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Ok, on Friday, the Texas Attorney General filed charges against Jonathan Eborn of Google Money Tree. For those who don’t know, Google Money Tree was a very popular BizOpp offer running on quite a few networks. It was promoted by a lot of affiliates for a while, and people loved it for having such good conversions. Unfortunately, it was a total scam. Here’s a copy of the article on the Texas AG Page:
Infusion Media Inc.’s ‘GoogleMoneyTree’ uses high profile name to deceive out-of-work Internet users
AUSTIN – Attorney General Greg Abbott today charged two Utah-based defendants with operating a fraudulent work-at-home scheme. The state’s enforcement action names Infusion Media Inc. and Jonathan D. Eborn, whose “GoogleMoneyTree.com” promised six-figure earnings for conducting specialized Google and Yahoo Internet searches.
According to investigators, the defendants promised big payouts in order to convince Web users to spend $3.88 on shipping and handling for a “free kit” that supposedly would show them how to make money from home. Those who purchased the kit were later surprised to discover they were being charged $72 a month by the defendants.
Internet users encountered the defendants’ Google and Facebook advertisements, which linked to blogs that were created to promote their work-at-home offer. The blogs included “testimonials” that touted their products and led viewers to believe that previously unemployed users were earning high salaries conducting Internet searches. According to the blogs, interested parties need only acquire a “free kit,” which was available through GoogleMoneyTree’s “sign-up” page.
Individuals who requested the kit were required to provide substantial personal information, including their name, address, telephone number, email address, and credit card payment information, which was supposed to be used to pay the $3.88 “shipping and handling” fee. Customers believed they were only obligated to pay the “refundable” processing fee and were not aware there would be additional charges to their credit cards.
According to the state’s enforcement action, GoogleMoneyTree failed to clearly inform purchasers that they had been enrolled in monthly memberships and had only seven days to cancel their trial membership. Purchasers who failed to cancel within seven days were automatically charged $72 on their credit card statements each month. In addition to the unexpected credit card charges, customer complaints obtained by state investigators indicate that GoogleMoneyTree failed to actually send the “free kit” and refused to honor customer refunds.
The state is seeking an injunction, civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, as well as restitution for purchasers. Texans who believe they have been misled by similar business practices may file complaints with the Office of the Attorney General toll-free at (800) 252-8011 or file complaints online at www.texasattorneygeneral.gov.
Ok, so after finding out about this, Nickycakes originally took the side of the Merchant. After all, rebill offers have been around for YEARS. Columbia House anyone? They are NOT fraud by any means, if set up properly. Unfortunately, after doing a little reading and digging, this product was definitely out of the boundaries of what can be considered legitimate. You can read the entire official complaint in pdf form here, but here’s a little rundown of why this idiot deserves to be sued:
- Lack of clear terms of service - Alright, at some point there were actually terms of service on the second signup page. Apparently they were wayyyy at the bottom of the page, in 11 point font, in tan text on a white background. Every number that was a price was written out like “seventy two bucks” instead of $72 so that people wouldn’t notice. People simply had no idea it was a rebill, even if they bothered looking.
- No actual product - Ok, there was a product. It was a bunch of shitty worthless e-books and programs. They were given to you when you signed up for the offer as a download, and then the exact same crap was physically mailed to you on cd. After that, you would get rebilled but not get anything further. Even worse, if you didn’t log in immediately after buying the product, you couldn’t log in later. So people couldn’t even access the product.
- No Refunds - Oh, yeah, the landing page claimed that you could easily get a “no hassle refund” if you didn’t like the product. But if you decided to call them, they would only refund the initial shipping and handling charge of like $3 and not the $72 or so that they billed you after a week claiming that the refund policy did not apply to the membership fee. Keep in mind that the membership fee did not actually include anything other than the privilege of calling yourself a member.
Ok, so yes, this makes Mr. Eborn a complete retard, clearly. But, to make matters worse, the Texas AG is thinking of going after the affiliate networks and possibly affiliates on this as well. And to be honest, they probably have legal grounds to do so, but it’s still fucked up. The affiliates were duped just as much as the customers on this one.
Seriously, theres hundreds of bizopp offers out there, and Cakes can easily count the number of rebill offers he’s actually filled out for himself to see if they were a quality product: ZERO. It would seem like common sense to us that the merchant would do their job and, you know, not be a fcking fraud, right? WRONG.
Here’s a suggestion to Eborn and any other morons out there who are running a crappy rebill offer: Call the FTC. Ask them to tell you, in writing, that your offer and what you’re selling is compliant. If it’s not, have them tell you what needs to be fixed so it IS compliant. It’s seriously a trivial thing to do, and it is their freaking job to help you.
But for real, if any affiliates get charged, Nickycakes hopes Jonathan is turned into the Huntsville Prison Sodomy Tree.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Welcome to the 3rd and final installment of the ASW 09 wrapup post. Most of you were probably holding your breath for this one, but before it gets out of hand, a little disclaimer. The information in this post is probably all made up, fiction, satire, alleged 2nd hand knowledge, unreliable, and for entertainment purposes only. Also, any events that may or may not have occured outside affiliate summit, such as things that happen at parties, are really in no way related to the show itself. Things can get a little crazy in vegas.
Tame In-Show Drama
It’s always fun to see the interactions between companies that dislike eachother when they’re forced together at a trade show. Last years ASW had Azoogle and Copeac booths located next to eachother which made for some fun times and hilarious promotional materials. Copeac had some great little flyers with an arrow “coincidentally” pointing at the booth next door and saying some fun things about “the competition.” At this ASW, as well as ASE in Boston last year, copeac brought these awesome foam slingshot rockets and had their booth mysteriously within firing range of “the competition.” Some chick at the booth started getting pissed when Nickycakes and his friends rolled up and started grabbing rockets and firing them en masse across the exhibit hall. What did they expect?
Worth mentioning are Toronto rivals CX digital and Azoogle booths being next to eachother this year. Also Frazier from CX and Ryan Sessler from Azoogle look a lot alike.
Also funny was to see the singlesnet.com and match.com booths directly across from eachother. Even more funny was to see so many guys working for dating sites who were so unlikely to…have girlfriends.
Party Drama
Cx Party -
The CX digital party, as mentioned in the last post, was really nice. Their guest list was only affiliates that worked with them and maybe like 1 guest if they were lucky. That’s what made their party so good. No companies trying to pitch them stuff, etc. Nicky spent a few minutes downstairs in the palms hanging out with the cx people as they were checking people in, and they were turning non-invitees away faster than evolution books in a Wasilla library. Somehow, Nate Whitehill, the dude who designs like…john chow and uberaffiliates blogs, got in as someone’s guest. But instead of just staying and enjoying the party, dude starts calling people and telling them to come there and to say they’re his guest. So these people show up, and the cx people are forced to go down 29 floors to tell the douchebags to leave cause they weren’t invited. Honestly guys, things are getting a little rough for you on the party scene when you’re trying to namedrop nate whitehill to get into a party. Just sayin. Pretend to know the dj or something, at least.
Advaliant Mansion Party -
By now, you have hopefully read the full story of the rug adventures at the advaliant mansion party at red rock. Nickycakes had half a post written up about this whole ordeal but had to scrap it when Barman beat him to the punch complete with skillfull photoshops and whatnot. This is probably the funniest story of the whole time in vegas, so go read and enjoy: PPC.BZ MisAdventures: The Rick Flair Rug From the Red Rock Mansion. And big thanks to c0ck (the guy with the rug) for the cuban cohiba. He keeps it real on the cigar tip.
Undisclosed Private Poker Game -
Alright, just to repeat, this is all second hand and probably false info. Anyway, there was this private poker tourney in a suite at one of the bigger hotels in the area. One of the attendees was John Kitover, owner of bannerblindness, which was featured at #2 on nickycakes’ top 10 worst sites 2k8. So John ends up losing the poker tournament early…not surprising. He then proceeds to make this big sales pitch, holding up the game, bragging about how he has 10 employees (lol) and if you need any work done just call him and starts throwing his business cards all over the table like a retard. John then proceeds to disappear into some room with the two hired adult entertainers who happened to be at the poker tournament. 20 minutes later, an extremely drunk kyle irwin becomes irritated that the adult entertainment has left the party, so armed with his camera phone kyle goes on a quest to find the missing strippers. Upon opening a door to one of the rooms, Irwin is greeted by angry yelling followed by John throwing water on him and trying to slam the door in his face. Enraged by the water throwing, irwin proceeds to kick the door open in John’s face a few times before giving up and going back to the party with a hilarious video on his phone. A few minutes later, Barman needs to use the restroom, which is located through the bedroom in question, so he ends up walking in on John sitting with one of the adult entertainers who then asks barman to “spot him $500″ to pay for some undisclosed activity. Barman laughs in his face and basically tells him to go F himself, at which point John proceeds to walk out into the party and start individually begging people for money, including asking the head of one of the biggest affiliate networks to spot him $80. Then, John goes and finds Kyle, who is at this point watching the video with a bunch of other guys and laughing, and buys the memory card from his camera for $100 in a desperate attempt to cover his tracks. Stay classy, Bannerblindness.
Copeac Party -
Later that evening, in another location, Kyle Irwin from the previous story ends up extremely drunk. EXTREMELY drunk. Starts walking around and trash talking pretty much everyone in sight. He ends up spouting racial slurs and threatening the wrong dude and gets punched in the face once and then ejected from the party. Guy doing the punching ends up hero of the party and possibly ASW. Kyle is actually a pretty good guy, usually. Apparently later he was spotted puking between some slot machines. Good times.
That’s It For This Year
Well that’s about all Nickycakes has in him about ASW 09. Now you know what you’re missing if you didn’t go.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Looks like someone found a vulnerability in twitter that allowed people to break into anyone’s accounts earlier which led to the misuse of pretty much every high profile twitter account available (except nickycakes’). The highest profile, of course, was Obama’s.
The attacker cleverly (or so he thought) posted a link to a zip submit on Copeac. Seriously…put yourself in the shoes of a semi-intelligent hacker who finds he can access the twitter account of the President Elect. Why on earth would you do something like promote an affiliate offer to a US network which will inevitably give up your personal details the minute the Secret Service comes knockin’? Pretty retarded.
You’d think that a scheme like this would generate quite a bit of income, but sadly, this was not the case. According to a trusted source at Copeac, the revenue generated was “barely enough to cover a decent dinner for two.”
Stay classy Affiliate Marketing hackers.
Published by nickycakes //
Having had to wade through another year of god-awful “Top 10 Best” diggbait style posts, Nickycakes has yet again compiled a Top 10 WORST Make money online sites list. If you didn’t catch last years post, chiggity check it.
Anyway, here’s the list…worst of the worst, 08:
10. Ms. Danielle
Talk about exploiting the fact that you’re female as your only angle on getting readers. Do you honestly think if the internet marketing crowd weren’t sex-starved parents basement dwelling nerds that you’d have made it over 100 subscribers? Doubtful. When you take time out of your day to make a post about a picture with you and Zac Johnson standing in front of the least unique and most overpriced waste of blog design services (unique blog designs..lol) you know your make money online blog is grasping at straws. It’s cool though, you’ll probably get some drooling acne faced digital point reading college kid to sign up under your adbrite referral link and make you millions! Till then, pack up shop and find a dayjob, or considering ebaying your used undergarments. Nickycakes hears that does well with the same sorta crowd.
9. Zac Johnson - Secret Life of a Super Affiliate
If pretending you know about PPC and dressing up as Spiderman and going to childrens playgrounds in the daytime makes you a “super affiliate” then yes, Zac, you are Thuper…err Super..indeed! To be fair, Zac’s blog started out ok. He had some good tips at the beginning on how affiliate marketing worked, a few clever ideas, whatever. And then about a year ago, it all went to crap. Maybe he paid content writers to write his first few blog posts, and then when those articles ran out he had nothing to write for himself, who knows. But it soon became clear that Zac had no idea about PPC. The dude made some decent money back when Yahoo screwed up with their adsense style program and was paying people tons more than they should of per click, but after that dried up and zac’s network of myspace layout sites (lol) got flushed down the toilet, the dude had nothing. He stuttered his way through an agonizing session at Affiliate Summit where he proved he knew absolutely nothing about PPC, and then he was caught ripping off an affiliates landing page word for word right after publishing a guide on how to make landing pages, and was trying to claim he was some kind of expert on the subject. He’s now resorted to devoting entire posts to things like figuring out how to calculate how much money you make per hour….daily revenue / 24….you’re a genius zac…really. This dead horse has been beaten into the ground, time to remove from your rss reader.
8. SeoBlackhat.com
Back in early 2007, this blog/forum had a little credibility. No longer. The dude who runs it, Quesadilla, Godzilla, something like that, has turned into the blackhat version of shoemoney, teaming up with the most blatant retards like Marcus “i think making $1k a month cookie stuffing ebay makes me a blackhat allstar” Tandler to try and convince newbies to attend their $5k attendance fee seo gatherings. Really? Seoktoberfest? Nickycakes feels really sorry for whoever shelled out $5k to go hang out with this group of asshats instead of spending that money on something….significantly less lame. Having seen pics of said event, you would have been embarassed to be caught dead at this thing. Either way, total scam, this dude’s fallen off bigtime, and it shows. Keep making posts nitpicking the no-follow tactics of news sites like forbes.com big guy…everyone cares..really they do.
7. TylerCruz.com
The first giant douchebag make money online blogger was obviously shoemoney. Then someone who wanted to be like him, copied everything he did. His name is john chow. Then uberaffiliate copied john chow, and people copied uber, all the way down the line till you get to TylerCruz.com. Same deal. No good content, tons of worthless posts and contests with the hope that some whale affiliate will accidentally click his link to sign up to marketleverage, or whatever flavor of the month worthless network is sending bloggers free stuff this week, and make him $500 per month to pay for his inevitably unused gym membership and a lifetime supply of little debbies and mt dew. Listen, bro, if you’re going to be a sheep and get one of those oh-so-gay caricatures drawn up as your blog logo, at least get one that doesn’t look 3 times as skinny as you are. Really dude, it looks like you ate the guy in your logo. Be realistic.
6. Daniel Kemp - One Man, One Dream
Ok, so this guy looks like Napoleon Dynamite, and decides to take the hype that surrounded that movie and move it over into the internet marketing realm by pretending to be this really weird guy. He frequents wickedfire forums where he prentends to be really weird, and makes these videos and really long “intellectual” posts complete with footnotes. People do actually fall for it and it’s sometimes hard to decide who is more idiotic, kemp himself, or the people who don’t realize it’s a big show. Really the only reason this guy is on this list is because he posts on wickedfire a lot…the blog isn’t exactly make money online related…
5. Blackhat World
Do your biggest dreams in life involve making a few hundred dollars a day by pretending to be a girl, visiting chat rooms, and persuading horny guys to sign up to dating services under your affiliate link? Then this forum is full of people just like you. Sign up today. (bhw will likely start some gay thread about this post, and then make a short rally for someone to get some russians to ddos nickycakes’ uber shared hosting acct before giving up like they give up on pretty much everything in life)
4. Mr Javo
Have you ever had a nightmare where there was this guy who barely spoke english and kept sending you im’s every day asking you to read their awful blog posts and to submit them to digg and get your friends to read them…EVERY….DAY. Well Mr. Javo has made that nightmare a reality. There is probably no other blog on the internet that has so many words on it that mean so little. When this guy first started, he contacted as many people as he could and just bugged the living crap out of them until they agreed to digg or sphinn his blog posts or subscribe to his rss feed. He does a “blog revenue” post every month where he includes the amount of money he made total in his affiliate marketing ventures, and it’s always less than $500, yet he has written an e-book on getting started with affiliate marketing. In addition, he has the most annoying to look at caricature blog logo ever drawn. Gives nickycakes a headache just thinking about this guy.
3. Digital Point Forums
No surprise, digital point forums makes the list yet again. Nickycakes was attempting to not repeat any of the “winners” from last year, but really, its hard to imagine digital point could have actually gotten worse since last year, but it definately has. The place is just a cesspool of 3rd world scammers trying to make a few dollars a month clicking their own adsense ads. It’s really impossible to describe, and the Cakes is probably preaching to the choir here, but if you’re part of the 1% of the readers who have not been there before, you really have to see it for yourself. Make your way to the google adsense section on a rainy sunday weekend for more laughs than you can handle.
2. Banner Blindness
For someone who’s been in the industry for a couple years, this guy’s pathetic attempts at viral marketing would be comical if they weren’t so damn sad. He’s another one of those john chow ripoff clones, but can’t even seem to pull that off properly. His latest genius viral marketing plan was to hire some average looking model to dress in wrapping paper, rattle off the names of like 50 affiliate networks and make money online blogs before unwrapping herself on camera. Well, she was clothed in a bikini underneath, and he advertised it as her getting completely naked, strike 1. The dude obviously shelled out a ton of money for this ultimately boring ordeal, strike 2. And he got really upset when everyone called him a failure and demanded backlinks from people for his troubles, strike 3. Here are some simple tips to fix your blog, guy: Get a theme that doesn’t blind people….bright pink and blue? MOAR LIKE COLORBLINDNESS.COM! If you insist on tagging most of your posts with 100+ categories, don’t have wordpress list every category on your sidebar so that it extends about 10 times further down the page than your site content does. Actually…the best tip to fix your blog is just quit the internet man. Just give up.
Words do not do justice.
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on December 19th, 2008 in Facebook, Retards
Well, it looks as if Facebook’s anal ad policies are, indeed, biting them in their collective asses. Facebook’s value estimate has dropped almost 90% since last fall to $2 billion. Granted, the estimate last year was inflated due to microsoft’s buy-in, but still, the company is apparently not even profitable yet. The recent ad policy changes certainly aren’t helping them make more money.
Over the last several weeks, the Facebook Ads COPS team have committed to disabling pretty much every ad on the site that advertises a commercial product, especially anything to do with losing weight. They had already long ago banned things like ringtones, dating (well they haven’t banned dating but they’ve put enough draconian restrictions on it to make it not worth spending the money), scholarships, anything that collects a users information, any ads that have the color orange in them, etc… They claim that these changes create a better user experience which will keep more people on the facebook site, and that sites like myspace who have much less restrictive policies are losing users because of the ads. It’s pretty safe to say that pretty much nobody stopped using myspace because of ads.
Anyway, these new policies are losing facebook tons of money, probably millions a week. Where are those unused advertising dollars going? Their competitors.
So what happens? Their company sinks like a stone even though their membership is growing astronomically. This is what happens when you put a bunch of no-skill ivy leaguers in charge of your company. GUESS WHAT GAIZ….YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE PROFITABLE TRYING TO GET GARAGE BANDS TO ADVERTISE WITH PPC, SORRY!
They prolly won’t even send cakes a gift basket for the millions he generated them in revenue this year by writing about their ad system. Not that they could afford it anyway, M I RITE?
Keep it real.
Published by nickycakes //
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