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One Year Later, Zer01 Web Site Disappears
alphadogg writes "Zer01 Mobile — making promises of flat rate, no contract, unlimited cell phone service — made its grand entrance at the annual CTIA wireless convention about a year ago, but now the company's Web site has disappeared. The site recently began redirecting visitors to Google.com. Zer01, which was lauded for its plans in the mainstream press, aligned itself with a multilevel marketing company called Global Verge (whose founder had earlier been convicted of securities fraud), and the two companies began recruiting salespeople who paid a monthly fee to be part of a sales program. (Since then, Global Verge and Zer01 parted ways and Global Verge filed a lawsuit against its former partner.) But no mobile service from Zer01 ever materialized. Salespeople were promised payment based on how many other salespeople they signed up to the program, although few appear to have received payment. But as late as the fall CTIA show in October, Zer01's CEO was still promising to launch the mobile service."
We call them "lotteries".
Scam is right. Multilevel marketing makes it almost seem legitimate, which apparently it wasn't.
BTW - I'm using the word "apparently" in the "please don't sue me" sense of the word.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Instead of multi tier marketing schemes, we just need more cooperatives: owned and run by members, for the benefit of the members!
Pyramid schemes are only legal in the US if they are being run by the government.
The most popular government pyramid scheme is called "social security," where the payout you receive after retirement depends on how many additional payers you and everyone else bring into the system throughout your lifetimes.
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com/
Name Server: NS1.PARKED.COM
Name Server: NS2.PARKED.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 07-mar-2010
Creation Date: 13-mar-2009
Expiration Date: 13-mar-2011
The only difference is that it's O1 (the letter 'O'), not 01
Seems to me that, to add insult to injury, the typo-squatter picked the better domain name to begin with...
"like those herbal juices you see advertised on the back of peoples cars"
You mean the ones that get sold with a pitch that makes them out to be some elixir of eternal youth? While the scheme may be legitimate, I've yet to see it being used in conjunction with a product that wasn't a load of horseshit.
I hate printers.