Litigation

Immediate Edge: Scam or not?

By Tracy Coenen

I could literally spend all day blogging about scams on consumers. And the consumers don’t even have to be gullible. There are plenty of scams that look completely legitimate from the outside, and it’s not until you’re involved with them that you realize they’re scams.

The latest scheme or scam that is being exposed is Immediate Edge. Ashley Morgan over at Upstart Blogger is writing about Immediate Edge, but he hasn’t fully committed to calling it a scam just yet.

Sometimes a product or service isn’t an outright scam, per se. The first thing you ask is… “Do you get what you pay for?” I run into this a lot when writing about things like the United First Financial Money Merge Account. UFF has consumers pay $3500 for use of their software which is supposed to help you pay your mortgage off faster. Do consumers get access to the software for $3500? Sure they do. Is it worth $3500? Not even close. Even still, getting a bad deal doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve been scammed, does it?

In the case of UFF MMA, the scam lies not only in the big price tag, but in the fact that this software is being sold with lies and deception. Consumers are being sold something they’re told will do what they can’t on their own… pay down their debt faster than they currently are. They say the big fancy software gets people there faster and is a breeze to you. What they don’t tell you is that the software wastes a ton of your time and helps you pay off your debt slower than if you did one simple thing a month. That’s right… one simple step each month which you can do for free, and you can blow UFF MMA out of the water with your debt paydown.

But back to Immediate Edge. Can it be called a scam? I suppose people get what they pay for in terms of training on how to get noticed in search engines. But what they don’t tell you before you buy is that you’ll be using techniques that are not aboveboard. According to information gathered by Ashley Morgan, what they teach the Immediate Edge disciples includes:

Spam, gambling, poker, loans, mortgage brokerage, browser hijacking, credit cards, SIM cards, forced email capture, and even porn.

I don’t know about you, but if I want greater visibility for myself on the internet, I don’t want it to include those things!

If purchasers of the Immediate Edge products and courses knew ahead of time that what they will be taught includes such underhanded techniques, do you think they would still buy? I’d bet they wouldn’t, and that in an of itself makes Immediate Edge a scam in my mind. If you can’t tell me what I’m actually buying, I know there’s something wrong with it.

A quick search for “immediate edge scam” on Google really doesn’t tell the reader much. Most of the results seem to be from Immediate Edge disciples who are saying good things about it. But good or bad, no one is giving many details on the program, so it’s hard to evaluate it from a simple Google search. (UPDATE: A Google search for “immediate edge scam” now has this site in the top position!)

A commenter on Ashley’s blog offers these details, however:

I paid $97 a month for the Immediate Edge over a 6 months period and made absolutely nothing. I paid for Marketing Samurai (the Immediate Edge fan boy?s prefered product) and still got nowhere.

Spam, spam, spam. That?s all it is. You can pretty much sum up the Immediate Edge in the following steps?

1. Buy a domain and hosting (using Ed?s affiliate link) and start a blog.

2. Buy Market Samurai (using Ed?s affiliate link) to spam the internet with keyword stuffed junk about your blog.

3. Tell other people about Market Samurai and Immediate Edge.

4. Start an ebook that no one would be interested in except you. This is dressed up by the Immediate Edge crew as ?having passion for your product?. I know more than a few poor fools who have written ebooks about their pets and tried to sell them on internet marketing forums. Fail!

5. When you fail, pay $997 for a seminar ticket to be rounded up with other failures who will all be whipped into a frenzy by the Immediate Edge crew with the kind of marketing nonsense that belongs in 1982.

6. Fall deeper under their spell as they give you presentations full of carefully scripted marketing hype like ?don?t be kind to your competitor, he?s your enemy?.

It?s about time someone blew this thing wide open and I?m happy to be interviewed if it helps. I don?t want anyone else to waste their money on this kind of junk.

Ashley has made an interesting proposition. He’s going to pay for someone and a friend to attend the Immediate Edge program, and tickets are $997 each. He’s going to pay for first class air travel from anywhere in the world to Melbourne Australia for the program, as well as a five-star hotel. All to get a firsthand account of this Immediate Edge class which he says is likely a “pitchfest” which promotes nefarious tools on the internet.

I think it would be fun to go. Who better to sit in and evaluate the class than a fraud investigator?

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on December 07, 2009 (boomark / email).