Jesse Willms Banned by Judge from Negative Option Selling – Assets Frozen!
Frozen Assets
CBC (with whom Willms has already had a tussle) in Canada are already broadcasting that local high-school athlete drop-out turned internet businessman of dubious repute, the self-styled and self-publicising entrepreneur & charitable Jesse Willms, has had some shackles applied to his business by the order, by a Seattle court, to freeze his assets (in case they’re needed to payout to his alleged victims and fines) and also to not use the negative option gambit in any of his websites.
CBC report on the FTC lawyer Robert Schroeder saying,
The judge also froze the assets of Willms and his companies
I'm not a Flim-flam guy!
This could be the main reason why CBC say that all his websites (that they know of, at least) are down and that his phone is dead. I’ve checked and the dismal self-publicity blogs are still running, which they would be I suppose, as they’re not selling anything except the idea that Willms is a “good guy”. The judge is Marsha J. Pechman, Federal Judge out of the Western District Court of Seattle according to the post I’ve linked to. It finishes with the words:
While Jesse Willms has not responded much to these accusations, he has hired many firms to engage in a positive PR and SEO campaign and consistently sends out news releases claiming that he has been assisting charities with financial donations. Additionally, there are at least a dozen “blogs” setup by Mr. Willms to counteract the negative press with positive SERPS.
This is exactly what this website and many others have been saying for over a year now! “Performance Marketing Insider” also states that:
Currently, according to news reports, there is a both a consumer and criminal investigation against Mr. Willms in Canada.
Well this is good! And only fair – fair to the thousands and thousands of people that feel duped by Willms’ activities. Roll on next year – Willms is scheduled for trial in the U.S. in July 2012. Should be sooner.
According to the CBC report, we see another aspect of Willms’ doings whereby he very rarely admits to any mistakes or wrong-doings. It’s always someone else’s fault, in his world. CBC say;
Willms has blamed unscrupulous business associates who he claims defrauded him by stealing credit card numbers in order to generate commissions with bogus sales.
I say,
What? All of them? All $457 million dollars worth?
Pull the other one!
Willms’ local paper, the Edmonton Journal, also reports on the asset-freezing story here. They don’t say anything new – but it’s nice to keep the locals informed, don’t you think?
All those local charities that Willms has been plugging his exploits with over the past year must surely be examining their credibility in the eyes of their donating public. This connection (and to fair, the charges are not proven yet) to Willms is starting to look very bad for them, people have long memories and mud does stick. Ask any politician!
Surely?
Jesse Willms (r), in the source of the famous grinning shot.
Just Think Media Settles With Google Over Trademark Infringement Last year Jesse Willms threw the lawyer dogs at me which forced me to pull some posts. I’d been calling him a scammer which was obviously in clear contradiction of his (now public) self-vision as a charitable philanthropist. However yesterday, Google, who had originally sued 50...
Jesse Willms Ethics Hacked I got a auto-alert from a Scamraiders post from Justin Asking that a page on one of the plethora of Willms self-promotional websites has been tampered with – and sure enough it has! See here for the original comment from Justin Asking. Below is a screenshot of the hacked page, a...
Over the weekend, I received over 600 spams from someone called Willie R (with a number appended to the name) to my gmail account which I now use for my spam-trapping on an old email address that I use for registrations and the like… See the screenshot of one page above!
Centurion Wealth Circle
On checking out a sample I found that most point back to Centurion Wealth Circle with a small array of other dubious links included. The spams I got had almost identical formats (except for differing ‘from’ addresses). The differences were in a couple of links. These are the two spam types:
Type 1: Includes Link to AutoXten.com
CWC Spam Type 1
Type 2: Includes Link to TextAdBrokers.com
CWC Spam Type 2
The amazing thing taken straight from http://textadbrokers.com/?premier1 is the spelling mistake for their prime selling point! Under the headline “What is TextAdBrokers?” we see:
TAB was created as the premier Partner for marketing and distribution For the newly created contextual advertising Platform hitcralwer.com
hitcralwer.com (or HitCrawler.com) has already spawned a long chain on Scam.com that starts with a scam warning, then features server outages, lawyer warnings, lawyer bebunkings and various personal threats and revelations about the contributors. For me, this is all very entertaining stuff, but the key facts for me are that;
I have been heavily spammed, all links tending to the same source and all pointers pointing to the same destination(s).
TAB’s own blurb can’t even spell correctly!
From that, you’ll gather which side of the honesty fence I think this lot come from…!
Willie R Burke kindly leaves his address in one spam type as “41 Merker Dr, Edison, NJ 08837″. This ties in with the WHOIS of the source. However, I don’t see why I should have to follow THEIR suggestion to stop the spam coming from them. After all, I have over 600! The suggestion is not everywhere, but only on some of the pointers.
Five domains are in nearly every spam, (from those that I checked in my deluge.)
These are;
http://autoxten.com/premier1
- Under their earnings disclaimer, they claim “that AutoXTen is not a get rich quick scheme but is a business” and that “all customers are essentially purchasing advertising”….?
- considering the deluge I just got, their spam policy takes some beating! e.g. “Unsolicited commercial email (UCE), while regarded as legal in some jurisdictions, is regarded as spam by most Internet service providers (ISPs), and may not be used to promote CWC”. Larry Harper, take note! I am not prepared to wade through 600 email headers just to prove that your spam policy works… You do it. Start with the source. YOU!
CWC Pyramid Details
Their business model is based on buying “tokens”, keeping them as a “portfolio” or something for a bit, and then cashing in 50% of the “investment” at some ill-defined “maturity” point. Although they claim otherwise, this is classic pyramid scheme technology. They make clear the exponential growth that potentially exists in their own blurb, and ONLY pyramid schemes promise exponential growth.
http://www.makemoneyonline-free.org/
- here I find out that I “have been invited to join ClixSense by robbie1201″. Oh really! Thanks for nowt robbie. It’s a site called “ClikSense, advertising that pays” but the domain name remains the same. On their user agreement, point 10, Spam Policy, they helpfully remind Robbie and Willie R that “Spamming is a federal crime. Any member caught Spamming will not only have their account terminated immediately and lose any past, present and future earnings, but shall also be held liable for spamming as we shall cooperate with any authorities and investigations that may arise from the spamming incident. ClixSense may fine your account up to $5 per spam email reported from you email address.” I don’t think they were listening!
Why this should be so when so may sites (like mine here) are served from the massive data centres in the US (like Texas, say!) is beyond me. But I find the Canadian connection strangely comforting.
Conclusion
It stinks. From the initial deluge to burrowing through the various “systems”; it stinks. Leave it well alone folks. Any business of note should NOT be resorting to Spam for new business. The scale of this spam deluge emphasises the non-credibility of these charlatans much more than their cheesy website offering ever could.
The fact that most domains were hidden “for privacy” plus the fact that the websites are almost incomprehensible as they struggle to disguise their real motives and modus operandi are just bonuses!
Introduction There’s a well-known adage that says, Don’t believe everything you read in the papers (Point 1) Another, (which is derived from the mantra of the old UK stock market) goes like, An Englishman’s word is his bond (Point 2) Make what you want of them, but many people still go by this, replacing “An...
Introduction I knew there was something really, really dodgy about that MyBookFace.net crap highlighted in this post the other day. Not only are they connected to some serious malware (as detailed in the posting), but they’ve an interesting line in popups!!! Google Treasure Chest Rises Yet Again! Here’s what to do… Go to http://mybookface.net making...
…when mankind left the gravitational confines of our Earth.
Google Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin
A poor boy from the steppes, Yuri Gagarin, simultaneously became the first man in space and the first man to leave Earth and orbit it completely. (This is something that took NASA several steps before John Glenn finally emulated the feat).
While of humble background (like Jesus), his father was a carpenter (like Jesus) and his mother read voraciously (as Jesus knew the scriptures). Obviously, Gagarin wasn’t Jesus, but he did die in his mid-thirties which parallels Jesus’s early death.
Gagarin Launch on Vostok 1
I was alive when Gagarin stunned the world by being shot into space. I remember very few photos of the man or the event. The West was naturally very embarrassed by being overshadowed by a dictator-led communist state. Most scientists were just astonished. Most politicians and the mainstream media were extremely alarmist in public (and fully actioned in private) because the inter-continental aspect of chucking a nuclear weapon sized piece of machinery aloft at the height of the cold war was paramount in their minds.
What struck me then and since was the fact that Gagarin always seemed to have a happy cheeriness about him. When we now see his pre-flight pictures, his confidence is astounding, because remember, before the voyage, mankind had conflicting ideas about the very survivability for a man in the entirely hostile and unforgiving environment of space. Some said that a man would die within half and hour from radiation….
Of course, the Soviet scientists had tested these theories with mammals (dogs & ape) and knew that even though the animals died on their space-flights (and were destined to die, by design), they knew that a man could survive the flight and if a return to Earth could be made, he’d live to see another day. They’d also done a small step-by-step approach to their rocketry so even though the rocket was made primarily as an ICBM, its designer was actually more interested in getting men into space and had designed accordingly. (see this article on Sergei Korolev and his space-flight dreams).
This, Gagarin duly did, by re-entering the atmosphere in his capsule and then, when the speed had sufficiently reduced, by opening his capsule and leaping from it to then descend on a conventional parachute.
Amazingly, this all worked, perfectly.
International Space Station
We now see the benefits of this early Soviet work because for the next few years, transport of people to the International Space Station (ISS) will be done by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft alone now that the NASA Space Shuttle is grounded for good.
The Soyuz is a direct descendant of Gagarin’s early capsule and the subsequent work and deaths of Soviet cosmonauts. Later joint work with NASA and their own accidents and astronaut deaths have made the Soyuz platform very reliable, in space flight terms. See this Wikipedia article for a full introduction to space-flight of all kinds.
Google Celebration
Google, characteristically, have celebrated Gagarin’s achievement (and that it was, make no mistake, he was a very, very, brave man), with a decorated main page which I’ve copied for posterity above.
Hooray For Gagarin.
So it was 50 years ago today. An event that changed the world and our perception of it and ourselves in the universe.
It’s only people some years older than myself who actually remember the previous world where people remained fixed to the planet and could only dream and wonder about the reality beyond. For myself and folks younger than me, we can only to imagine what that world was like because we are part of the world that Gagarin’s bravery opened up for us..
Crikey! I Never Realised! Maybe certain days have relevance above their station and mere numerical nomenclature? Who knows. So read on. See what happened today! 622 AD – The Hijra of Muhammad Muhammad runs away from Mecca to escape persecution. From this point forward, huge swathes of the globe took up Islam, Islamic empires spread...
Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off. the co-incidence was in the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died. You’d expect some reasoned discussion,...
However yesterday, Google, who had originally sued 50 unknown John Does reached a settlement with some of the defendants in a case originally brought on 17 May, 2010. prominent among these is Just Think Media, latterly a vehicle for Jesse Willms’ internet enterprises. See final judgement here.
Apparently, all defendants are saying that the Google claims are false, yet are paying up. Whether they have or not, I don’t know. Google still won.
You’ll notice in the above screenshot that it includes as many of Willms’ businesses and associates that they can discover – Farend Services on Cyprus, 1016363 Alberta, 1524948 Alberta and his current vehicle, Terra Marketing Group (This is him on the “about” page).
Farend Services popped up a lot in our investigations. This is Willms take on networks and affiliates and how his business worked in a now hard-to-find interview from around New year, 2011:
It‟s a commission type arrangement in which we hire networks to manage our advertising and we pay them a certain amount of money per product sold. Those networks hire affiliates to place the ads and most of them are very good – but we occasionally run into problems with affiliates making false claims.
Blaming all the failures on the folks who fed him customers which he did in his interview did not save him from folding under the weight of evidence that Google presented to the Utah court.
Noticeable by its absence in the interview is any mention of the Google case although mention is made of his cases against CTV and others! In actual fact, from our and others investigations, the statement “…affiliates to place the ads and most of them are very good” is so far from the truth as to be laughable.
This is because time and again we saw the same adverts all served from the same few servers (like Bloosky say) and all the affiliates all quoting the same copyright infringing stuff in their webpages that have been used and proved in this case by Google, almost continuously.
This is not a few affiliates- it’s almost all affiliates! Almost all the time! The web was full of it!
Oprah
So to be absolutely clear, Willms blamed almost everything on his affiliates in the Oprah Winfrey case, which he also lost. Quote:
Affiliates broke our rules and used their unauthorized images, and made claims that she had endorsed our products. Even though we didn‟t use the unauthorized images ourselves, this case has been settled and there are measures in place so this doesn’t happen again.
Software
The thing is, he had an excuse for his million dollar fine for flogging counterfeit Microsoft and Symantech software as well, which given that they’d want at least their lost sales back does not equate with his statement of:
Only a small percentage, less than one per cent, was counterfeit.
So far, without any other corroborative information, it is only Jesse saying this. He blamed everything on his supply chain. To be fair, Microsoft’s authentication system was poorer some years ago than it is now.
Willms also says that he has learned from his mistakes in his interview. Let’s hope he has.
This case goes back to his business efforts for 2009 and earlier.
Since then he has apparently folded on the-next-big-thing which was penny auctions and has gone to great pains to shift website ownership of his earlier websites (as detailed in posts and comments passim). His Terra Marketing outfit are noticeable for their absence of any business activity (at least compared to the past) and appear to exist purely for charitable works and a promotional vehicle for Willms himself. Their website mentions “partners” and is big on saying, well, er, not a lot actually. It’s not clear what they do but apparently 250 people are doing it!
And there’s the nagging questions again;
If this interview is so wonderful, how come it has now been pulled and is only available via the Google cache? Originally he was very proud of it and went to great pains to promote it…! I have enough news log references to it to fill a (….insert your own big thing here….)
And why are the Willms businesses and domain names being shuffled off this mortal coil so quickly?
And Farend Services in Cyprus, the companies in Pasig City, Nevis, County Durham and Gibralter plus Pacific WebWorks and Willms’ former enterprises… – Is the fact that the same names and addresses, phone numbers and call centres all kept popping up a valid causal link or is it really just several businesses all using the same business services with or without considering the ethics of their business decisions?
I guess there’s still time to find out.
Where is The Jesse Willms Interview?
Interestingly, despite all the web puffs for it when it first came out, it has disappeared! He http://jessewillms.com/giving-my-first-interview/ – mentioned it here on his main personal blog and http://www.gettingtheinterview.ca/ – it used to be here. Sadly, and ironically, the Google cache (how coolly ironic is that?) provides us the answers:
…is for his self-promotion of the interview and below is the actual interview, which had also gone! (I’m not making this stuff up you know, but it shows the lengths to which some folks will go to rig Google search ranking…)
So. Scammer or philanthropist? You decide. The settlement in court says one thing.
Google won $1.6m between the defendants, which in my opinion is a fraction of the money that the scammers duped from their “customers” over the years.
Reading the Google case shows that Google only started to react when they themselves were asked to answer court summonses by folks that had been scammed – by Willms, Pacific WebWorks and the rest under the mistaken impression that it was Google taking the cash from them!
During the time of the scams in question, Google made heaps of money from the advert placers (the affiliates). Perhaps they’d like to dip into their pockets and help the thousands who’ve been scammed by financing a proper damages case?
Probably not. Gotta think of the shareholders.
As always, it’s the little folks that suffer.
And Google, with its “do no harm” mantra, has actually not done much good at all! The case has provided a case law example for any folks willing to take up the reins against the defendants for monies lost, though.
Or the FTC could take up the baton and recover the millions for people should they wish to do it. Let’s see.
Introduction The 9/11 period, (or 11th September in some places), has been interesting of late with regard to internet marketing and litigation as it applies to certain entities not unfamiliar to these pages. Pacific WebWorks (PWW) A Randy Guffey is named as the class action plaintiff against the “business” of PWW. The nature of the...
The few readers of these pages may have noticed some diminishment in content recently; specifically: http://strangelyperfect.tv/7955/facebook-msnbc-jesse-willms-swipe-auctions-and-doctored-photos/ http://strangelyperfect.tv/8860/jesse-willms-favourite-tv-clips/ http://strangelyperfect.tv/8740/the-three-rules-of-trust-using-swipeauctionsbids-as-anexample/comment-page-1/#comment-3066 You’ll now find that these links no longer work. Cause and Effect The cause of all of this was a cease and desist request to me via email by a lawyer, Matt Thomson working at Kronenberger Burgoyne. ...
The DWP have lost in the courts again after a tribunal today ruled that the Atos run Work Capability Assessment (WCA) disadvantages people with mental health problems. This follows a string of legal decisions ruling against the DWP as they … Continue reading → […]
Boycott Workfare joined the Civil Service Rank and File Network (CSRF) and Brighton Benefits Campaign in Brighton yesterday to lobby the PCS Union to take meaningful action on the brutal benefit sanctions currently driving hundreds of thousands of people into … Continue reading → […]
However yesterday, Google, who had originally sued 50 unknown John Does reached a settlement with some of the defendants in a case originally brought on 17 May, 2010. prominent among these is Just Think Media, latterly a vehicle for Jesse Willms’ internet enterprises. See 
