Archives: 2001 (2nd Quarter)
April, May, June
BIGSMART PYRAMID SCHEME BLACKEYE
The genesis of this scam started with Mark and Harry Tahiliani owners of Awarness Corp which outside of some weird parasite claims ran a pretty straight company. Then they spun off Bigsmart as a divisional diversification. Things went downhill from there with the Bigsmart scam. The state of Maine hit Bigsmart and fined them. Texas jumped in with Wisconsin following……then the FTC stepped in.
FTC VS BIGSMART A NEW BREED OF HIT
Unlike recent court “executions” of the Equinox and 2Extreme performance the Bigsmart scam was let back out on the street alive – but under a tight leash.
Customers, customers that do not belong to the complan was first mentioned in the 2 Extreme Performance case by the FTC. In the FTC hit on Bigsmart they directly addressed the lack of customers in the charges against Bigsmart. The Bigsmart case involved selling multiple (3 packs – 7packs etc) websites to feed a hot binary plan then requiring the monthly purchase of questionable value and price items to qualify to collection commissions. To the FTC it all boiled down to no retailing to non-participant customers. The FTC in court document said, "there are few, if any, sales of these products to non-members." Because there were no customers to speak of Bigsmart was accused of running a pyramid recruitment scheme in which distributors made money from recruiting others.
Bigsmart was allowed to continue business under tight rein, a change in action for the FTC. One of the requirements Bigsmart had to meet was a policy of requiring active shopping center distributorships to produce $35 per month of retail sales to non-distributors. Other requirements were Bigsmart had to: (1) Put up $5million for consumer redress (2) post performace bonds (3) monitor distributors closely (4) the bigsmart principals had to give the FTC reports for 10 years on ANY of their business activities.
The company, and Mark and Harry Tahiliani as owners signed the settlement of course.
The case was interesting in that Richard Slaback (formerly of Destiny Telecomm Scam ) and Ed Lamont (Equinox Scam)were top distributors and nailed for pyramiding and "suspended" from MLM by the FTC.
Rod ur Editorial: Is there a remote chance that Bigsmart will survive. NO! Is there a question if Awareness corp will. Yes!
FTC Court Complaint
Final Stipulation
final Order
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