It has been difficult to keep a straight face this week whilst watching the pretty ridiculous goings-on of a big, well-known business opportunity publisher.

This company – which here I’ll call “ABCD” – have built a reputation over the years of always offering a no nonsense, no questions asked money back guarantee on all of their products.

And they’ve been very successful.

Several years ago they sold a very expensive financial trading product and brought in millions of pounds in orders. It set of a bit of a trend.

There have been many other manuals, newsletters and courses over the years. Some good, some poor but each one with a solid money back guarantee.

For some reason ABCD have recently released a brand new product with one of those “mystery” opp sales letters. This is where the promotional letter gives very few details about what the opportunity involves.

The buyers still ordered- many who were probably previous customers and trusted ABCD with their money, assuming that they’d be able to get their money back without any fuss if it turned out to be a poor product.

Some found the product to be poor and sent it back to request a refund.

Here’s where it got silly.

ABCD apparently aren’t issuing refunds without a fight, claiming that the guarantee only applies if the product”doesn’t work”.

As you can imagine, this has enraged the buyers who have been refused refunds.

Of course in this day and age it is easy to find other people who aren’t happy with a product. All you need to do is go to a business opportunity forum or a review site that allows comments.

So that’s what the buyers did, congregated on forums and blogs, discussing the way they’d been treated by ABCD.

And the discussions went on with each comparing the various silly excuses they’d been given why they couldn’t have a refund.

Until…

ABCD appeared to get their lawyers involved.

Yes, ABCD have allegedly been issuing threats to the forum and blog owners about these supposed “defamatory” remarks about this new product.

The discussions have now been severely edited.

One forum owner has even stated that the forum will shortly be removed because he is tired of being threatened and of having to moderate the posts.

All in all it’s farcical.

The internet has been a blessing for consumers as it can be used to compare products and give reviews and warnings to others.

Biz opp publishers who want to write “blind” sales letters – letters where the opportunity isn’t outlined – no longer have the advantage they used to because the subject of their product is now revealed quickly.

And that’s a good thing.

10 years ago this wasn’t possible but now if you can’t figure out what a sales letter is saying you can simply wait a week or so and someone will review it online.

In this case ABCD, instead of creating a good product with a reasonable no-risk guarantee, are refusing refunds to unhappy buyers.

And they are damaging their reputation at the same time.

So instead of simply pacifying customers by giving them their money back, they appear to send legal threats to any website owners who carry unfavourable reviews of their products.

There are rumours that ABCD are having financial issues. Maybe this is true, maybe not, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence.

However, behaviour like this i.e. desperately holding on to customers’ cash when they aren’t happy, certainly makes it look like something is very wrong.