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Iworks Incorporated, Virtual Contact Incorporated, Bright Builders, Paynet Merchant Services lied to get $6500.00 of my money, put me to termendous additional cost, time and trouble, put virtually nothing towards promoting my site. ripoff Internet
It was a few days before 1/28/2003 that I saw a popular ebook marketing course on the Internet titled "How to Get 1 Million Visitors on Your Web Site with Paying a Dime" by Stephan Ducharme, The "FreeADGuru". I bought this ebook and as I read this it offered 2000 leads for around $200.00 which I bought.
I recall it was only a short time after buying these leads that I got a phone call from a fellow by the name of Cody Mosher working for Iworks Incorporated.
I asked him how he got my phone number and he said they were contracted out by Stephan Ducharme and his company that created the ebook mentioned above, "How to Get 1 Million Visitors on Your Web Site with Paying a Dime". Cody said Iworks was contracted out by this company which was mentioned in the ebook by Stephan Ducharme and in the e-mail correspondence shows it to be Virtual Contact Incorporated with Stephan Ducharme as the founder and CEO. Cody said that Iworks Incorporated wanted to make me successful because 95% of the people that read this ebook do nothing with it. He talked to me steady for around 2 hours and emphasized that this was not a get rich quick scheme and that if I put in the time and the money of about 10 to 15 hours per week I would be making around $17000,00 or more per month just like some others they had made successful.
He showed me a site at http://www.handsontools.com and said this site was making about $17,000.00 per month and that Iworks Incorporated had made http://www.handsontools.com successful.
I told him had taken a good number of Internet marketing courses and already knew lots about marketing. He told me he would get back to me to see if I could be part of the company team and that there were 3 packages I could buy. I choose the 2nd package in the middle price range which was $6,500.00 US dollars. I also emphasized that I did not know if I should buy any of this because I was deeply in debt on credit cards from buying things related to marketing on the Internet and that all credit cards were almost at the limit except for the American Express card which I had no used yet.
He arranged to take half the $6500.00 off American Express and the other half taken off Capital One. After the charged went through I discovered that they had charged the full amount on American Express which put it over the limit and then again overcharged the additional half on Capital One. There was some difficulty getting all this corrected with Iworks which had miscommunication as to if they made this mistake or not and then with the credit card companies. Eventually the charge on these 2 cards was corrected for the right amount after some time of worry.
I noticed after I bought the package that I could not get through to people that were supposed to be there to help me get set up. This made me suspicious and so I phoned the owner of the web site at http://www.handsontools.com whom Iworks said they made successful at a monthly profit of $17,000.00 per month. The owner of this site told me he was upset because I was about the 20th person that had called him inquiring about the fact that Iworks had made him successful. He said to my shock that Iworks Incorporated had nothing to do with making his business successful and that the only thing in common was that Iworks Incorporated was using Bright Builders at http://www.brightbuilders.com the same as he was. I was upset and wanted my money back. I proceeded to attempt to do this by contacting Virtual Contact Incorporated that had passed on my phone number to Iworks Incorporated and was supposedly contracted out by them. I sent e-mail to Virtual Contact Incorporated between 2/19/03 to 2/25/03. I have pasted below the last e-mail with the response of Virtual Contact Incorporated. You can see all the emails at http://www.wellswell.com/iworks/iwemails.htm
Hi David,
The person who received your e-mail, sent it to me. I asked again and I got the same answer from Stephan.
Stephan does have part in this company. He can across this company, who specializes in coaching. They said that they would like the chance to coach our affiliates if they wanted to. These coaches are experts and charge a lot of money, but what you basically get in return in the teacher that goes with the course. You, as the consmer, have the right to refuse this coaching. As with any company, we offer products. The choice to buy or not, always lies with the consumer.
Please click ''Reply'' when writing to us.
Take care,
Andrea
Customer Service
Virtual Contact inc.
MoneyHome.com
FreeAdGuru.com
MyAffiliateFinder.com
I then phoned Bright Builders and asked one of the people there to give me there judgment on whether Iworks was a good company. They said they were a good honest company as also did Virtual Contact Incorporated in one of their earlier emails. I then phoned and was getting angry with them because I could not get immediately through. When I did get through Cody told me he had the CEO with him while I was on the phone. I confronted him with his lies. He admitted that he did not tell the truth but said he had other sites he could show me that were making $8000.00 profit per month. He gave me a list of five sites which are the following: http://www.dsswarehouse.com , http://www.rogersranchhouse.com , http://www.greyhawkscorner.com , http://www.impluseinternet.com , and http://www.silver-statperformance.com (Note: I did not phone these web sites until recently. I phoned the site at www.rogersranchhouse.com and he said he was just breaking even. Also, he told me that some others had phoned him for reference and were saying it was a different company than Iworks which means they may be trying to get away with their scams)
I could tell by talking with Cody that they were not going to give me my money back and Cody told me they would put half the money towards advertising in pay per click search engines and so on. I decided since Bright Builders that did business with them and Virtual Contact said they were an honest and good company that I would not fight them but work my best with them to make a lucrative business that would justify the $6500.00. This was with the understanding that at least half the money would go towards advertising and that I would have coaching sessions and other benefits. I proceeded to get their package and was discouraged to find a catalogue with products that were general merchandise that was not unique or exceptional and would be hard to sell. I also had to get the Brightbuilders web site with my own money and pay each month for the web site plus the merchandise that was put up on the web site.
I also had to do the work of setting up the site with the merchandise and of setting up a merchant account and also paying for it every month. The charges appeared on my Capital One Credit Card with the name JA Marketing Franklin Squa NY in the first month for $124.00 and with the name Paystems.com for $90.55. Each month these charges continued with a higher or lower rate depending on the merchandise that was up and available and other factors. These charges continued each month from 2/03 to 9/03 and totaled $342.56 by JA Marketing and $347.92 by Paystems.com. I did not make a cent all this time because Bright Builders could not get the site working for me and Iworks could not help nor had the know how to help although I tried hard with both these companies to solve the problem. The problem was that I could only use certain merchant providers with the Bright Builder Web site and they required that I live in the United States. Brightbuilders gave me a merchant provider that would work for me living in Canada with Bright Builders by the name of Planet Payment. So I contacted Planet Payment. I had to give them all kinds of paper work and a lengthy business plan and they plainly told me they accepted Canadians. Also, I had to pay them $152.54. After doing all this they told me they changed their policy and could no longer accept Canadians. At least they credited $149.11 back to me. I contacted Bright Builders and they told me I would have to try and find someone myself and that they were looking. I had to go to a lot of searching and found Paynet Merchant Services which could receive me living in Canada and had the right gateway that would work with the Bright Builders web site. Again I had to pay $100.00 US with lots of paper work and a business plan. Also I had to go to the trouble of opening up a Bank in the United States and putting $500.00 US in the account with all the paper work, photo ID and so on. On top of this I had to wait for an approval from Paynet but this kept being stalled. They would tell me they did not want certain products on my site and I would remove them. They would still not approve and I had to wait again and again week after week.
Then they said they had a change in policy and were no longer accepting multi-merchandise sites and therefore I could not use them. Further, they refused to give me my money back after all this over a period of almost 2 months. The fellow to contact about this is Paul Sargent at 1-888-855-8644 extention 114. Now I had to search for my third merchant provider and was really getting upset with Iworks who did not know anything about how to set up this and said that Bright Builders were the experts. I spent a lot of time trying to find for the third time a proper provider for my site with Bright Builders. During all this time I was being charged by Bright Builders who knew I could not get the site working and by the merchant product provider for the site which totaled $690.98 over the period of time shown above. Bright Builders finally had a merchant provider for me that would work but I had heard from all my searching and phoning from a good number of sources that Linkpoint was a terrible provider and that all there was was problems and high payments by using them so I did not want to use them. I finally found an arrangement with a merchant provider that would work but the person that I found it through had his own site and offered me 1000 tools with his site some time earlier which was similar to Bright Builders. I finally asked Iworks if I could drop Bright Builders and after some consultation they said I could and that they would work with me on a site that I already had for some time at http://www.http://www.hgh-releasent.com .
First Iworks wanted me to sign some kind of further agreement which you can see at http://www.wellswell.com/iworks2agree.htm because they were afraid I was going to give them some trouble as I was upset and complaining that I had not seen any results with all my investment and hard work. Also, they gave me a $70.00 gift to join a wholesale distributorship listing site for free for one year in order to find products that I wanted to market. I had been complaining that I wanted products that I could believe in to market and that I liked.
After this I had ten coaching sessions in which I would receive a phone call once a week which would only last about 20 minutes. They told me hardly a thing that I did not already know about marketing and was planning to do and I told the coaches a good number of things that they did not know. This should be no surprise as I mentioned in my phone conversations with Cody and in my application writing with them about the courses and software I had acquired for marketing. After these sessions I was told I could would get some credit for advertising my site at http://www.hgh-releasent.com with pay per bid search engines. It turned out that the credit they listed was not really any credit at all because I could find these sites independent of them and they were offering the same credit to everyone. Also, these pay per bid search engines were new, small and poorly known search engines and I have submitted to the few with large credits and seen no results in the last week since then. I was told after these 10 coaching sessions were finished at the beginning of 11/03 that everything was now finished with Iworks and that all I had left was 6 months of phoning the hotline if I needed help. Also, in my package that I bought it says that I get submission pages to 3000 search engines and I did not get this. Also in the package I am supposed to get the Keyword Gold (Platinum) which is credit towards a special pay per click search engine. I never recieved this. When I asked the last coach - I believe his name is Grady - he told me that things had changed at Iworks and that they were no longer able to use this package and that instead I got these other pay per clicks that I have already mentioned. You can see the package they gave me for $6500.00 US that includes Keyword Gold at http://www.wellswell.com/iworks/package.htm. You can see the pay per click list they said was money towards advertising in place of Keywork Gold at http://www.wellswell.com/iworks/nopaysperclick.htm. Iworks Incorporated lied to me to get my money, put me to a tremendous amount of time, trouble and money on top of this when they knew I was already in deep debt. Also, after all this was finished I was angry and tried to get through to them and could not. I left messages on the message phone to Tony, the head coach. He has never got back to me for weeks. You can phone him at 1-877-235-7005. I have been told that Cody Mosher has been given a different position in Iworks Incorporated and that I can no longer get a hold of him. Other numbers where I could reach Cody are at 1-888-845-5855 extention 120. It is strange because this phone number is in a different part of the United States and they would not answer and lied that no one worked betweeen 1:00 and 3:00 pm there. Please help me get full compensation for all of this back.
David
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada
5 Updates & Rebuttals
David
Vancouver,British Columbia,
Canada
Iworks Inc. alone stold $6500.00 US
#6Author of original report
Tue, March 16, 2004
I just want to clarify that is is Iworks Incorportated that stold $6500.00 US from me and not the other companies that are indirectly involved. The reason the main title is misleading is because when I filled out the fields for this report from what I recall it asked to name all companies involved and then it adds those company names to the rest of the title. I will seek to correct the title to be more accurate so that it is clear that only Iworks was involved in the actual theft of $6500.00.
Brian
Orem,Utah,
U.S.A.
Clarifications
#6UPDATE Employee
Tue, March 16, 2004
I would like to clarify the following about the above report:
1) Bright Builders did not collect the reported $6500. Our only charge to David was a monthly hosting fee for his website.
2) We had a working solution for our Canadian customers to use Planet Payment. Unfortunately for us and for David, Planet Payment changed their product offering after we recommended them to David so that it was no longer a viable solution for him.
3) We offer the following solutions for our Canadian customers:
a) Use Linkpoint.
b) Collect money via checks or money orders.
c) Use ANY merchant account and manually run the credit card. Although our system does not automatically process the credit card, it can collect the information securely allowing the website owner to manually process the credit card.
Brian
Orem,Utah,
U.S.A.
Clarifications
#6UPDATE Employee
Tue, March 16, 2004
I would like to clarify the following about the above report:
1) Bright Builders did not collect the reported $6500. Our only charge to David was a monthly hosting fee for his website.
2) We had a working solution for our Canadian customers to use Planet Payment. Unfortunately for us and for David, Planet Payment changed their product offering after we recommended them to David so that it was no longer a viable solution for him.
3) We offer the following solutions for our Canadian customers:
a) Use Linkpoint.
b) Collect money via checks or money orders.
c) Use ANY merchant account and manually run the credit card. Although our system does not automatically process the credit card, it can collect the information securely allowing the website owner to manually process the credit card.
Brian
Orem,Utah,
U.S.A.
Clarifications
#6UPDATE Employee
Tue, March 16, 2004
I would like to clarify the following about the above report:
1) Bright Builders did not collect the reported $6500. Our only charge to David was a monthly hosting fee for his website.
2) We had a working solution for our Canadian customers to use Planet Payment. Unfortunately for us and for David, Planet Payment changed their product offering after we recommended them to David so that it was no longer a viable solution for him.
3) We offer the following solutions for our Canadian customers:
a) Use Linkpoint.
b) Collect money via checks or money orders.
c) Use ANY merchant account and manually run the credit card. Although our system does not automatically process the credit card, it can collect the information securely allowing the website owner to manually process the credit card.
Brian
Orem,Utah,
U.S.A.
Clarifications
#6UPDATE Employee
Tue, March 16, 2004
I would like to clarify the following about the above report:
1) Bright Builders did not collect the reported $6500. Our only charge to David was a monthly hosting fee for his website.
2) We had a working solution for our Canadian customers to use Planet Payment. Unfortunately for us and for David, Planet Payment changed their product offering after we recommended them to David so that it was no longer a viable solution for him.
3) We offer the following solutions for our Canadian customers:
a) Use Linkpoint.
b) Collect money via checks or money orders.
c) Use ANY merchant account and manually run the credit card. Although our system does not automatically process the credit card, it can collect the information securely allowing the website owner to manually process the credit card.