The image above is the included return envelope I received with my last credit card invoice from Visa, issued by Bank of America.  The advertisement makes it look like it is a gift certificate for $108 to purchase the crap items pictured above.  You put in your credit card information and mailing address, and when you return your credit card payment, you card gets billed for the items!  This false advertising makes consumers think they can get $108 dollars worth of free stuff.  The $108 Holiday Award Certicate doesn’t actually exist, they just print it and make consumers think that it does.   You can click on the image to make see the full version.  Please leave comments if you have fallen for this.

The Learning Annex is a private corporation that uses notable celebrities to help them push their real estate investment business courses, internet marketing get rich quick schemes, and other business opportunities that are full of it. The videos above are a collection of marketing materials I gathered at the Learning Annex. Studying the marketing materials are about the only education you will receive if you attend the Learning Annex. All marketers should take advantage of attending something like The Learning Annex, not because what they are selling will profit you, but you can learn from, and duplicate their marketing materials that are clearly making them millions of dollars.

Information to take away from this real estate get riches video:

• Than Merrill uses a testimonial from the back of the room to develop credibility
• The use of lists and marketing to find good deals

This was another get rich quick real estate seminar that I walked into during the Learning Annex in Rosemont, IL.  Than sells a real estate development course (as did about 5 other presenters) that can make you rich!  Hardly, most of these real estate presenters most likely have made far more money selling their resources then actually flipping home.  I was amazed how they outright showed homes they bought for $50 and flipped for $50,000.  That’s incredible rate of return!  If your looking to make money in real estate it can be done, but purchasing a kit on how to do it will just take some of your down payment money away from you.

I hope you have enjoyed the videos I have been posting of the Learning Annex that came to Rosemont, IL around 6 months or so ago.  Instead of calling it the “Learning Annex” they should call it “Leave Your Money Here” Annex.  The Learning Annex resembles a casino somewhat - advertisements state a fortune can be made, but you end up leaving your money with the house.  The video below is of Mark Gonsalves at the Learning Annex.  Gonsalves claims that you can make millions purchasing crappy single family homes and flip them for tens of thousands in profits.  I’m not in the real estate business (online realestate though) but I doubt it is this easy.  I believe the examples that Gonsalves shows are most likely fakes, but how can you really ever tell?

Im going to post all of the Learning Annex footage I have over the next week. A few things to take away from this video:

• Lowry builds credibility by talking about how he was an orphan and came from humble beginnings (like most of the people in the audience). Whether this is true or not doesnt matter; its a credibility builder.
• Lowry discusses how much his home sold for (10,000,000+) in value.  I wonder if the money to purchase this home came from real estate or real estate courses?  The way Canadians say “house” is very annoying.
• Koz the internet millionare gives a testimonial for Dr. Lowry and how he quit his job, bought 27 properties, all for no money down and no closing costs.  In the Koz online millionare seminar guess who makes an appearance and testimonial - Dr. Lowry!  Now whether or not this is real; I have no idea.

Please leave your comments (good or bad) on whether or not you think Dr. Albert Lowry and Koz Khosravani are legit.

About 6 months or so ago I went to the Learning Annex in Rosemont, IL and observed quite a bit.  I saw amazing marketing, inspirational speakers, an exhibit hall full of money making opportunities; and above all else - I saw desperately poor people looking for an answer.  Below is a video by David Lindahl that I recorded while attending the conference:

Two things to take away from this video:

1. The usage of testimonials - nearly all of the get rick quick schemers at The Learning Annex use testimonials, testimonials, and more testimonials. I even saw the pitch-men giving testimonials for each other! Testimonials sell products, products dont sell products.

2. When I saw him tossing out CD’s to a crowd of desperately poor people, one guy even in a wheel chair, I got rather disgusted. Though, he certainly did have the audiences attention.

Well, yes, I was a member of RealityKings.com and it really is a damn good porn website, that is till you try and cancel via email.  Below is a screen shot of an email I received:

Thats a lot of question and damn hard on the eyes - they do that on purpose.  That’s marketing they don’t teach yah in college.  Now, Im not saying that RealityKings.com won’t unsubscribe you if you email them back a second time.  They send this first email so they make you take the extra step, and it is probably automated anyhow.  Then when you email them a second time, I’m sure they will cancel your membership.  Or, if you don’t want to pay for your membership anymore, you can take the quickest route and call your credit card company and chargeback the amount.  Tell them you did not authorize them to charge your credit card for “some” reason. If you call your credit card company and try to charge back the porn charges you will find that it can be quite tricky.  Enough said.

I just received an email from a rather interesting company - the people behind MyDomain.com  Congratulations, MyDomain.com, I’ve giving you the 2008 Scam of the Year award.  Readers of this blog, take note, this is slick and it’s owners are probably making millions every month.  They are making it from spam email, domain look up scripting, credit card fraud, “professional phony website” - the whole works people.  These people got the online registration domain name fraud game goin on!  Check out this picture below:

They got to me through my email - spam.  Then I clicked on the domain they say I owe and the page is full of high paying google/yahoo text contextual advertisements.  This type of stuff is still going on after Yahoo and Google saying they would no longer doing; well over a year ago.  So advertisers are still basically getting fleeced from google and yahoo’s contextual advertising system.  In many cases Yahoo and Google still do this with domain parking companies.  So you can monetize a large pool of domains and it is believes that many of these millions of registered domains only receive “type-in traffic”.  This proves that users are getting to these sites through “highly-suspicious” means of advertising (a.k.a. spam).

In the picture above this is the parked page that I went to after getting the email.  This page is optimized out to the max.  I would say it would have one of the highest CTR rates of many parked landing pages.  Now the people carrying this out know they cant send too many people to the same domain.  So they have about 1K domains or so.  Most of the landing pages are probably consumer good websites.  They every day they email about 15-30 people with an email just like this, constantly rotating through their domains so Google/Yahoo don’t get suspicious and boot them from their parked page API whatever they call it.  So every day these people are able to generate tens of thousands through sending spam email to parked landing pages that the person receiving the email doesnt really even own.  Can you say run on sentence?!  So anyhow, back to this domain registrar parked landing page doing on.

This is the website I was brought to in order to “renew” my domain.  Which isn’t even registered with this company to begin with.  So basically they are either criminally stealing customers from other registrars, or just trying to dummy you into thinking you actually registered something when in fact you just got billed and never recieved anything in the first place.

The image above is what the website looks like and is.  It looks just like a real registrar and you would never know the difference.  I dont know if you can actually make a purchase from this page - I didnt test.  Anyhow, this is the base of operations for this company.  This is because they actually look like a large registrar and may actually BE a large registrar, I dont know.  Anyhow, so they can get the license from google or yahoo, register a bunch of domains, and actually make it look like they are a registrar then just sent out spam email on the domains they own.  Enough said.  Interesting scam, and if you want to help end bullshit like this, please contact the owner of GoDaddy.com, Bob Parsons, or contact your current registrar that you have been working with for years, and let them know so they can help end this.

I was surprised to find that scammers are now attempting to break into your Google Adwords account.  Below are the screen shots verifying this:

It seems hard to believe that someone would break into another persons Adwords account.  In today’s sophisticated criminal world it’s a rather ingenious way to steal.  The original account holder gets hurt because it ruins their account and possibly eliminates their chances of using Adwords in the future.  Google gets hurt the most because they face credit card charge backs from the original account holders after the damage is done.

I assume that some malicious affiliates or online marketers are behind some of these account break-ins; possibly and most likely some Russians (as that seems to be the stereotype).  If you don’t have to foot the bill - why not just blow through daily budgets and advertise affiliates offers?  Google can track this however by finding out the affiliate ID’s of these malicious hackers.  Therefore, it is imperative that Google be able to “back-up” the accounts of affected users in order to deter these phishing schemes and protect the Adwords advertising system.