After The Goldrush


Buying software, courses and other internet marketing stuff can be perilous

I recently attended a free marketing event in London by a well known media company. They were promoting management of Google, Facebook and Instagram ads This included setting up the accounts so they were ad friendly and the website mobile friendly.

The cost of this was a large fee for the set up and an equally large on-going monthly fee which could be cancelled at anytime. It sounded like a good deal, especially for me as I am not that confident with all of this technical stuff and had already spent a lot of time and money on software and hadn’t really got anywhere.

The head of the company presented the event from the stage at a prestigious hotel in Kensington. The room was full with about 500 people in attendance. He was a very slick presenter, a practiced salesman and very persuasive.

He made lots of promises, quoted stats, gave examples of companies that had made significant improvement to their sales and showed slides of famous people talking at his events.

It was exactly what I needed and wanted but the price was high, too high for me but his pitch of managing my ads and rapidly improving my sales and getting coaching clients was enough to persuade me to jump in.

The convincer was if you signed up that day they would wave the set up fee and I told myself (my convincer strategy) that I would make enough money to cover the fees and ads.

The application form gave them permission to charge my credit card for the first payment and a member of the team would call me for a consultation before getting to work on my website, products and ads.

I waited in the next day but no call came in. That’s OK I thought they are probably busy dealing with the sign ups from the event.

Days went by and I began to worry. I had handed over a large sum of money and got nothing for it. What if they have just taken my money and don’t call?

I had experienced a previous situation where I did lose a lot of money to scammers in the Bitcoin arena with a company called USI-Tech and they had blatantly ripped off thousands of people and disappeared with no way of retrieving my investment. So I was sceptical about this situation.

I started to send emails to them saying that as they hadn’t done what they promised I wanted to withdraw from the deal and would like my money back. No reply and I began to plan how I could expose them on Social Media. I checked the internet and there was a piece on there from 3 years ago where someone who had invested with them and had spent 6 weeks trying to get their money back. Oh no! Should have checked the Internet first.

Eventually (2 weeks) I got a call from a lady at the company who explained how she had called me a few days earlier. I know this wasn’t true and if that was the case why had she not left a message?

She was very nice on the phone and apologetic and was obviously checking me out. Was I angry and threatening to do nasty things? That was my hallucination anyway.

Eventually she asked me if I wanted to continue and start again from the beginning to which I clearly declined and asked her to refund my money. She then asked for my bank details and said she would forward the money.

3 days went by and I hadn’t received any money so this post was my first step before exposing them. If I don’t get the money soon I’ll try to contact her and then I will expose them.

Here’s my thinking on this. They may well be bona fide as they are a well known company and may have been overwhelmed by the number of applicants from that event.

As a result, perhaps some of their staff were overworked and stressed and had begun to leave. In the midst of all of this I received a mail out from them advertising several positions so my supposition may well have been correct.

I suspect this sort of thing happens a lot in this sort of business. Slick snake oil sales people, it’s not always men, skilled in presenting an enticing scenario and creating a powerful sense of desire in the punters and the offer to wave the set up fee if you sign up there and then is the convincer.

This is a well known strategy in the Internet Marketing arena, so buyer beware. I’ll keep you all updated.

The California Gold Rush was a gold rush that began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.

Despite the many stories of big discoveries by the miners who lived in very poor conditions, very few of them struck it lucky.

The most money was made by those who supplied the necessary tools and supplies to the men and women with dreams of striking it rich.

I suspect that most money is being made by the people who are selling you software, courses and various other strategies which are going to double or treble your income almost immediately. And once you subscribe to their marketing emails or pitches on Facebook and other media they will continue to bombard you with emails notifying you of deadlines.

They don’t stop, their messages becoming more desperate, until you succumb or hit the unsubscribe button.

Well this company did return my money and hopefully any others in my position managed to get their fees returned.

Pity really because it was a product that I needed but the one thing that they had destroyed was trust and the toughest thing about the power of trust is that it’s very difficult to build and very easy to destroy.