They say that no publicity is bad publicity and this seems to be true for the “Rich Pom” – a Rich Jerk clone who is offering a get rich quick scheme down in Australia.

According to a thread on the UK Net Marketing forum (great UK based IM forum – [link no longer active]), this marketer has been featured on an Australian TV programme called “A Current Affair”.

On his site (therichpom.com) he claims to make $90,000+ per month and will show anyone how to do the same if they are willing to pay him $79.

He includes “proof” of his earnings by showing screenshots of his Clickbank and PayPal accounts from June 2006. Here’s the first image from his site:

Two minutes ago I logged into my Clickbank account, saved the HTML and then doctored it to give the following:

Moral – don’t believe that a screenshot tells you the whole story, they can be easily doctored. That includes PayPal screenshots, bank statements, Clickbank account screenshots… anything.

The Rich Pom’s sales copy contains one page called “Sound Like A Scam?”

It is on this page that he asks:

‘Would I be on YAHOO NEWS as “Number One Work From Home Website in Australia” if this was a scam?’

He then gives a link to a Yahoo News page where a Press Release has been published. And it is a very one-sided press release at that.

The Press Release states:

‘The Rich Pom Becomes Number One Work From Home Website in Australia, According to Alexa Internet Traffic Rankings’

OK, lets take a look at the Alexa rankings for therichpom.com:

Traffic Rank for therichpom.com:  414,161

Another famous entrepreneur who offers business opportunities in Australia is Ed Dale, whose site is undiesipack.com. Is the Rich Pom trying to say that he is more popular that Ed Dale?

Ed’s Alexa rankings for undiesipack.com:

Traffic Rank for undiesipack.com:  317,102

So, the Rich Pom is clearly lying about being the number 1 “Work From Home” website in Australia as just one of Ed Dale’s websites beats him hands down.

Who is the Rich Pom?

He isn’t brave enough to give his name on his website but the Rich Pom  website is owned by Chris Dutton of Frenchs Forest, NSW (New South Wales?)

I’m not willing to put any money into the “Rich Pom’s” pocket so I won’t be buying the package. From one report I read, he delivers it as a Word file – very professional… not

My advice – AVOID

Back in September I went to Robert Puddy’s 3 Day Focus 4 the Future seminar in Birmingham. I covered my thoughts on the speakers and the content previously on this blog, just check the “Seminar” category….

It was held over a Friday, Saturday and Sunday and so I decided to get there early (the night before) so I would be bright and refreshed for the first session on the Friday morning.

I got there around 8pm, dumped my bags in my room and went down to the bar to have a drink and something to eat.

There were only around 20 delegates there but I managed to chat to the vast majority of them. One person who really stuck out was a young Welsh fella called Alex.

Alex’s enthusiasm was quite stunning, he was chatting away about how he had quit a pretty poorly paid construction job to concentrate solely on his eBay trading.

In fact, as I chatted to him I learnt that he had made a six-figure sum on eBay the previous year (admittedly in dollars!) and he was still only 23!

Over the weekend we got chatting more and he told me about the new product he was developing – a membership site concentrating on the techniques he uses on eBay. Now, back in September he had already been working on this site for 5 months and was adamant that it would launch in November.

Just yesterday he finally launched the membership site and is limiting it to just 500 members so that every member has chance to use the huge array of features.

When you sign up to the site you have access to loads of top quality information – reports, screenshots, software, instructional videos, a private members forum with access to Alex, personal coaching and so much more.

How do I know? Because I got a sneak peek last week… Alex had promised to let a few select people in to have a nosey around before the doors were opened officially. That’s the beauty of attending seminars and networking, you get to know people and get early access to their new products!

Back to the seminar… All weekend Alex was chatting to people and asking advice as to how much he should charge for membership – the replies were varied but most people said that he should charge a monthly fee or, failing that, a recurring yearly fee. However, Alex wanted to charge a one-off enrollment fee and leave it at that!

When he mentioned he was thinking of selling his website membership package for a ridiculously low price, everyone tried to get him to increase it.

Now that he has opened the doors I see he hasn’t budged. He’s gone ahead with the ridiculously low lifetime membership price…

You can check out Alex’s offer at: http://www.AuctionResource.co.uk

If you have been following this blog you will know that earlier this month I received an email from Finspreads’ analyst Sandy Jadeja. As far as I could gather, he was suggesting that I should be short the December Gold contract because Gold was in a downtrend.

Unfortunately, at the time I was long December Gold and so I was a little apprehensive about whether I should keep the position open or not.

Well, the email was sent out on the 8th November and the position expired last night. I had bought December Gold at 627.5 and the contract expired at 640.6 – a profit of 131 points!

I’m very glad I stuck to my guns and this is the first position that has closed in profit since I started my little spread betting experiment. Hopefully there will be lots more to come!

Check out the results at the BizOppsUK blog

I recieved a great email yesterday from a subscriber to the Free Business Opportunities Email Newsletter which said:

Hi Ben,

I’ve been a bizop junkie for years and have boxes of the damn things. Freelance photography, streetwise this and that, turtle trading, wade world trade(twice)- I’ve definately got the T-shirt.

I love the thrill(?) of getting these things in the post(I know, get a life)!Some of them even turn out to be useful!!!

Anyway, I have recently discovered your site and I must say I am very impressed and find your blog a facinating read – not least because I know some of the products you are talking about. I’ve just signed up for your news letter and am looking forward to recieving that.

Keep up the good work! We are all behind you (bizop-ers of the world unite – but only if we can find a manual for £49.95 to tell us how).

Regards
[Name Removed}

Very true…

Several weeks ago I decided to start trading again and this time I promised that I wouldn’t waste money on silly trades…

Listed below is my progress so far, each term is the P/L of open positions as of the close of trading on that date:

24/11/06: +£112.95
17/11/06: +£99.01
10/11/06: +£54.34
03/11/06: -£21.46
27/10/06: -£38.59
20/10/06: -£24.52
13/10/06: +£12.82

As you can see, my trading started well, then went a little downhill but has now come back into profit as of the close last Friday the 24th November.

Today my position in Gold expires and so we will see whether I was right to ignore Sandy Jadeja’s advice about going short December Gold (see blog post from 8th November).

Mine was just a small punt on the price and at around 1800GMT today I should find out whether I was correct to stick with my long position. I expect the price to be volatile on the last day so I could end up losing money even though I am currently in a reasonably healthy position.

All my trading decisions at the moment are based on the ideas I got from Vince Stanzione’s home study course. As I have previously mentioned, I bought Vince’s package a couple of years ago and it was the first “business opportunity” I ever invested in.

Since I read that 2004 edition I have read the 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006 editions.

If you don’t know who Vince Stanzione is, he is featured on the site:

Vince Stanzione and First Information

Last week I managed to get hold of Darren Winters’ home study course, “The Path to Financial Freedom” which consisted of a large printed manual and 3 videos featuring Darren speaking at a WinInvesting seminar. I will do a review of the material shortly. Stay tuned!

Got another sales letter for Hugo Lawrence’s “PentaTrade Profit System” this morning from Streetwise Publications.

They want to give me a “cast iron” 30 day money back guarantee so I can:

“Tear open the packaging , watch the DVD, listen
to the audios, read the beautifully produced
full-colour training materials…”

I did notice that they have changed the sales letter to remove the strange comment about other trading systems. You can read more about that particular sales letter here:

Hugo Lawrence and the “Pentatrade Profit System”

I have received a lot of letters about this particular opportunity so I decided to have a root around the web to find out more about Hugo Lawrence.

As I mentioned in the last blog post about PentaTrade, Hugo Lawrence was advertising in the national press earlier this year. I mistakenly said it was the Sunday Times but, looking back at my records, it was actually the Mail on Sunday.

His first advert was printed on the 5th February 2006 and it advertised two websites – bcfpublishing.co.uk and 2busy2trade.com – both of which are now offline.

The first site (bcfpublishing.co.uk) offered a trading course called “Secrets of Financial Trading” for £97, quite a lot less than the £2000+ needed to buy the PentaTrade Profit System.

In the sales letter for this course Hugo states:

The fee for my home study course is just £97.00.
Why is my course priced so low? Because I know
there are people who charge exorbitant fees for
trading information

The second site (2busy2trade.com) offered a more expensive trading course called “Trading for the Long Term” for $425 (discounted from $895).

It was quite interesting to see that this course focused around trading a “Window of Opportunity” – just as PentaTrade does.

The second time Hugo advertised in the Financial Mail was on Sunday the 23rd April 2006 where his ad only contained the BCF Publishing website.

By this time Hugo had changed the website so that it advertised his “Private Protege – Mentoring For Success Program”. This was priced at £695 and involved a trading course in Devon limited to just 10 attendees.

The site contained several testimonials from past students who praised Hugo’s teaching methods as well as the same photo of Hugo in front of dual monitors which is present on the PentaTrade sales literature.

It looks like Hugo Lawrence has put his BCF Publishing websites on hold so that he can concentrate on supporting the PentaTrade students…