My Financial nightmare began on October 29, 2015 and contunies to the date of this report. I was contacted by 'Ron', who introduced himself as a reresentative of Alternative Online Design and he had a unique opportunity for me to subsidize my Social Security income. His plan seemed to be valid. It was not a "get rich quick" program and that they were marketing through Amazon.com
I purchased their $990.00 'Nitch Plan' which would allow me to select the products that I was interested in selling. This payment was paid by using one of my credit cards. Then I was told, "For every $1,000 I invested, my income return would be around $10,000."
Initially, they wanted to know all of my credit card balances and Avaliable Credit amounts. That should have been my first clue of an 'impending problem', but I ignored the intuition and invested $3,000 more. Once again, on another credit card.
Alternative Online Design (AOD) was to develop a Web-site which displayed the products I had selected to sell. My potential customers would actually be making their purchases from Amazon, whereby I would receive a Commission of between 4% to 6%. (I found out later that Amazon did not and would not acknowledge any 3rd party purchases and would not pay any commissions on these sales.)
AOD did present me with an initial web-site in November; however, it was not interactive where the customers could actually make a purchase. Also, by December 19, 2015 they were Still 'working' on my marketing web-site. At this point my 'Guranteed 45 day Cancellation" was past. So I felt I had no other choice than to continue.
The Amazon commissions, of course, never came and I've never seen a valid working web-site or receiven Any monies. AOD Wanted me to send a W-9 so they could 'pay' me for sales I may have earned but they couldn't give me an amount! I would NOT give them my Social Security Number, now, after this debacle.
I have filed Fraud/Disputed Transactions with the two credit card companies I used for this Scam. They'll make their decisions in 60 days, which will be sometime in May, 2016.