With Fortnite: Battle Royale, marketing expert Pete Accetturo unintentionally became a celebrity. This had consequences, and now the man has lost his job.
Who is Pete Accetturo? Pete Accetturo, better known as “VoiceOverPete,” is a former sales expert and has been working as a voice-over artist on the job portal Fiverr since 2009.
There, he voices videos for various marketing campaigns, including home renovations, legal marijuana, and e-learning.
Pete Accetturo impresses with his good screen presence and likable manner. The man can literally sell you anything.
What does this have to do with Fortnite? Basically, anyone can hire Pete’s services to have him record lines, as long as they are not obscenities. Therefore, a cheeky Fortnite fan had the idea to have Pete say the following text:
Attention all Fortnite players! John Wick is in great danger, and he needs your help to eliminate all squads in the Tilted Towers. For that, he needs a golden Scar and a few drinking mugs. To help him, he only needs your credit card number and the three numbers on the back, as well as the month and date of expiration. But you have to be quick so John can secure the bag and achieve the epic Victory Royale!
Fake scam becomes a meme
What does all this mean? The text from Pete sounds like a typical scam, i.e., a fraud attempt to get credit card details. However, the wording and presentation of the message are clearly ironic and meant as a joke. Therefore, Pete also agreed to the request.
Text becomes a meme: However, no one expected the consequences of this action. After the video with the fake scam went online, it quickly spread viral and gained many fans.
They all wanted a video like that, and soon Pete couldn’t keep up with the orders.
Meme success quintupled revenue
500 orders per month: Due to this newfound attention, suddenly there were about 500 orders for Pete per month. Previously, he had on average 100 such jobs per month, for which he charged $50 each.
Due to his fame as the meme guy, his revenue virtually quintupled overnight! The texts that Accetturo was supposed to record dealt with all sorts of topics and usually had the same theme: Someone has problems and urgently needs your credit card numbers. In one video, however, Accetturo simply said the word “chair” 45 times.
Meme violates guidelines, leads to ban!
Legal department has no sense of humor: Business was booming for Accetturo. But then came the bad news from the platform Fiverr, where he offered his services.
According to their terms of service, one must absolutely not promote fraud schemes. And this is exactly what Accetturo would be doing with his meme videos.
That it was just a joke, Fiverr apparently refused to believe.
“I believe the legal department has no sense of humor,” Accetturo dryly remarked in a video produced specifically for that purpose.
Anyway, the man was basically out of a job because all his orders went through Fiverr. There were even over 200 open jobs there that he was currently working on.
VoiceoverPete goes independent, starts Patreon and Twitch channel
Silver lining: The shock over the dismissal from Fiverr didn’t last long. Because together with his son, Pete is currently building his own web presence. You can soon hire his services cheaper on the Patreon platform and support him financially there.
In addition, Accetturo wants to get into streaming and also stream Fortnite on Twitch. You can find his channel here.
