UPDATED Jan. 20, 2010: Sale. Price of Single-User License for “Rebates Aren’t Guaranteed” lowered to $9.88.

Dear Readers,

We are pleased today to release, “Rebates Aren’t Guaranteed: The True Story Of Ponzi Deceptions And Myths In The Criminal Autosurf ‘Industry.’”

Belong to an autosurf? Thought about joining one? Think they’re harmless?

Think again. “Rebates Aren’t Guaranteed” reveals some shocking truths about the so-called “industry.” You could be joining an organization whose members belong to groups that would embarrass you from one end of your town to the other.

You’ll read about bizarre litigation surrounding these groups and how you could become part of it just by joining an autosurf — perhaps even after hearing the pitch from a close friend or family member.

Perhaps even from a person purporting to be a “Christian.”

First, a few key facts about the publication:

• Pages: 43
• Words: 12,722
• Illustrations: 18
• Format: PDF (You’ll need Adobe Reader, which likely already is on your computer.)
• Download process:  After purchase, you will receive an email with a secure download link. The product and your license will be included in a Zip file.

The Table of Contents has “clickable” links for your convenience. We recommend you read through the publication front-to-back once or twice.  After that, you’ll be able to return to the TOC for quick reference and click on a link to take you to specific areas inside the document.

The price of the product is $27 (Jan. 20, 2010: On sale for $9.88) for a Personal Use License and $47 for a Family Use License. The Family Use License entitles you to use the product as a gift for up to five family members.

Purchase of the Family Linecse reduces your per-copy expense to only $7.83. With the Holiday season approaching — and with autosurf predators ready, willing and able to separate your loved ones from their money — “Rebates Aren’t Guaranteed” might make for an appropriate gift.

Rebates Aren't Guaranteed

It is our hope that many people unfamiliar with the unseemly world of the autosurf will benefit from this publication.

Included in the publication is a “prayer” that circulated among members of the AdSurfDaily autosurf. The prayer is unique in many ways, perhaps particularly in its release date and in its fire-and-brimstone quality. The release date may trouble some readers — but it’s an important part of the fabric of the ASD story.

At the same time, “Rebates Aren’t Guaranteed” seeks to open eyes that have been closed by choice to the dangerous world of the autosurf. The eReport is filled with facts about ASD, Noobing and other autosurfs.

You will see visual evidence of why prosecutors say ASD President Andy Bowdoin is telling a federal judge one story and members another. If you are an ASD member, use the information to help shape your thinking. If you are a longtime autosurf observer, use the information as part of your continuing knowledge base.

The publication outlines deceptions and myths, destroying the myth that “offshore” autosurfs provide protection from the SEC and the FTC, for example. You’ll read about a notable Ponzi prosecution in Canada — one that resulted in disgorgement and penalties against the operators totaling $42 million.

Meanwhile, you’ll read about cases in which the government took swift action to stymie Ponzi operators, including companies and individuals who purported to be “offshore” but were operating from the United States.

You’ll read about why the Surf’s Up forum is important to the ASD case, and how fractured thinking has generated one magical theory after another.

The eReport also provides information on Curtis Richmond, including screen shots of Richmond-connected documents. You’ll be left wondering how he became such an important player in the ASD story, a man labeled a “hero” on Surf’s Up.

One of the chapters is titled, “Divine Viruses To Invade Satanic Databases.” The chapter outlines some of the oddities of the ASD case.

As always, Readers, we thank you for your time and appreciate your readership.

Here is the PayPal button for the Personal License: (On sale now for $9.88)

Here is the PayPal button for the Family License:

Thank you.

Regards,

Patrick

The spread of online commerce has been accompanied by a spread of elaborate frauds — some of which have gathered tens of millions of dollars.

Accompanying the fraud have been stares of disbelief. Not all of the stares have been directed at the fraudsters themselves. Indeed, thousands and thousands of people globally at any point in time simply refuse to believe they’ve been scammed — perhaps owing to embarrassment.

Some of them point the finger of blame at law-enforcement agencies that take actions against the cyberspace scammers.

Online fraud can be particularly elaborate. It often takes advantage of brand names people trust. In the alleged AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme in Florida, for example, prosecutors say Google’s name was used by ASD promoters as a means of instilling trust in customers.

Names of other famous companies also were used by ASD promoters — names such as Kodak, Starbucks, Quiznos Sub, Callaway Golf, Macy’s, Toshiba, NBC, Farmers Insurance, USA Today, Priceline.com and more.

Today comes word that a Florida man has been convicted in a scheme carried out on eBay, one of the most famous websites and brands in the world.

Nilton Rossoni, 50, of Hallandale Beach, Fla., faces up to 20 years in prison.

How elaborate was the scheme?

Prosecutors said Rossoni created “more than 260 different eBay accounts” using aliases “or the real names and address of unsuspecting individuals.”

Rossoni gathered money for more than 5,500 items but never shipped them. He netted $717,000 over time, prosecutors said. Rossoni averaged about $130 per fraudulent sale.

Here is a breakdown of some of the listings:

• Textbooks.
• Computer flash drives.
• Rotisserie grills.
• Tools.
• Sporting equipment.
• DVD collections.
• Airline tickets.
• Saddles.
• Saddlebags.
• Designer luggage.
• Appliances.
• Metal detectors.

“When the auction ended, the winning bidders were notified to send payment to the defendant at a private mail box,” prosecutors said today.

“Customers of eBay sent payment to the defendant at 59 different private mailboxes opened in names of multiple aliases during the course of the scheme,” they continued. “Once the defendant received payment from the eBay auction winner, the funds were deposited in bank accounts under the control of the defendant, but in the name of a nominee entity or person.”

UPDATED 11:57 A.M. EDT (U.S.A.) There are widespread reports this morning that AdVentures4U (ADV4U), the new darling of the autosurf world, is suspending “revenue sharing” and that its owner was threatened.

The reports come on the heels of various reports that the surf slashed payout rates and poured money into a gold-buying business known as TradingGold4Cash. ADV4U purportedly had more than 60,000 members and positioned itself as a “marketer’s dream.”

These remarks were sent members today and were attributed to Steve Smith, the purported owner of AdVentures4U.

Smith purportedly acknowledged that he put his family in danger by starting an autosurf.

“We have been threatened and my family is more important to me than most will know,”  Smith purportedly said. “We Never (sic) ever said the revenue share was a set % and in order to move other income forward I made a decision that put my family in danger and I will not tolerate that.”

“99% of the members understood where we were going but the small % that I am scared of I just cannot risk because we really are who we said we are and we really did intend to move us into the future,” Smith purportedly said. “We will not be answering scary support or answering the phone anymore until we have completed the cashout requests.”

Smith purportedly urged members not to contact offshore payment processors to file complaints, saying any suspension of offshore accounts would result in members getting lower refunds.

“We cannot control the Members so please give us to Aug 4th (sic?) to process all payments because if members complain to the payment proccessors (sic) and they Freeze our accounts we will not be liable for any of the cashouts and the Revenue Share monies will held by the payment processors and we will not have control and they will only pay a portion of the monies back to the members,” Smith purportedly said.

It was not immediately clear why the message cited the Aug. 4 date — a date in the past.

AdVentures4U purportedly conducted business with a Hotmail address. The gold site purportedly is a subsidiary.

The ADV4U website appears still to be functional, although an audio message that once started up upon the loading of the page appears to have been disabled.

UPDATED 7:53 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) AdViewGlobal (AVG), which also is known as the AV Global Association (AVGA), registered the association name as a fictitious entity in Florida in April, canceled and re-registered it in May — and canceled the registration again July 21 in a transaction that involved a hotel fax machine in Montevideo, Uruguay, according to records.

AVGA’s name initially was registered by Gary Talbert April 21 and used the same address AdSurfDaily used — 13 S. Calhoun Street, Quincy, Fla. — according to documents on file in Florida. Federal prosecutors said last year that the S. Calhoun address was bogus.

Talbert, once an ASD executive and later the chief executive officer of AVG before resigning in March, was listed as the owner in the April filing, which was dated a month after AVG had announced Talbert’s resignation.

AdViewGlobal claimed to have no ties to AdSurfDaily, but this document lists ASD's address in Quincy, Fla., as AVG's address.

It was not immediately clear why the filing occurred in April and included Talbert’s name after he had resigned a month earlier, but Talbert’s name and purported signature appear in the document. The surf announced a shift to an association structure in February, one day after AdSurfDaily President Andy Bowdoin signed the first of his pro se pleadings in the ASD forfeiture case and two days after reports circulated that the U.S. Secret Service had seized the bank accounts of some individual ASD members.

On May 29, the surf reregistered the name, this time listing Judy Harris as the owner and using the address of the Harris home in Tallahassee as its address. The reregistration occurred two days prior to the issuance of a news release by AVG through PR Newswire that used a Tallahassee dateline.

AVG sent a follow-up email announcing its news release to members on the same day. The email hotlinked to servers at Forbes Magazine and other publishers, pulling the publishers’ logos off their servers and creating the impression that the companies had endorsed AVG. The email purported to have originated in Uruguay.

By June 25, a little more than three weeks after the issuance of the June 1 news release, AVG announced it was suspending cashouts.

Federal prosecutors said in December that the mortgage on the Harris home had been paid off in June 2008 with more than $157,000 in illegal proceeds from AdSurfDaily Inc., a Florida company accused last year in a forfeiture complaint of wire fraud, money-laundering and operating a Ponzi scheme.

The name of the Montevideo hotel appears at the top of the faxed document, as do the fax number and international dialing identifier. The document suggests the fax might have been sent to another company in the United States before being forwarded to the Florida Department of State — or the opposite, faxed from the United States to Uruguay.

The timing of the registration cancellation coincides with an unconfirmed report that AVG had fired employees in Uruguay on July 20.

Members later said that Bowdoin was the silent head of AVG.

In early February, after AVG’s graphics were seen Jan. 31 in an ASD-controlled webroom that showed AVG’s street address as the same S. Calhoun address ASD used, AVG explained the appearance of the graphic was an “operational coincidence.”

Regardless, AVG used the address in April in filings in Florida.

Not a single share of Vana Blue’s penny stock has traded hands since July 30, a period of seven full trading days, according to Yahoo Finance. In news releases, Vana Blue identified itself as the owner of eWalletPlus, a payment processor later linked to the AdViewGlobal (AVG) autosurf.

Vana Blue, which used mailing services in Phoenix and Las Vegas as its address, is a registered corporation in Nevada. Its website now resolves to a server that beams ads from GoDaddy.com, but until recently resolved to a server from which the company told its story.

The company has claimed to own a company that variously has been described as TMS Corp. and TMS Association, which purportedly developed eWalletPlus. In January, Vana Blue also claimed to own a company that variously has been described as Karveck Corp. or Karveck International, a purported advertising and media company.

In February, Vana Blue reported that Karveck had posted $1.8 million in revenue in January — the month AVG was in prelaunch.

Among other things, Vana Blue also had said it signed an agreement with a company known as Native Express Inc. “to develop oil and gas resources” in Utah. Vana Blue also has said it had an agreement with a firm in Jamaica known as Internet Mobile & Caribbean Network Ltd. to “facilitate the sales of the Compass Pre Paid debit card throughout Jamaica and the Caribbean.”

Meanwhile, Vana Blue also has said it had an agreement with a company known as Net Auction Plus, an eBay alternative, “to provide online, affordable, and flexible payment services.” The NetAuctionPlus.com domain name is registered to Michael Austin and uses the same Phoenix mail-service address as Vana Blue.

The NetAuctionPlus.com domain throws a server error. Austin’s name was mentioned in an announcement last week by AVG that it had reported a theft of $2.7 million to unspecified law enforcement agencies. AVG, which purports to be headquartered in Uruguay, did not explain when the alleged theft occurred and did not provide details.

Austin’s name also has been associated with eWalletPlus, but is only one of several names associated with the payment processor and money-services business. AVG promoters have claimed that eWalletPlus was AVG’s in-house payment processor. At one time, the eWalletPlus domain resolved to the same server in Panama that hosted AVG, but the domain now resolves to a parked page and appears to be offered for sale on sedo.com.

In a purported public filing dated March 31, Vana Blue identified its officers as Donald Rex Gay, Leonard Capelli and Michael Reis, saying it owned TMS Corp and Karveck International.

Only days later, a man associated with both the AdSurfDaily and AVG autosurfs — Gary Talbert — registered an entity known as TMS Corp. USA LLC, according to records. Talbert’s U.S. registrations occurred within days of a March 20 announcement by AVG that he had resigned as its chief executive officer and a March 23 announcement that AVG’s bank account had been suspended because too many members had wired transactions in excess of $9,500.

TMS Corp. USA LLC is registered in Nevada, and lists Gary D. Talbert of 2601 E Thomas Rd, Ste 220-A Phoenix, AZ 85016, as its manager. A company by the same name also is listed as a foreign LLC in Arizona, with Gary D. Talbert of 13. S. Calhoun Street, P.O. Box 109, Quincy, FL 32351, as its manager.

The S. Calhoun Street building address is the same address AdSurfDaily Inc. used.

In a forfeiture complaint against ASD last year that alleged wire fraud, money-laundering, the sale of unregistered securities and a Ponzi scheme, federal prosecutors said the building address was bogus.

One of the officers of Vana Blue is named a defendant in a counterclaim by the U.S. government that alleges more than $252,000 in federal income tax is unpaid. The same individual — Donald Rex Gay — is listed in Louisiana records as a person who has been involved in a number of businesses.

Gay denied in pro se court filings that he owed the taxes.

Records in Illinois note that Michael Reis, also listed by Vana Blue as an officer, was ordered in 2000 to cease and desist from the practice of public accounting without a license.

Monday news and notes:

• We’ve installed a WordPress plug-in called “Quote Comments” by Joen Asmussen. If you highlight a section of a comment to which you’d like to respond and click the “Quote” link next to the date, it will copy the highlighted text to the comment box. We initially couldn’t get the plug-in to work after installing it last week. But an update was released this morning, and it appears to be working.
• A reader advises our column on whether the Seattle Post-Intelligencer can save itself by employing the autosurf model is just a bunch of hot air to ardent ASD supporters. We weren’t given specifics as to how we got so much so wrong in a single post, but would like to know. We’d like to publish a guest column by an ASD supporter that explains why existing companies with magical brand names and huge website traffic volume haven’t turned to the autosurf model — either to save themselves or to create an exciting, new revenue stream that would position them for 21st Century success. Please contact us through the contact tab if you’d like to write a bylined guest column that explains your point of view.
• At some point this week — likely by Wednesday — we are installing a new contact form that uses a different system to process inquiries. Some testing is required. We’ll let you know when it is installed and operational.

UPDATE 10:43 A.M. EST (USA): It appears the plug-in is not providing the “Quote” link until the first comment has been left. We’ll look into this.

If you enjoy WordPress blogging and are looking for ways to expand your online presence in 2009 while implementing a clean, fresh look, ElegantThemes may be a choice suited for you.

First, though, let’s get you qualified: Elegant Themes is a membership site that provides attractive WordPress themes. You’ll need a core understanding of WordPress. You shouldn’t join Elegant Themes unless you have some WordPress experience or intend to gain it in the coming year.

Skills you’ll need include the ability to download themes and plug-ins and upload them to your server. Occasionally you’ll need the ability to copy-and-paste code. If you’re already a Blogger these skills likely are second nature to you. If you’re inexperienced, expect to spend some time learning WordPress basics. The WordPress interface is user-friendly. Until a few weeks ago we had virtually no experience with WordPress, but now can’t imagine a world without it.

One of the first things we noticed about Elegant Themes is that it provides psd files — for Photoshop — in its download packs, meaning you can use Photoshop to fashion a logo for your site.

But Elegant Themes also provided a blank logo. If you don’t have Photoshop, you can edit the blank logo with a free program such as paint.net to create your own site logo. This is a big plus, because an average Blogger may not own Photoshop. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with paint.net if you don’t own Photoshop and have been looking for ways to make your own logos.

As of this writing, ElegantThemes charges $19.95 for a one-year subscription via PayPal. Our purchasing experience was seamless, meaning there were no glitches and we were routed instantly to where we needed to be after purchase.

There are 17 eye-catching themes available for download at the site. More will be added, and we anticipate they will have great curb appeal.  The owner impresses us as a hard-working designer. Elegant Themes provides a members’ Support Forum, so let’s talk about that for a moment.

We have asked three questions in the forum. Each question was addressed promptly — by the owner and a fellow forum member. We were impressed by the swiftness of the responses, especially because we posed our questions on a weekend.

What made the responses particularly memorable, though, was the thoroughness. We encountered a glitch with one of the themes — an alignment problem. This problem was caused by the recent upgrade of WordPress to version 2.7. A fellow member provided a solution — a code snippet — right in the forum, and the owner incorporated the fix into the theme within a matter of hours.

In reading forum threads, we noticed other examples of members and the owner providing code snippets to fix individual issues. Issues, of course, are inevitable, regardless of the Blogging platform you choose. One of the great things about WordPress is that the user base is large and the documentation is thorough. When issues do arise, there is a worldwide knowledge base from which to glean answers. The Elegant Themes members’ Support Forum has added to this WordPress knowledge base, a big plus.

We have done considerable shopping for WordPress themes. Many are available for free — the theme on the Patrick Pretty Blog is known as “Visionary,” for example. You’ll find no shortage of free themes if you enter the WordPress world.

But we also did some shopping for paid themes. A good number of highly qualified WordPress designers offer paid themes. The range runs the gamut from “should have just used a free theme” to “we’d gladly have paid more for the theme.”

Pricing at Elegant Themes is on the low end of what we viewed online and is more than fair. For a $19.95 annual subscription, we received access to 17 very attractive themes. We’ve seen membership sites that charge as much as $299 for a year’s subscription — while having fewer selections than Elegant Themes.

As always, though, we encourage you to do your own shopping. For our money, Elegant Themes has provided exceptional value.

Visit Elegant Themes.

In the weeks ahead we plan to upgrade a couple of sites with themes from Elegant Themes. On Wednesday, we are launching RateMyVanity.com, and we’re using a theme from Elegant Themes on the site.

We find Elegant Themes to be fresh and new. Our experience on the members’ Support Forum has been a positive one, and we get the sense the owner works hard to maximize value for members. The themes alone were worth the low price of admission.

Visit Elegant Themes.