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They might have taken their sweet time rolling out Bidify and Bidsson 2.0 and have had absolutely no luck in resolving their Towah payment issues over the last few months, but within hours of Albert Liske’s latest Ponzi scheme allegations against the company going live, Bidify has responded to Liske’s claims.

Labelling Liske’s claims as threatening, “unwarranted, untruthful and defamatory”, “Bidify Management” are claiming that, contrary to Liske’s claims that he and then Bidsson VP Chris Robinson resigned from the company late last year, that Bidify themselves infact “severed ties” with him.

Playing devil’s advocate, I’m not really sure who to believe here but I do note that upon leaving Bidsson, Liske uploaded a resignation letter to the Bidsson website where it remained online for at least 24 hours before being pulled down.

Had Bidify indeed of terminated Liske, it seems strange that he would have been able to do this.

Furthermore following the pulling of the Liske’s letter by Bidify management, the company put up a blog post claiming that Liske’s resignation hit them as a complete surprise.

As you may be aware, our Former CEO has Broadcast a newsletter announcing his resignation.

This Newsletter has come as a surprise to us and we will release a formal announcement in the coming days.

To this day the promised announcement never came and one has to ask the question that if Bidify did indeed terminate Liske as they are now claiming, why did his “resignation” come as a “surprise” to them when it happened?

Either they fired him or they didn’t… something doesn’t add up.

The press release from Bidify then continues with a series of targeted allegations taking aim at the credibility of Liske:

Unfortunately, there is much more to Mr. Liske and his activities than most of you are aware. It is important that our Affiliates understand the truth about Mr. Liske.

Bidify’s relationship with Lloyd Albert Liske started with discussions with “Josh MacDonald” through Penny Auction Wizards.

At that time, Josh (aka, Lloyd Albert Liske) was selling auction software and promised to deliver the software for Bidsson 2.0.

Josh stated to us that he had been part of building Quibids and that Quibids was running his software. However, we later learned that Josh was, in fact, Lloyd Albert Liske, and that his software was non-functional, full of backdoors and errors.

After contacting QuiBids, we learned that they had never heard of Mr. Liske or Josh. He had not delivered software to them, as they have their own in-house programmers.

We also discovered some disturbing information about Mr. Liske; he had a notorious reputation in the hacking and credit card fraud circles. Mr. Liske and his previous history is mentioned in a book, Kingpin.

It was quite ironic when our company experienced a similar hack during our leadership cruise a few months ago.

During this cruise, Liske made it a point to go back to Canada, which is when our system was attacked, seemingly coming out of Vietnam. Even more interesting was Mr. Liske’s direct contact with the so called hacker from Vietnam.

Whether or not Liske was involved in the hacking attempts I have no idea, but I did note it strange he seemed to be in rather close contact with “the Vietnamese hacker” who was apparently targeting Bidify at the time.

The press release continues to cast doubt on Liske’s credibility, and then offers up this:

Mr. Liske claims on his website that Bidsson is powered by his software, when, in fact, Bidsson is NOT running his software at all.

Now this was certainly news to me. I’ve noted previously that Bidsson prominently features on the website of Penny Auction Wizards so I have no idea what’s going on there.

Either Bidsson are or have used the Penny Auction Wizards script or they haven’t. I tried looking at the Bidsson website source-code for any indication either way and failed to find any.

Next Bidify go on to address the claims made by Liske that they owe him and Robinson ‘wages from October (2011) and rent and travel expenses‘:

Regarding Liske’s claims about us owing him money, we’ve already paid our fair share.  In October of 2012, we transferred 100,000 euros to our Bidsson bank account, which he had access.

It was towards the end of his employment with us.  Instead of covering the obligations owed by the company, he transferred the money to himself via invoices for staff that never existed.  We were left with the bill.

Bidify then conclude their allegations against Liske, stating that

based on everything we learned about Mr. Liske and his fraudulent dealings with us, we were forced to terminate our relationship with him.

And following the above is then a brief paragraph on what Bidify claim is “the truth about Towah”:

As you may know, Bidify and its members have had their funds blocked by Towah. Our attorneys are working hard to get to the bottom of this to find a solution to get this resolved.

Unfortunately, Towah is not cooperating with us and is refusing to give us information regarding the frozen accounts, so we need feedback from our members on amounts locked in their Towah accounts.

No mention of the “dissatisfied members who approached their banks and claimed to be victims of scam” or potential delay of “up until 540 days” due to “fraudulent activity” Towah referenced in a recent email to Bidify affiliates is made.

Simply put, what a mess.

At this early stage I’m not really sure what to take from who and what to discard but it’s clear both Bidify and Liske believe this is far from over.

Liske has already declared not only does he have “proof” to back up all his claims, but that

everyone who is an employee or a Corporate representative involved or perpetuating this ponzi scheme in Bidify and Bidsson is going to jail.

It might not happen immediately but IT IS COMING.

Bidify meanwhile in response have declared that

Bidify will not accept such behavior and we are taking all necessary actions to stop this illegal activity. We have discussed this matter with our attorneys, who are investigating the matter and devising a plan to put an end to these attacks.

We intend to hold Mr. Liske and others associated with these email attacks fully accountable for their actions and we intend to explore the full range of remedies available under the law.

Whether that’s US law (where Bidify are incorporated), the laws governing the undisclosed tax havens Bidify funnel its money through, Icelandic law (where Bidify’s CEO Larus Palmi Magnusson resides) or Norwegian law (where Bidify’s COO Frode Jorgensen resides) was not immediately clear.

Looking at the two sides of the discussion objectively, Liske presents a series of cold hard facts and figures which are strengthened credibility wise by his position in Bidsson. He does of course display an obvious distaste towards Bidsson, Bidify and its management however this is combined with a lot of very specific information and descriptions of fraudulent activity occurring over at Bidify and Bidsson.

Bidify on the other hand simply label Liske’s information as “unwarranted, untruthful and defamatory” and proceed to tear apart Liske’s credibility.

They do address two specific claims regarding Bidsson’s use of the Penny Auction Wizard script and monies owed to Liske and Robinson, however much more effort is spent on discrediting Liske rather than specifically addressing his claims.

Ironic I might add considering Bidify CCO and public spokesperson, Frode Jorgensen’s well documented Ponzi scheme past.

In anycase, one would hope that in the near future Bidify will address some of the more specific points Liske has raised and focus less on attempting to discredit him, as it doesn’t really add anything to the dialogue.

I imagine we’ll be seeing a response from Liske soon enough too, and hopefully this time with some solid proof rather than the mere mention of it this time around.

Looking at the bigger picture, it appears that whoever you believe there’s a whole bunch of people attached or once attached to Bidify who are doing things they shouldn’t be.

For the second time today, stay tuned…

 

Update 29th January 2013 – Albert Liske has responded to Bidify’s claims above, clarifying how he came into posession of the Bidify affiliate database, his name and past activities regarding credit fraud and his ownership of Penny Auction Wizards.

On the subject of his identity Liske writes,

First I would like to respond to the erroneous accusations stating my name is Lloyd Liske. My name is Albert Liske.

I have no relationship to the person in the book nor have I ever been charged with any form of fraud related activities. We share the same last name and that is about it.

Essentially what they came up with here is the equivalent of doing an Internet search for my last name and running with the first result found.

Liske admits he is the owner of Penny Auction Wizards but clarifies that he is not Josh MacDonald:

As per the accusations that I have any alias. Josh MacDonald is the person I bought Penny Auction Wizards from and still works at my office today. In a future post I will post an interview with him just to put this one to rest.

Josh is was the owner of another site called Pennyauctionsoft.com (google it he’s all over the place defending his company against pirates). He later sold the company to Joel Asadoorian before starting Penny Auction Wizards.

Anyone can contact Penny Auction Soft and Penny Auction Wizards by phone and verify these individuals are indeed different people.

Meanwhile I’m still not sure why the Penny Auction Wizards has the template up for Bidsson, however Liske confirms that Bidsson is not running the Penny Auction Wizards auction script.

Why? Apparently because they refused to provide Bidsson with the autobidder functionality they usually ship the script with (Liske doesn’t mention why).

As stated earlier I bought a company called Penny Auction Wizards. This is what brought me into contact with the Bidify group. They initially contacted our team looking to upgrade from a crappy Penny Auction Software they were using called PHP Penny auction.

This is the software they currently use and never deployed our Bidsson 2.0 software. One of the major issues they were having was how much RAM the server was consuming and it was taking a dedicated cloud deployment just to keep it running.

Additionally there is a bug in the PHP Penny Auction system that does not allow the Bidify team to use the built in admin auto bidders to steal from its members without source code disclosure on the main site.

This is why Hanns had to list auctions manually AND add fake bidders from the front end of the site (using them as admin auto bidders).

I think this is well documented amongst the various teams so I will not go too far into the Bidsson 2.0 platform’s feature set. I will however comment that they did not launch our platform was for three reasons.

1. They did not EVER want to use the promised BUY IT NOW FEATURE. Had they deployed the software they would have had to deliver on that promise and that would have allowed the users in the Bidsson system to begin pulling money out in the form of products by simply using the bids accumulated in the system.

Every time someone bids the price goes up by $0.01, at the same time the buy it now price falls by the bid price ($1.00). Therefore bidding over and over would eventually let the user get the product for free. The Bidify team could not allow YOUR MONEY TO BE TAKEN OUT in such a fashion.

2. They did not have the source code to the software. It became apparent that a server technician that works for Bidify named Kevin was attempting to decode the licensing files of our software in an attempt to resell the software to Bidify’s competitors.

Christopher Robinson learned of this on the cruise and immediately told me about it. When asked for the source code I said no and pointed to what Kevin had said to Chris.

Kevin later told the Bidify team and myself that he was simply “testing Chris”. Which to this day I do not believe.

3. The third and MAIN reason why they did not deploy our system was that our team disabled the admin auto bidders in the back end. This prevented them from using our system from stealing from the Bidsson clients.

Certainly a bit of interesting insight there as to what goes on behind the scenes of an MLM penny auction.

This neatly explains why Bidsson 2.0 never launched and also hints at the lengths Bidify is allegedly willing to go to stop their affiliates from withdrawing their invested money.

Finally, adressing the question of whether or not Liske himself hacked the Bidify/Bidsson database, he provides a rather long Skype chat log between himself, the hacker (“Vinh Lai”) and Lai’s friend.

Liske explains that Lai was a Bidify affiliate trying to get his money out of Towah.

I won’t republish the log here at it’s a bit lengthy but suffice to say one of Lai’s friends initially contacts Liske and is concerned about a Bidsson auction vulnerability where Lai is able to delete automated bids and effectively choose who won auctions.

Seeking information on the vulnerability Liske appears to have eventually got in contact with Lai and confirmed that the entire affiliate database (complete with unsecured passwords) was indeed obtained illegally from Bidify’s servers.

This database was then forwarded to Bidify’s management by Liske (who were at the time on their cruise).

Liske has also included a video of what he states is a recording of desktop sharing between himself and the Lai, claiming that this proves he is not only not the hacker but that he was an innocent party in the discovery of the hack and database theft.

Marked as “part 1” of what Liske describes as a “soap opera”, in his next installment Liske states he will be sharing information pertaining to automated bot bidding in Bidsson taking place on the admin side.

This is the first part of a series of posts that will show everyone the evidence that Bidsson and Bidify are scammers running a Ponzi shill bidding penny auction website.

Stay tuned for my next post that will show the Bidsson auction database and how Hanns logged in each day as different users to place manual auto bidders on auctions so that no one could win.

Naturally any hard evidence proving company sanctioned bot bidding accounts would destory the legitimacy of the Bidsson penny auctions and take with it the credibility of Bidify and its management.

Liske claims that Bidify are wholly aware of the evidence he has in his possession and are “terrified and desperate” as a result.