they can still infringe on the intellectual property rights of tech companies whose designs have, in effect, been cloned, even if the product is sold under a different brand and uses its own packaging.
Kevin David is a dropshipper who is not involved in the sale of such goods. But he says some of his friends have made "hundreds of thousands a month selling knock-off AirPods."
"It's very easy to take a high moral level, but if a lot of people had the skills and made tens of thousands of dollars a day, then they'd probably think quite differently," he says.
Fake products
Dropshipping is nothing new, but the rise of celebrities on social media has supercharged the model.
Sellers have previously marketed their products through eBay and / or Facebook ads. But the boom in "influencer marketing" has given them access to far more gullible customers.
Sarah Mebarki worked for a dropshipping operation, Magnetic SL, which sells products that feature her own brand.
He told BBC Click that he had paid Kourtney Kardashian - who has nearly 100 million followers on Instagram - 170,000 euros ($ 203,000, £ 156,000) to promote false eyelashes and other beauty products and paid back the investment many times over.
"Influencer marketing today is enough to create a strong and influential brand image," he explained.
" People think you have to be an internationally known brand to engage influencers like Kourtney Kardashian, but that's completely untrue. Influencers who care about the quality of the product they promote are rare or even non-existent. "
Magnetic SL has attracted more than 1,000 complaints online. They include stories of the product not being delivered or taking months to arrive.
However, there are an equal number of rave reviews.
Sarah told BBC Click that the dropshippers she worked for had flooded Trustpilot, a major consumer review site, with bogus posts.
"Nearly 70% of their total customers have written reviews with one star ... so basically they just bought fake reviews [to counteract them] and created fake accounts to make fake reviews. "
Glenn Manoff, Trustpilot's chief communication officer, says he is aware of Magnetic SL's practices and has added a warning banner to the company page.
Consumers can see that we have full transparency on the platform and can see how many reviews are flagged. "
BBC Click sent an email to Kourtney Kardashian representatives informing them of the company's practices and highlighting the complaints. Ms. Kardashian declined to comment and her promotional video is still live on the dropshipper's Instagram page.
Magnetic SL did not respond to the accusations made against them.
Pandemic spending
Influencer marketing isn't just the preserve of celebrities.
Thousands of lesser-known influencers have also been involved in paid dropshipping promotions.
The vast majority are "individual merchants" and can make a living with just a hundred thousand followers, a relatively modest number.
And the mix of closed High Street shops and people stranded at home during the coronavirus lockdowns benefited the trade.
Charli Paton, manager of influencer Zara McDermott, told BBC Click that her inbox is flooded with offers from dropshippers asking her client to promote what she believes are knock-off goods.
"I think these companies take advantage of the fact that influencers and management firms don't always do their due diligence," he says.
In such circumstances, it can be a case of buyer's attention.
"Anyone can source products online with some degree of anonymity, quickly sell a lot of dangerous or counterfeit products and then exit the system," says Mike Andrews, of the UK's eCrimes National Trading Standards team.
Until recently, Metisha Schafer was selling knock-off Apple products. His customers often complained that it didn't work.
He has since reimbursed every follower he made contact.
"There are a lot of" scam "companies, but honestly, I didn't experience anything like this before the pandemic," he says.
" It was my responsibility to make sure this company was legit and I didn't.
"People get angry because they ask why people like us actually do this kind of promotion without looking into it. And they're absolutely right."
