Robocalls: Gotta Hate ‘Em
If you own a phone, you’ve likely gotten a robocall… and they suck hard. This one is short and sweet. Let’s explore.
Most Annoying Robocall?
The most annoying robocall ever has to be this one:
“What exactly is this specific robocall all about?”, you ask?
Well, I’ll tell you! It’s a sales and marketing multi-level scam. Apparently, this scam was devised by Paul Stevenson when he formed Exitus Elite. This company sells packages of varying “educational materials” (and I use these terms loosely). These materials contain marketing and sales “education information”. Yeah, you’re selling so-called “secret knowledge” about how to make money using marketing and sales. It’s a catch-22 circular sales pitch. You’re selling the exact thing that got you roped into the scam in the first place. And, you had to pay for that “knowledge” the first time before you can actually begin selling it. Yeah… so there’s that. That’s why it’s a scam.
Most scams like this require an investment before you can begin selling the thing you got roped into buying.
Now, don’t run off and go buy into this scam lest you read the fine print details. For example, Exitus Elite offers sales of four differing “knowledge” packages priced between USD $250 and USD $1000. If it were only a one-time purchase, it might not be so bad. Unfortunately, it gets worse.
In fact, you’re actually joining a “Membership” program called “Exitus Elite” that costs $299 per year. After you pay your $299, you are hooked up to someone who can then sell you one of those four expensive “Genesis” packages priced starting at $250. Your purchase helps out the MLM “representative” you buy it from which then allows you to begin selling the very same packages to other people.
Worse, Exitus’s refund details are sketchy at best. They claim a 7 day refund policy, but good luck trying to work that out with them. Their strategy will most likely string you along past the 7 day mark and then claim it’s too late to exercise a refund (usually the reason for such short refund periods). If you try to charge the refund back to your credit card, Exitus’s terms claim the right to be able sue you. It’s actually a scare tactic. They can sue you anyway. It’s just that because you signed up by agreeing to those terms, that “agreement” may or may not hold up better in a court of law. However, no terms a company like Exitus writes can deny you your ability to use your credit card’s chargeback program. If you feel you’ve been scammed by a company, it is your right to contact your credit card company and dispute the charge.
Stay Away from MLMs advertised via Robocalls
It is always your best option is to avoid getting involved with any multi-level marketing programs, especially when they are advertised over annoying robocalls from companies which repeatedly violate the Do Not Call registry. Some MLMs may make you small amounts of money, but you’re always making money off of the backs of other people.
To succeed in an MLM, you basically have to rope people into the same MLM scheme that roped you in, forcing them to pay a lot of money to the company and giving you some tiny amount for “referral”. If you enjoy alienating friends, relatives and co-workers, then perhaps MLM money stealing scams are for you. If not, then try other more legitimate methods for making money.
If you receive this (or any) robocall that sounds similar, hang up and block the number on your phone. This action is your best option to avoid being scammed. Just forget all about that call and do something better with your time and money.
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Is DealDash a Scam?
I’ve always been fond of online auctions, until I found DealDash several years ago. I’ve also seen a number of people who have complained about DealDash and how it operates. Let’s explore if it’s a scam.
Auctions and Bidding
In a traditional auction, you’re actually buying from a seller who has put an item up for consignment to the auction house. This is how eBay works it. The seller uses the eBay platform to pay for their auction. If the item sells, eBay gets a cut of the profit. This is a typical auction from a typical auction house.
Bidders pay nothing to bid at eBay. You simply join the platform and off you go on your merry bidding way. You will pay for any auctions you win or any Buy-It-Nows you buy, but if you bid and don’t win, you pay nothing. This is important when understanding the difference between a site like eBay and DealDash.
At eBay, auctions have a finite end. If the auction closes at 6PM today, then it’s over at 6PM. Whomever was the highest bidder at 6PM is the winner of that auction.
DealDash Auctions
With DealDash, the auctions here work a bit differently. Instead of joining and bidding for free, you must pay for your bids. The bid cost can range between 12¢ and 60¢ per bid. In order to get started on DealDash, you’ll be required to pay for some initial bids. Sometimes DealDash offers bid sales for as low as 12¢ per bid.
As for the auctions themselves, they work quite a bit differently from eBay. Unlike eBay’s fixed close time, DealDash has no fixed auction close. Their auctions infinitely run and continue to extend until the 10 second countdown timer runs out without any further bids. As long as even one bid happens within that 10 second countdown, the auction extends with another 10 second countdown timer. Basically, an auction can run infinitely or until no one else places a bid. Bids also increment the item cost at 1¢ per bid. You spend 12-60 cents to raise the bid on an item by 1¢. Admittedly, that means the item cost goes up very slowly, but it also means that the bidding can go on for days with enough bidders.
Bid Extensions
You’re probably wondering about how people can manage to bid within 10 seconds. To answer your question, they don’t. Bidders use a feature that DealDash offers known as Bid Buddy. See below for more details. Suffice it to say that DealDash’s automated system continues punching in those bids in an automated way so users don’t have to. You’ll also notice that many of those bids are made right at the last moment of second 9. There’s no way a human could time a bid that precisely.
However, there has been some speculation that some of the bidding is rigged by DealDash. That speculation alleges that DealDash itself has its own set of automated bidders driving up auction prices and bringing attention to those auctions. I can’t tell one way or another if this is true. I’ll leave that speculation alone because of Bid Buddy and how it works.
Buy-It-Now
Both eBay and DealDash offer a Buy-It-Now option. However, these work entirely differently between DealDash and eBay. The eBay Buy-It-Now feature can be standalone or attached to an auction. If it’s standalone, you can only buy that product through Buy-It-Now. If it’s attached to an auction, you can only use Buy-It-Now before the auction begins. Once an auction has a first bid, the Buy-It-Now option disappears for that item.
With DealDash, if you bid on an auction, you are eligible to Buy-It-Now when the auction finally closes. You’ll buy the item at whatever price that DealDash offers, which they claim is usually at a substantial discount. In addition to buying the item, you’ll also get all of your bids back for free. This means you can reuse those bids again on future auctions. It’s not a bad deal if you really want that item. However, if you decline the Buy-It-Now purchase, you lose all of your bids. There’s a big incentive to bid on items where you are likely to buy it when the auction closes no matter the price.
Bid Buddy
DealDash offers an automated bidding service called Bid Buddy. It continues to bid on your behalf even when you’re not around to do so. eBay also has a similar feature, but it’s tied to the actual bidding process and doesn’t have a name. If you put in your maximum bid on an eBay auction, eBay will continue to bid on your behalf at the current bid increment until your maximum bid is reached. After that, you’d be responsible for upping your maximum bid or bidding manually.
Bid Buddy works in a similar way. It continues to bid on your behalf until you’ve run out of bids or reached the maximum number of bids set on that auction. The reason to use Bid Buddy is clear. Those who are using Bid Buddy get priority over those who are manually bidding. It is in your best interest to set up and use Bid Buddy rather than manually bidding. Otherwise, your manual bid will always be last in line.
So far, So good
So far, there’s nothing here extraordinarily bad about how DealDash works. Other than the infinitely open auction which I don’t personally like, it’s pretty straightforward in how it all works.
Products and Quality
Here’s where this site falls down hard. Do you go to DealDash to buy merchandise for a great deal or to spend time gambling to win? If it’s the former reason, then you might run into problems considering all of the below. If it’s for the latter reason, you might want to seek gambling help.
DealDash claims to offer overstocked products at “discount” prices. The difficulty with this business model is that DealDash is in this business to make money off of bidding with the side effect of an eventual sale of a product. They are not a retailer, not a discounter and definitely not in any way a reputable store. They are an auction house and that’s how they run it.
As a buyer, you’ll notice there’s nothing mentioned about a Return Policy or what to do if you receive damaged or unacceptable goods. Indeed, there’s nothing on any of DealDash’s auction listings that even mention the quality or authenticity of the merchandise that you will receive if you buy or win the bid.
The products purport to be genuine, but are they? Also, unlike eBay where there’s a seller behind each and every product, with DealDash, DealDash is the seller. This means that if you have a question about the sale of a product, you have to go to DealDash to get it answered. Worse, buyers have tried doing this with no response from DealDash.
If you’re actually wanting the product you’re bidding on, you might want to consider that what you’ll receive may entirely differ from the listing. In other words, the trust level with DealDash’s merchandise is very, very low. If you really want that merchandise, you can probably find it cheaper from a more reliable seller on eBay or Amazon without the bidding fees. On eBay, both the sellers and the products themselves have a reputation score. You can see what buyers are saying about both the product in the listing and of the seller’s reputation. You’ll notice that on DealDash, there is no reputation information about the seller nor reviews from buyers about the product or what they received. DealDash is a black box.
Being the black box that it is, unfortunately, DealDash is about as scammy as it can get from a site like this. If you can’t readily see what other buyers have received from a listing, then how do you know that you’ll receive anything of value? You don’t.
Additionally, because DealDash is not a traditional store, returning any merchandise may be next to impossible, particularly when you can’t get in touch with anyone at DealDash. If the item you receive is damaged, misrepresented or outright garbage, you’re stuck with it. Otherwise, you’ll have to dispute the credit card charge. The only other thing you can do is complain about DealDash… and many people have done exactly that on RipOff Report. However, other than venting your frustrations to the world or forcing a chargeback, you may not be able to get your money back.
Jumpers and No Jumper Auctions
Here’s where DealDash also gets just a little bit more scammy with their auction site piece. A jumper is a person who jumps in at the last minute and begins bidding on an auction when they think the auction time is about to run out. Unfortunately, jumpers on DealDash effectively mean nothing. A “No Jumper Auction” is simply a way to allow early bidders not to be outbid by someone who wants to jump in at the last minute. With DealDash, there is no such thing as a ‘last minute’. On eBay, there is a ‘last minute’ because auctions have a hard close time. On DealDash, the auction is infinitely extended so long as even one person continues bidding.
A “No Jumper Auction” sets a minimum bid point that after that no new bidders are allowed to enter the auction. If the no jumper point is set to $5, that means new bidders attempting to bid after $5 will be unable to do so. Only bidders who placed at least one bid below $5 will be able to continue bidding on that auction.
This then excludes users from auctions after the no jumper bid price has been met. On eBay, this is called ‘sniping’ or ‘snipers’. A sniper is a little different from a jumper in that because the auction close time is finite, snipers join in during the last 30 second countdown to try and outbid the current high bidder. With DealDash, a “No Jumper” feature is entirely pointless and just gives DealDash a way to manipulate auctions and who can bid. This feature only serves to force people into auctions early or wait for another one to start. This feature is simply a way to lower competition and allow early birds to win the auction more quickly without extra folks jumping in and keeping the auction open much longer. That seems to go against the idea of DealDash making more money. It’s kind of a weird feature for DealDash to add a limit auctions and prevent even more bidding, losing DealDash even more money in this process.
The scammy part of this is that apparently these “No Jumper” auctions don’t work properly, or DealDash is able to manipulate the “No Jumper” price randomly against would-be bidders. Some bidders have claimed to join in on standard “No Jumper” auctions with the default threshold set to $5. Yet, the auction price never reached $5 and they were unable to bid with DealDash claiming they were a jumper. Fishy. It seems this feature is being manipulated by DealDash in a way that prevents certain bidders (new or not) from bidding on that “No Jumper” auction.
Is DealDash worth it?
DealDash is ultimately an addictive form of legalized gambling, but it actually feels much like playing slot machines in Vegas. Mostly you lose, rarely you win and you spend a lot of money doing it…. which is how DealDash likes it. It’s what keeps them in business. If you’re willing to Buy-It-Now, you can buy back some of your bids at the cost of the product stated in the listing. But, don’t expect the price of the Buy-It-Now merchandise to be any less expensive than what you’ll find in a retail store, according to many who’d done this.
Some complainants who’ve used the Buy-It-Now option have been quite disappointed in the process. One user claimed that instead of getting their bids back as was promised, the “total value” of the bids was deducted from the price of the Buy-It-Now item. However, the “total value” of the bids applied to the reduction in the item’s cost were substantially lower than what the user paid for the actual bids. They might deduct at 12¢ per bid when the user paid 60¢ for the bids. Assuming you can actually get your bids back instead of this deduction thing, that’ll buy you a little more time to bid on new items and addict you further to this form of legalized gambling. This getting-bids-back idea is a little like losing $500 at BlackJack and then winning back $100. You’ve still lost $400. It’s simply a way to make you feel a little better about having lost $400.
If you get a high off of gambling, DealDash may be worth it… particularly if you don’t care about whatever it is you might win.
If you do happen to win the bid on item, then you’ll lose all of your bids plus whatever the winning cost of the item. If you happen to win a bundle of bids, then you’ll lose your bids only to gain some back. If you win the bid on a pair of earrings, you’ve lost however many bids it took to win that bid plus the cost of those earrings.
Consider if you don’t do Buy-It-Now often and you continually keep losing bids, you need to keep track of how much money you’ve spent there. You need to keep track because all of your lost bid money adds up when you finally do win a bid. For example, if you’ve spent $500 buying and losing bids for a while, then win a $50 coffeemaker, technically you’ve spent $550 for that coffeemaker. That’s not such a great deal. You could have bought 11 coffeemakers for the amount of money you spent to win that bid at DealDash. You simply can’t ignore all of the money you’ve spent on bids as non-existent. Those bid costs add into the cost of any items you bid and win. This means you can’t claim you got a toaster for $5. It was $5 plus the cost of however many bids it took you to get there.
Scam or Not?
The idea behind the site is fine, the execution of it is poor. If DealDash had partnered with legitimate sellers to back each of the auction products and if DealDash had allowed buyers to review the product listings for quality and authenticity and if DealDash offered a buyer’s protection plan and an actual Return Policy like a legitimate store, I might be more inclined to say it’s not a scam.
As it is, because DealDash doesn’t act like a legitimate store and also doesn’t offer feedback from buyers nor is there a buyer and seller relationship to ask questions, I cannot recommend the use of this site for any purpose… not for buying products and definitely not to get your gambling fix.
There’s too much of a chance to lose far too much bid money and very slim chances you’ll actually win a bid. Of course, you’ll be given the option to Buy-It-Now and get your bids back on auctions where you lost the bids, but that’s of little consolation if the merchandise you receive is trash, assuming you receive anything at all. Between the bids you pay for and the Buy-It-Now, this is how DealDash makes money. The rest is all an addictive game.
Testimonials
Don’t be fooled by people holding up a piece of merchandise that they claim to have received from winning an auction. There’s no guarantee those are legitimate photos. You have no idea if the merchandise you will receive is legitimate, counterfeit, refurbished, used, hot or in any other condition.
Even if the “winner” photos are legitimate, what you don’t know is how much those people have spent in bids to DealDash to “win” the privilege to buy the item at that price. They could have been bidding for years and have already spent a ton on bids before they finally won an iPad. In fact, they could very well have spent more than simply going to the Apple store and paying full price for one.
It’s just like being in a Casino. When you hear the bells ring and see the lights flash on a machine because someone has hit the jackpot, you really don’t know if that’s a win or if someone is simply making back a little money towards what they’ve already lost.
Recommendation
Site Recommendation: 👎 Avoid!
Reasons:
- Highly Addictive
- Form of gambling
- Not a store
- No Return Policy listed
- No Product Reviews
- No User Reviews
- No Seller Reviews
- Auction items don’t describe authenticity or condition
- Pay to bid
- Pay to win (separate from item cost)
- Costly
- Difficult to Communicate with DealDash
- Mostly a scam to separate you from your money
- Doesn’t operate like a legitimate store
- May be less costly to shop elsewhere
- Questionable business practices
As always, if you find Randocity a fascinating read, please leave a comment below and please click the Follow button in the upper right under the Search bar to be notified of any new Randocity articles.
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Film Review: The Warning – PBS / Frontline Documentary
Rated: 4/5 stars.
PBS’ The Warning Documentary
The Warning is a PBS documentary discussing a warning from Brooksley Born, an attorney and a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairperson. She explained that derivatives were extremely risky insurance vehicles and sent a warning that these vehicles needed regulation during her tenure as CFTC chairperson, but her warnings went unheeded. She resigned in 1999 from the CFTC position after legislation was passed preventing her agency from regulating derivatives.
Vision of this Documentary
While I would like to rate The Warning higher, its take is pretty much tunnel vision on the derivatives markets. While the derivatives markets did melt down and did, to a large degree, spur the meltdown onward, the meltdown was not started because of derivatives. The derivative meltdown was a casualty of and was exacerbated by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Had the mortgage industry bubble not burst, the derivatives market might have gone unchecked for many more years. The warning was and should have been about placing regulations onto mortgage lending practices. The mortgage lending industry is the industry that failed and sent the economy into a tailspin, let’s make that perfectly clear. The derivatives (insurance) market, which speculated on the mortgage industry, single-handedly sent Wall Street into a tailspin (along with several large insurance companies like AIG).
Derivatives and the Mortgage Meltdown
Anyone with half a brain in their head could see that using questionable lending vehicles like interest only loans for the first two years or adjustable rate mortgages were ticking time bombs. When the actual monthly payments came due years later after rates went up to where they should have been, people couldn’t afford pay. This was especially true when lenders were handing these loans to people who could barely afford the ‘introductory period’ payments. So, loans came due, people defaulted and the rest is history. The derivatives (insurance policies) that were issued also came due because of the en masse foreclosures. Insurance companies that issued derivative policies speculating people wouldn’t default en masse began to fail because their speculation was wrong. So then, these insurance companies couldn’t pay off on the insurance claims. So, when consumers defaulted, so did the insurance companies offering derivatives.
It wasn’t as if warnings weren’t being issued regarding the inevitable mortgage meltdown, it’s just that Brooksley Born (the focus of this film) was not one of the people issuing the mortgage warning. Her warning was strictly about the highly risky derivatives. More specifically, the black box non-transparent nature of them. The danger, of course, is that derivatives can be placed on any speculative and risky investment as insurance. The reason derivatives need to be regulated is to prevent companies the size of AIG from making stupid decisions about such risky vehicles. However, from a consumer perspective, banks should never have gotten into the position of issuing such risky mortgages like water to people who couldn’t afford them. This was the single mistake that led to where we are today and that mistake has nothing to do with derivatives and everything to do with Government and the Federal Reserve making stupid decisions.
Overall, the movie is worth watching, but also understand its information’s place in the larger meltdown that was at work in our economy.
America’s Recession: loans and scams
Economic Downturn & The Fed
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’re probably aware that we’re going through a fairly deep recession. Recessions are cyclical, but in this case it probably could have been either avoided or lessened IF the banks and lenders had not been offering creative financing techniques. It also could likely have been avoided if our current pro-business govt. administration hadn’t chosen to look the other way while bad mortgages were being doled out. The problem with all of the creative financing is that it tended to lead some people into believing they could afford a mortgage they could not afford. When the loan reset after the promotional period, the realization quickly set in. Worse, the situation was compounded by property investors who sank huge amounts of loaned money into properties that would eventually become valued less than the loan.
It’s not as if the handwriting wasn’t on the wall several years ago when the fed dropped the rate to 1 percent. Now, we are back in this exact situation again with the fed dropping the rate to an unprecedented 1/2 percent. The feds are, again, trying to spur the economy like they did 2-3 years ago. But, this time, the banks don’t have money to lend. So, the 1/2 percent may not trickle down into the mortgage market like it did several years ago.
But, our economy is still likely being set up for yet another financial failure. The banks that do have money to lend are still advertising on the radio claiming extremely low interest rates. The problem isn’t the rate, but the loan you’ll be getting. If it’s a standard fixed rate loan, that’s fine. But, it’s the fine print you need to read. Don’t get locked into an adjustable rate mortgage or a limited time interest only loan. Once these creative loans reset in a couple of years, you may end up deep under water.
The Fed, therefore, needs to be extra careful when cutting the rates this low again to avoid the same mortgage problems all over again.
Scams in a down economy
With the economy being so depressed, it’s also a good idea to watch your money closely. As money gets tighter and tighter, the scammers will come out of the woodwork (and they already are). I’ve already noticed a drastic increase in spam and phishing emails since the economy has taken a turn. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
There are many scams out there from the Nigerian 419 scam that claims to give you a ton of money only to rip you off of thousands of dollars before you realize it, to sending you what look like official invoices that only turn out to be scams in themselves. Don’t fall for them. The easiest way to avoid scams is to not give out any personal information to anyone who approaches you claiming to be from a legit company. This means, if you receive a call asking you to make a payment and they request for you to give a credit card over the phone, don’t. Make sure you know who this company is first and make sure you are a customer. Then, tell the company that you will call them back through their official channels and make a payment that way. As long as you are the person making the call to the official number, you should be safe. With incoming calls, you have no idea who is really calling you no matter what the CallerID says. Always, always call companies back from official numbers located on a trusted bill or from the back of your credit card.
TV advertisements that offer products or services usually employ people who are not paid very well. So, be wary when you give your credit card number out to TV commercial based purchases. Not only are some of these companies impossible to get refunds, your card number could be enrolled in a club or, worse, stolen by one of the telephone operators in an independent scam. You should always Google the product you are thinking of purchasing to 1) find out if you can find it cheaper online and 2) find out if people have had issues with either the product or the companies refund polices.
Get rich schemes are basically another form of scam. Yes, they do make someone rich… the person who created the scheme, but not you. Get rich schemes are usually designed to part you from your money. So, in a down economy, you should avoid get rich schemes (placing classified ads, setting up ecommerce sites that sell Amway products, or Multi Level Marketing – MLM schemes). Note that MLMs only make the top most people money. If you’re anywhere near the bottom, you will be parted from your money.
Craigslist and even eBay are a haven for scammers. Be careful when you work with people selling or renting things. Never buy or rent anything sight unseen and never give money out as a ‘deposit’ or to ‘hold’ something unless you truly trust the individual. Chances are, if the person you are thinking of doing business is presently outside of the US, you should immediately stop the transaction unless you know for sure that what they are selling/renting is legit.
If you are selling a car or renting out an apartment, watch out for scams here too. There are some people who are outside of the US who will claim to give you an excessive sum of money in the form of a check. They may even send you what looks like an official check.. the problem is that it will bounce causing you fees and other associated problems (and may let them get access to your account number). Don’t cash any checks like this.
The bottom line is that in this weak economy, you should be extra careful with your money as there are lots of desperate unemployed people willing to do anything to make a buck (or a thousand). Always make sure to do your homework before buying anything or giving out personal information to someone you don’t know. If you suspect a scam, you should alert your bank or credit card company immediately.
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