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What began as a day I thought I’d spend focusing my attention on analysis of the recent FTC bust of the Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing pyramid scheme with Herbalife’s business model, has quickly turned into covering the ongoing accusations between Bidify and former Bidsson CEO, Albert Liske.

Liske’s latest installment of the saga fires shots directly at the legitimacy of the Bidsson penny auction (which Bidify is the MLM business opportunity attached to), with Liske claiming that analysis of the Bidsson backend reveals an alarming number of “company won” auctions.

Providing screenshots of the Bidsson penny auction MYSQL database, Liske claims that as of August 2012 out of the 4853 won auctions on Bidsson only “a few hundred” products had actually been shipped.

Liske then had his team (who were at that stage handling shipping for Bidsson) look into the irregularity and writes:

Many of the top affiliates had not received the products they had won and Gold bars where even mysteriously going missing from the Norway shipping office.

What we discovered was that out of few hundred paid auctions won on the site less than 100 were actually shipped. Of those auctions many could not be accounted for by the guys in Norway office.

Putting aside the issue of unaccounted for auctions shipping wise (which in actuality dropped the actual number of shipped products to less than 100), the books placed the number of shipped products at 268.

With Bidify offering a cashout option on won products, Liske naturally assumed that these unaccounted for auctions had simply been traded for cash by those that won them.

Able to see the amount of cashed out auctions however in the Bidsson database, Liske reveals that only 1862 auctions ended in a cash out (or “sell back” as Bidsson referred to them).

Using simple math, Liske combines the 1862 cash out figure with the 268 shipped product figure to ascertain that Bidsson admin staff (bidding with illegitimate accounts against actual affiliate and customer bidders) must therefore have won the remaining 2723 auctions.

In his next update, Liske has stated he will

pull Hanns’s and other office workers IP addresses from Norway from the admin logs and cross reference them with Bidsson users that logged in to bid.

How?

The PHP Penny Auction software records administrative login IP addresses and user IP addresses every time someone logs in.

We can use this information to also show the Bidsson administrators IP addresses as they logged into fake registered user accounts to place bids.

Obviously if the logged IP addresses from Bidify office workers show up repeatedly on the bidding account logins, that means that indeed Bidify were manipulating their Bidsson penny auctions.

Liske claims that this revelation ‘really is the smoking gun as administrators cannot log in to users accounts and book auto bidders to bid in auctions unless they are bidding against real users.’

Thus far Liske has delivered on his claim that he has proof backing up all of his explosive claims against the legitimacy of both Bidsson and Bidify. Liske has previously stated that Bidify management are well aware of the evidence he has in his possession and are now “terrified and desperate”.

After initially responding to Liske’s claims with a mountain of disparaging comments mostly attacking Liske’s credibility, now it seems Bidify have now focused their efforts on deploying their lawyers onto Liske.

Determined to put a stop to the continued publication of Liske’s evidence (including his smoking gun), Bidify’s lawyers over at Thompson Burton (headed up by MLM attorney Kevin Thompson) have only hours ago released the following official statement:

Reports have spread fast about the malicious efforts of a particular group within the Bidify organization.

While Bidify has been hesitant to engage in the mudslinging, which has been brewing since the termination of Albert Liske, it has become apparent that passively waiting is no longer an option.

As many of you know, there have been a number of challenges for Bidify since June primarily stemming from the change to its compensation plan.

There has been a sect of people that want Bidify to push a button and provide a refund on the digital equivalent of used inventory.

As stated in a prior communication, this is simply not possible. As a refresher, please review the language below, which was included in a communication sent out several months ago:

While we certainly understand the value of having people purchase sample bids and giving them away to generate customer activity, it has led to the wrong perception. And perception is reality.

Despite our efforts to require people to qualify for profit sharing, people, as they were doing in Zeek, were using the sample bid process as a way to earn passive income. This was inappropriate.

Due to the changes we had to make, people are under the impression that we have taken something away.

When we made the decision to eliminate the possibilty (sic) of purchasing sample bids, we had a unique challenge: how do we honor our commitments to the people that purchased the points and gave them away to customers like they were supposed to do?

We think we’ve reached the only available solution.

While the opportuinty (sic) to purchase sample bids has been eliminated going forward, we will continue to honor our commitments by paying commissions from Bidsson for those with remaining bonus points.

If you treated the transaction as an investment, it was never designed for such a function. If it’s your desire to recover the costs of participating in Bidify, this is the best solution.

After the change was implemented, growth stalled. Due to the sluggish growth, the participants from the older model have been accruing commissions ever so slowly.

It’s this frustration that has largely fueled recent efforts led by disgruntled executive, Albert Liske.

Bidify has not forgotten about the participants from the older model. Contrary to these reports, Bidify’s behaviors are inconsistent with those of a company looking to injure consumers.

Instead of disappearing, they’ve made the decision to stay and honor their commitments.

Bidify is prepared to fight to protect its business model and user base from false and malicious attacks. By way of litigation, the truth will be revealed about Liske’s true intentions.

-Thompson Burton Law Firm

Again dodging the meat of Liske’s claims, Thompson Burton instead attempt to shift focus away to Liske’s intentions, which I might add he’s already addressed:

It was suggested that I had a hacker past or that I somehow hacked the Bidify website. The only ex-criminal in this story is Frode.

This story seemed to surface towards the end of my employment with them as a cover story for our departure. I didn’t think much of it until I was recently made aware that this was the story Bidify management was circulating to it’s senior rep’s as to why I left.

According to Bidify however Liske is merely a “disgruntled executive” out to get the company. Short of the revelation that Liske was a Bidify affiliate and lost thousands of dollars in the scheme, I’m not really seeing how that makes much sense.

Following his resignation, why would Liske care what goes on inside the company?

Bidify has refuted Liske’s claim that he resigned, instead claiming they “severed ties” with Liske after learning about ‘his fraudulent dealings with‘ Bidify.

Raising doubt on this claim however is the fact that following Liske’s alleged resignation late last year, Bidify’s management put out a press release advising that the former Bidsson CEO had ‘broadcast a newsletter announcing his resignation‘ and that this had ‘come as a surprise‘ to them.

One would think that had Bidify themselves “severed ties” with Liske that this action would hardly come as a surprise to them, nevermind the fact that they openly acknowledge he resigned in their press release.

In any case it will be interesting to see what approach Thompson Burton take to silence Liske before he reveals any more damning information regarding the internal operations of both Bidify and Bidsson. If the proof Liske has thus far revealed is any indication, it’s not going to be as straight forward as they might hope.

Thus far Liske’s revelations have been one hell of an interesting read and from the sounds of it there’s still plenty more to come. The big question now I guess is whether or not we’ll get to read the rest of the story before Bidify attempt to silence Liske with legal action.

 

Update 30th January 2012 – Approximately two hours ago Liske published a new blog entry stating that he’d received a cease and desist letter from Kevin Thompson’s law firm Thompson Burton.

This Cease And Desist Letter was emailed to me today regarding the statements on this website by the law firm of Thompson Burton.

This letter was sent to me today by the folks representing Bidify. Apparently the information being posted on my website here has them worried and rightfully so.

Here is what I find interesting. I have evidence of a global financial crime, this is indisputable.

What kind of a world do we live in where a Law Firm (who is probably aware they are up to it’s eyeballs in this thing) sends out a cease and desist letter demanding the removal of evidence that clearly implicates it’s clients in a Fraudulent global ponzi scheme?

Not to mention the very same clients sent out an email only hours earlier slandering myself with a boat full of lies clearly designed at discrediting what I am posting.

Will I cease and desist? Certainly not! I will not rest until members start receiving refunds from these Criminals.

In fact I welcome the litigation they are threatening and will counter sue them on behalf of all the members who have invested into this scam.

The funny thing about the letter above and I really believe that this was intentional. Look at the name it is addressed to. The fact that it was spelled wrong invalidates this letter.

Despite Liske claiming that he won’t cease and desist, at the time of publication of this update the Bidify Fraud website has been pulled offline.

Liske had published the cease and desist letter from Thompson Burton in its entirety accompanying the blog post, however it was pulled offline before even Google had a chance to cache it so I’m unable to reproduce it here.

I haven’t been able to find any additional information on what exactly has happened so as of now I’m not sure why Liske pulled his site down.

 

Update 31st January 2012 – Liske has published an update claiming that after he learned of Bidify’s plans to hack Bidify Fraud, he moved the site over to a ‘bullet proof host and added some anti-ddos measures‘.

The resulting DNS update delay is the reason the site has been inaccessible for myself and others over the past 36 hours or so.

Additionally, in defiance of Thompson Burton’s cease and desist letter, Liske has continued to publish insider information on Bidify.

In his latest round of claims Liske claims that

  • Companies claiming to sell legitimate “customers” to Bidify affiliates (Lisk names A1Customers as an example) were in fact selling nothing more than fake accounts created with bogus details (Lisk claims over 25,000 of these accounts exist in the Bidify customer database)
  • The winner of the much publicised Bidsson Volkswagen car auction from mid last year was “misty”, a customer account that does not appear in the Bidsson customer database
  • Frode Jorgensen and his “group” had a meeting in Norway last night and in the wake of Liske’s claims and publication of evidence are now planning to flee to Thailand

Liske provides screenshots referencing the first two claims however without analysis of the Bidify database no concrete proof is available. Being the ex-CEO of Bidsson however Liske’s posession of the Bidsson database is entirely plausible.

As for Frode and friends running of for Thailand, guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Liske has declared that Bidift Fraud ‘will not go offline until there is creditable news reports that all of these guys (Bidify management) are headed to jail’, and that he is currently ‘preparing the next round of evidence presentations‘.

 

Update 31st January 2012 – Liske has just published two new updates he claims exposes Bidify creating fake customers in their Bidsson penny auction.

At the forefrong of Liske’s claim is the company “BCustomers”. BCustomers (now defunct) was a website where Bidify affiliates could purchase Bidsson customers to dump their auction bids on, in order to generate points they then earned a 120 day ROI on.

On the BCustomers website the company claimed to be owned by an “IRG Ventures” and only accepted payment from Bidify affiliates via Skifri.

In addition to IRG Ventures being a “shell company” registered in the US state of Wyoming, Liske claims that

Skyfri is not a REAL payment processor. It is 100% front owned by Robin (Kenneth) Bakkejord to launder Bidify/Bidsson ponzi money through.

The Skyfri website does not have a real payment API that can accessed by outside parties. It is IMPOSSIBLE for anyone outside of Bidsson/Bidify to accept payments through this fake payment processor.

and concludes that BCustomers is in one way or another, owned and operated by none other than Bidify themselves.

bidsson-database-fake-custome-rmerchant-accounts

Pulled straight from the Bidsson database, Liske also provides a screenshot showing the merchant accounts “billcusa”, “bcustlive” and “a1custlive”.

These accounts perportedly have “API access” to Bidsson, meaning they can login and create additional customers themselves. Liske is claiming that over 25,000+ fake customer accounts have been created through these three accounts.

“a1custlive” belongs to the aforementioned company “A1Customers” and I’d imagine “bcustlive” belongs to “BCustomers” (even with Bidify owning the account they still need API access to automate the creation of fake customers).

Liske isn’t sure who the third merchant account belongs to but I’d suspect it’s yet another third party who at the time were selling fake customers they were generating as well.