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Last week, purely by co-incidence, I stumbled across an invitation in which it was claimed holdings company Insider21 had “acquired” Rippln.

Shortly after publishing an article on the story I was contacted by Stanley Abbott, Insider21’s VP of Strategic Alliances. In his email, Abbott wrote

Can you guys please remove the post about us purchasing Rippln. We are a holdings company, And we are not purchasing the company Rippln.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Wanting to know more about the matter before I published anything further, I sent off a reply on Saturday morning:

Hi Stanley, can you clarify why Insider21 wrote in their invitation that they’d already “acquired” Rippln then?

And, if possible, why the backflip? Clearly the invitation was written to give the impression an acquisition had already taken place.

I’ll update the article with this information when I receive it.

Insider21’s reply to my request arrived just earlier today, courtesy of President and co-founder, Eric Tippett. In his response to my queries, Tippett laid out the reason Insider21 had eventually decided to pass on the acquisition of Rippln:

Hi Oz,

Thanks for your reply. I was in the meetings with the Management of Rippln and the discussions of an acquisition. We thought it would be a great platform and member base to acquire.

We did in fact have an LOI (Ozedit: LOI stands for “letter of intent”) signed by both parties dependent on the due diligence of our attorneys. It was brought to our attention they were in a lawsuit with a company at that time. We made a decision to pull out of this acquisition and that is where it stands.

I just read your article and as Stanley mentioned, we are a holdings company that looks for small companies that we can bring Management, Funding, and Distribution channels to gain an equity position.

Insider21 does not have a lucrative compensation plan, but one of our Brands, Bonamour, a lifestyle MLM brand does. I want to make sure that is clear.

It is very hard to manage all the “fake” postings, marketing, and more on the internet.

Thanks for your update on this article. We appreciate your help.

Kind regards,

Eric

The lawsuit Tippetts mentions was the trademark infringement suit filed by Ripple Labs against Rippln late last year. The complaint appears to have been settled, with Rippln opting to change its company name to “Vapt”.

Somewhat curiously, and totally co-incidentally I might add, in the time between Eric Tippetts responding to my query and me publishing this article, Troy Dooly over at MLM Helpdesk put up his own version of what happened. According to Dooly, it wasn’t Insider21 who decided not to acquire the company but rather Terry Lacore who rejected the proposal.

In a video published earlier today, Dooly claimed

[3:55] Then you get outsiders, well they’re insiders, but they want to pretend they know more than they do. Like… like… Jim Bunch.

He sent out an email acting like the company’s dead and “you can’t do anything” and “the investors, we lost our investor.”

We didn’t lose our investor. Matter of fact that’s what Oz was talking about with Insider 21. Jim Bunch brought Nathan Halsey to the table because Jim does a bunch of stuff in his hypes (?) program for him over there in Asia.

Now his whole thing was “Hey man you need to buy this. Look at all these people , we can market to them, dadahda-dadah”. Well the one thing I can tell ya that has held true to Terry Lacore for as many years as I know, is he protects the distributor-base. He hates it when people screw with the distributors.

And he basically looked at this and said “I’m not… hey no way I’m selling them a database. You want to buy our technology, tell me what you want to buy and we’ll sell it to ya. The database? We’re not… no way.”

Dooly goes on to claim that Jim Bunch “owes” LaCore and Rippln money for sales made of Bunch’s The Ultimate Game of Life through Rippln last year.

That aside, what we now have are two very different accounts of why Insider21 turned down the acquisition of Rippln. In light of Troy Dooly’s version of what went down between Insider21, Jim Bunch and Rippln, I’ve reached out to Eric Tippetts for further comment. I’ll publish his response when I receive it.

Meanwhile it should be noted that last year Dooly disclosed he “works for some of the investors in Rippln”. Terry Lacore is a primary investor in Rippln (now Vapt). I’d ask someone for Vapt to comment on Tippetts’ version of events but I figure seeing as they see fit to communicate with their affiliates only once every few months, there’s not much point.

That and after Rippln co-founder Jonathan Budd spat the dummy here back in April of last year, it seems Rippln and its investors only issue statements through their paid consultants.

Stay tuned…