BREAKING NEWS: AdViewGlobal Consultant Leaves Beleaguered Surf Firm; Company Closes Forum Again And Cancels Conference Call, Members Say
Donna Rougeau, who identified herself as a subcontractor for AdViewGlobal, has decided not to work for the firm, members said.
Rougeau left a farewell message in the AVG forum, which appears to have closed again after opening back up earlier today.
An AVG conference call scheduled for tonight was canceled without explanation, members said.
Looks like that Lynn was right – She got in over her head!
But she was going to make so much money for her company…
Maybe Correction will take over…
Chortle!
Perhaps she choked on those small bit of information the members could not digest properly? Does anyone know the Heimlich maneuver??
I think Joe L should take over!!
LOL. Done.
She might have understood Entertained’s black box test and thought she better get out now before it gets worse. Especially when she realized how many banners and business cards her company SD would have to sell in order to make it legit.
I guess AVGA will go back to illegal now.
Patrick,
I’m as confused as anyone. I know Donna’s father is very ill and near death, and she is totally exhausted, but no one expected this. I wish I could be the bearer of positive spin…but I don’t have a clue. It’s a total 180…and that’s the truth.
Two days ago Syndicate Digital was onboard and ready to roll. That may still be the case but on the call tonight Donna said only that her contract to do the website and set up the web services was complete and she needed to attend to her family. She did not say she was gone, but truthfully she did not say much at all. I think she got beat up more than being in over her head.
I expect laughter, atta boys and chortles. Try to keep your glee to a respectable level. You wouldn’t want me and joe to stay away for long would you? As for me running AVGA…that is worth a good laugh. I sell advertising in the recession of 2008/09. That should be worth a laugh or two for sure because that ain’t easy.
I’ll try to add what I can when I have something to add worth reading. I may be retracting some comments that I made and that’s going to be difficult because I was pretty hard some of you! I was not here to win any arguments, as it turned out I got pretty rude and was not myself out of anger toward some of the unnecessary sarcasm and such. I regret that and I apologize. It looks like you win this round. Goodbye for now.
Opps I almost forgot. Naysayer are NEVER wrong. You may be right after all. Let that truth be told too.
Correction!!,
You can come here and apologize and say someone else is about to die and blah blah blah. It falls on deaf ears. Bottom line is you have been and continue to promote a ponzi scheme. None of us will quiet down or go away until the feds shut this junk scam down.
I did have you pegged right after all…have fun.
Pegged as what? Wanting to stop people from losing their hard earned money to a bunch of clowns? Yep, you got me right :)
Correction, apology accepted by me. Maybe, just maybe you are seeing the real truth behind it all. If that is the case you can definitely be on our side and help stop more people getting involved in these scams.
As far as Donna is concerned, how did the very few of us “beat her up”? We here are such a small number.
It is hard not to laugh, but….it is obvious that Donna never could answer the 8 little questions I posed. Perhaps when she read them, after little joe or CORRECTION! sent them to her, she actually examined what those questions were and why she couldn’t answer them. Based on her web site, it always seemed strange she’d totally abandon a career as a life coach to become a Ponzi promoter. Well, we all make mistakes…..at least she figured it out. Question is, will she take Digital Syndicate with her?
Correction!
Thanks for the honest post! I really respect that!
I understand that no one at AVG is making any money so to speak. It is not really happening over there.
But I know there are other surf sites out there, one in particular, that is paying out an enormous amount of money every day. I don’t know how they can afford to, not to mention the referral commissions they pay.
Perhaps we are looking up the wrong tree here??
I would personally be more concerned elsewhere, and not so much with AVG at this point.
Your welcome Entertained…thank you. Thanks to everyone really.
Larksong, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of surf ponzis out there. Each one claims to be sustainable, each one claims to be legal and each and every one of them will leave most of it’s participants far poorer for having joined. No one can stop them all, that’s the sad truth. But if we can drive the nails deep enough into enough of them, then perhaps the people with enough foresight to investigate what the rabid ponzi promoters try to sell them will have enough of a google trail to avoid wasting their money on the inevitable “next” surf ponzi.
I’m 1/2 Sicilian and I’m glad that is all we have in common.
Correction!!,
You can come here and apologize and say someone else is about to die and blah blah blah. It falls on deaf ears. Bottom line is you have been and continue to promote a ponzi scheme. None of us will quiet down or go away until the feds shut this junk scam down.
Sicilian,, are you really that small of a person, that when someone apologise, you still have to bash them. I guess in your supreme wisdom you have never misspoke, or allowed your temper to get the better of you… I wonder how many “firms” you have been with that didn’t work, let me guess everything you did, including belonging to ASD was a slam dunk. Grow up, and be a man. If you didn’t want to accept the apology,you could have just sat your fat a44 in your chair at your Mom’s house… People like you give real Italians like me a bad name…
I thank correction for being a stand up guy, and admitting he has faults.. As a side not I believe AVG is DONE as well.
Larksong, “any Auto Surf is a scam”, that’s your mantra for the month. If they were all they said they were, no one would be working a regular job, we’d all be at home clicking on freaking web sites. See what the SEC says about them: http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/autosurf.htm
CORRECTION: I also want to add my thanks for a very heartfelt post, and I know that was very difficult for you to do.
I was sorry to hear of Donna’s dying father, and will keep her and her family in prayer. I know this is a very difficult time for her and her family.
While we are at different sides of the fence regarding the legality of AVGA, I look forward to your future posts. Have a great 4th of July, and the same to all of us American’s. May God bless the USA.
I hope my relatives never join a Ponzi/Auto Surf. It seems to be deadly to their relatives.
Some times being around the HYIP ponzi “autosurf” scene is akin to watching the Comedy Channel 24/7.
My sincere apologies to “Donna” should her father be genuinely ill, but, the old “relative being ill” story is right up there on the list of the most commonly used excuses for the inevitable demise of HYIP ponzi “autosurfs”
At the minute, the owner of “Pathway-2-Prosperity”, Nick Smirnow (who, by the way, is being sought by the Canadian and US authorities on fraud charges as we speak) has variously used:
1) He was involved in a serious car accident
2) He was hospitalized and in a coma.
3) He was in the Philippines with his wife adopting a child
4) His wife had cancer.
as excuses for non payment.
One of the 2008 biggies, DXGold / DXInOne / DXSynergy / GDT suffered through:
1) Firebombing of their Vanuatu offices.
2) A hurricane destroying their servers and/or internet access.
3) Sabotage by Australias’ second largest bank, Westpac, which was apparently jealous of their successes.
And, of course, who could forget the list of excuses used by Bryan Marsden of “P.I.P.S.” fame, who developed HYIP ponzi excuses to such a fine art, he became subject of the True Crime book “Just Numbers On A Screen” by Owen Platt: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-Numbers-Screen-Marsdens-Pipsters/dp/0954888316 and fooled over 200,000 “members” of his scam for over 18 months.
larksong,
Care to name names? Every good Ponzi scheme pays out money, for a while…..bad Ponzi schemes that don’t pay out go away VERY quickly.
It is truly amazing isn’t it? It never fails.
Correction, I too appreciate your GUTS in coming here and making the post you have made. Having been an ardent cheer leader of ASD, prior to the seizure, I know how hard it is to come back to a place where you have been criticised and say – hey guys, looks as is I might have been wrong about some things. And maybe some of us owe you an apology for assuming you were aware of all the inner workings of AVGA.
I know we dont agree about the legality of the business model, but it is good to see that you recognise that all is not well at the ranch and are not in denial.
The biggest problem that most of us have had with ASD and now AVGA, is not the business model. That is a question of understanding the math and the law and, thanks to many of the writers here and on other sites we have had ample instruction. The problem has been with the lies and the concealment of relevant information by the people in control of ASD and, now, AVGA.
Andy Bowdoin was not who he told us he was. The situation with ASD was not as it was told to us. The unravelling of ASD is not simply a question of straight illegality or inxolvency, it is a story of lies and cover ups within the story. The same applies to AVGA. We were intially told that this was going to be a way to eventually transfer our ad packs to continue to earn. We were then told that the organization had no ties with ASD. Then we were told that a couple of the owners are in fact the Harris’s, and as they owned property bought with ASD funds which was also included in the second Government Seizure motion and as Judy Harris was officially Andy Bowdoin’s “right hand man” in ASD and family spokesman afterwards, this makes a lie out of their earlier declarations. And now Donna Rougeau and Systems Ditigal have gone without any really satisfactory explanation and payouts are frozen, and the reasons for this sound like excuses.
I am sorry Correction, if you are not part of the management of AVGA, it looks as if you have been “had”.
Thank you all. Donna’s father is gravely ill and that is the truth. Thanks for the prayers.
CORRECTION,
No, I wouldn’t want you to stay away.
I am sincerely appreciative, CORRECTION, that you are demonstrating a willingness to examine these very important issues during these very lean economic times.
Ponzi schemes always are dangerous, but they are exceptionally dangerous when the economy is in rough shape. People who are feeling financial pain are very susceptible to messages that suggest a quick fix. The most dangerous schemes are the ones that combine a Ponzi with an appeal to faith.
A day rarely passes when I don’t receive correspondence from a person whose life was profoundly altered by a Ponzi scheme.
The pain is acutely intense when the schemes are targeted at vulnerable populations — senior citizens, people on fixed incomes (especially when the prices of staples such as gasoline and groceries are soaring), people with hearing impairments, people who assign a high priority to faith and are reluctant to question the motivations of members of a group, people who were fleeced in a previous scam and recruited into a new one with a suggestion it was a way to recoup earlier losses.
Church congregations have been torn apart as a result of ASD. Synagogue congregations and Jewish charities and endowments were wiped out by Bernard Madoff. Deaf people were targeted by a Noobing promoter who took the message to YouTube and elsewhere.
Untold thousands of people are hurting across the spectrum of Ponzi schemes.
If by some chance you are looking for a reason other than the ones above to just say no to the surf industry, you might want to consider this one:
You don’t know if one of your fellow surfers is building bombs with the “profits.”
At this moment, you don’t know if member abuse of the AVG cash button contributed to the problems at AVG (or if the purported abuse actually was a new twist on ‘Russian hackers took the money’), and you don’t know if the insiders were plundering the company or were so monumentally incompetent that they created an environment that permitted others to plunder the company.
What you do know is that AVG isn’t paying and hasn’t been able to settle on a message, despite repeated attempts. If you examine the “corporate” communications, you’ll notice that the folks in the Ivory Towers deflect accountability, blaming problems on members.
Absent prodigious income from external sales — and I mean prodigious in the broadest sense of the word — there was no way AVG ever could fund the matching bonuses. The 80/20 program was a clear attempt to prevent an amputation, because AVG could not meet its obligations even if sales commissions were factored out of the equation and bonus page impressions ignored.
The ever-creeping line — from 150 days to 180 days and then 210 days — made AVG an exceptionally dangerous enterprise, and the ties to ASD made it dangerous beyond measure.
Patrick
You may be right Jenny…I have more questions that answers that’s for sure.
Correction you have stepped up admirably. Very nice! Maybe the healing has begun.
Now it’s time for little joe. little joe, where are you?
Big Joe
I wonder how George and Judy Harris have made out so far with this enterprise.
AVG has reported that it has 20,000 members. Certainly some of them are free members, but how much profit has the scheme generated from paid members in the short time it’s been in operation?
â– At an average of $1,000 per member, it would be $20 million in gross revenue;
■If 50% of that was actually distributed to members (as opposed to being reinvested) that leaves $10 million for the enterprise after “VIP†distributions;
â– If half of that was spent on commissions to promoters and other operating expenses, that would leave $5 million net profit for the owners;
â– Taxes (if indeed taxes have been or will be paid) would reduce the number still further, perhaps by half again, leaving a net after tax of, say, $2.5 million.
Obviously the above numbers are hypothetical, but the bottom line is that if the actual net after tax is anywhere close to $2.5 million – or even half of that, then for the short time they’ve been in operation, George and Judy Harris haven’t done too badly financially, even if AVG has reached the end of the road.
It would be interesting to see the actual numbers.
However, the rest of the story may not be so pretty if law enforcement authorities begin pursuing them. Or maybe there’ll be another RICO lawsuit by members, as is the case with ASD. Or all of the above.
There’s a book to be written and movie to be produced about all this, starting with ASD and going on from there!
What is truly going to be interesting is to see what news AVGA announces when the site does come back up. That is if it does come back up. Things are not well in AVGA-land, and Donna’s leaving just might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or was it the “evil government’s fault?”