An emerging scheme that butchers the English language and contends it opposes spam also bizarrely says it intends to build its business by requiring members to post ads on Facebook and Twitter.
Equally bizarrely, the scheme says it accepts Liberty Reserve, the now-shuttered payment processor implicated by the United States last month in an alleged $6 billion money-laundering conspiracy.
The scheme is known as Earn Profit Click — or EPC for short. The PP Blog observed ads for the “program” over the weekend on a Profitable Sunrise Facebook site. The ads now appear to have been removed. Profitable Sunrise was a murky international pyramid scheme that may have gathered tens of millions of dollars by using offshore bank accounts, the SEC said in April.
Since that time, pitches for reload scam after reload scam have appeared on the still-active Profitable Sunrise Facebook site. Both the SEC and FINRA have warned that scams are spreading via social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others. EPC’s full name is similar to “ProfitClicking,” a scam that rose from JSSTripler/JustBeenPaid, an earlier scam that also used social media to spread.
EPC is similar to Zeek Rewards in the sense that “members” are required to place ads for the “program.” In August 2012, the SEC described Zeek as a $600 million Ponzi- and pyramid fraud. Unlike Zeek, EPC appears to be trying to force members to post ads on specific social-media sites that may have heavy viewership. (Many Zeek ads were placed on classified-ad sites with low traffic; such also appeared to be the case with Profitable Sunrise.)
Here is a verbatim snippet from the purported Terms of EPC (italics added):
19. You have to post face book ads in a group which have at least 500 members. If you want to post the ad on any of your friends’ wall, then the condition is that your particular friend must have at least 300 friends in his friends list.
20. If you post the ad on LinkedIn or twitter in a group then there should be at least 200 members in this group. If you post the ad on a friend’s wall then there should be 100 friends in his friends list.
21. In a group, you can post maximum 2 ads in 24 hours.
22. On a friend’s wall, you can post only one ad during 24 hours.
23. By accepting terms and conditions, you will be bound to keep the marketing material confidential provided on website.
Elsewhere on its site, EPC claims to be a “Rapidly spread advertising company” through which members can “earn thousands of free entry [sic] that are changing lives [sic] of thousands people [sic] . . .”
Meanwhile, EPC makes this text declaration: “We are a win-win game players [sic], as we provide our members a suitable era [sic] to win high financial benefits and helps [sic] to make their financial future [sic] splendid. We have the best minds from the field of IT to assist you and to handle the operations of EPC. Our mature, dedicated and wonderful team has twenty years [sic] experience in the field of online home-based business.”
A graphic on the site declares, “We are growing fastly [sic].”
The site reproduces famous logos and appears to trying to plant the seed that well-known companies such as GoDaddy, HostGator and the Ernst & Young accounting firm somehow have endorsed EPC’s operations. (The PP Blog’s research suggest GoDaddy is the EPC domain registrar and that HostGator servers are being used.) Promos for various HYIP scams appear on the same page as the logos of the famous companies. The HYIP scams include FastCashMega (“Turn $10 Into $20,010 Without Recruiting”); “NonStopPayments” (“6% Daily For 180 Business Days”); and “WorldConsumerAlliance,” a “program” once known as “WealthCreationAlliance” that launched as a Zeek Rewards reload scam in 2012 and published ad after ad for HYIP scams.
