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Following much pomp and ceremony over their appointments by Bidify management, late last year saw the abrupt resignation of Bidsson’s CEO Albert Liske and VP Christopher Robinson.

Liske and Robinson had barely been in their new roles for two months so naturally much speculation arose as to why the two suddenly left.

Bidify, the MLM company the Bidsson penny auctions are paired with, did initially state they would explain why Liske and Robinson resigned, however to date no official explanation has been given.

Bidify simply removed all references to Liske and Robinson on the Bidsson website and seemed content to leave it at that.

Now, in a series of explosive allegations made on a newly created website seemingly owned and operated by the former Bidsson CEO Albert Liske, the reason why Bidify never explained why the resignations took place appears to have been finally revealed.

The Bidify Fraud (“bidifyfraud.com”) domain was registered anonymously on the 27th of January 2012 with a series of blog posts going live over the last few days.

In one particular entry, titled “Why The CEO & VP Of Biddson Quit After Working There For Only A Month”, explains explicitly why he and Robinson resigned from Bidsson.

Being new to the MLM world we quickly suspected that Bidify.com and Bidsson.com was a Ponzi scheme soon after being introduced.

Our positions enabled us to view auction data and financial data that simply showed one simple fact: If both sites closed tomorrow they would not be able to pay back any of the money investors had put in.

The auction site bidsson.com was reporting much higher revenue earned daily than financial records indicated.

On its busiest day the website never transacted more than $10,000 in purchased bids. Therefore the owners of Bidify were paying out more money than they were bringing in from previous invested money.

We were shown the Bidify Towah main account by Frode in Jamaica (before the cruise) which only showed $100,000 in available funds. Hardly enough to cover pending withdrawals of its members.

The decision to quit was made right then and there and I left and did not board the Cruise.

Christopher stayed in order to try to convince the owners to change the business model in order to make it legal and salvage the websites.

They did not follow his advice and he quit days after returning from the Cruise.

The cruise mentioned was an event Bidify held for its top affiliates as a way to thank them for contributing to the business.

Going over Liske’s accusations above, I can’t say that I’m at all surprised. Ever since Bidify’s prelaunch was announced in Februrary 2011 I’ve identified several ongoing concerns with the business model, specifically those that are Ponzi scheme in nature.

Following the collapse of the $600M MLM penny auction Ponzi scheme Zeek Rewards, Bidify did briefly attempt to run what appeared to be a genuine business model that relied on retail bid sales to customers, however that flopped terribly.

Bidify’s latest incarnation, introduced just a few weeks ago has seen the company return to its affiliate-funded Ponzi scheme roots.

Apart from confirming that he and Robinson left Bidsson due to Ponzi scheme concerns, Liske also claims the rampant use of fake accounts to drive up auction prices:

90% of auctions listed on Bidsson were being shill bid and won by a company employee in Norway.

Two men operate the Biddson website and handles the shipping out of Norway Hans Engelcrona and Robin Bakkejord. Hans lists all the auctions daily on the Bidsson website then he has his young assistant use self registered accounts to counter bid everyone on the auction site.

This means that they win 99% of the auctions that they list. The other 1% of won auctions are either cashed out by affiliates or they wait 2 months before anything is ever shipped.

Most people that have won anything on Bidsson.com still have not received won items.

The fact that Bidsson/Bidify owners are all aware of the shill bidding on the website makes them guilty of a criminal conspiracy and wire fraud in the United States of America.

Nearly one quarter of the entire bidify database (24,747) users in the Bidify database are FAKE.

The Bidify database was almost 100, 000 users when I left. It would currently be much more. Now I know that 25,000 members are fake as they’re emails all bounced back as undeliverable.

This again isn’t surprising at all. When MLM penny auctions employ a revenue sharing business model, history has shown that their affiliates generate thousands of dummy customer accounts to dump bids on in order to generate points (or some variant of), which in turn pay out commissions.

As for the bot bidding by the company itself, it was only yesterday that Kevin Roberts from Penny Auction Wizards confirmed that this was entirely possible using his company’s penny auction script (this script powers Bidsson).

In their defense, Roberts stated that although they are aware the features they include in their script can be used by MLM penny auction operators to artificially drive up auction prices, Penny Auction Wizards ‘do not warranty anyone’s operation against using our functions for evil deeds‘.

Payment processor Skifri also falls within Liske’s targets with claims of collusion between Bidify to rig certain Bidsson penny auctions:

Many of the expensive auctions on the site were won by friends of the Skifri owner (embezzling product wins) and the theft of Gold was rampant by the two.

Finally, much anguish has plagued the Bidify affiliates who have funds currently locked in payment processor Towah’s accounts. After a seemingly endless battle of pingpong between Bidify and Towah as to why affiliate’s money was locked in the payment processor, just two days ago Towah finally broke their silence and issued the following statement to Bidify affiliates:

Regrettably the current situation between Bidify and Towah is rather extensive and due to sensitive information, there is unfortunately a limit to the amount of material we at this point can go public with.

Nonetheless what we are able to inform is that this is the result of two substantial incidents with Bidify;

The first being the changes made to the Bidify compensation plan, which led to a series of dissatisfied members who approached their banks and claimed to be victims of scam.

Shortly thereafter the second incident happened, where Bidify suffered a massive fraud attempt by the usage of multiple fraudulently credit cards.

The severity of these two events led to all accounts with our Cooperating Bank and Business partners to be frozen, and in the worst case scenarios it will be frozen for up until 540 days.

Thereafter a mistake was made in which allowed Bidify to keep running their compensation on paper, however the bank kept and still do keep the funds frozen, which in real terms means members are not able to use their existing Towah Funds.

Unfortunately we did not foresee the severity of these situations, and where therefore late in putting an end to the compensation payment made from Bidify to Towah Club Accounts.

The reality of this is that there are funds available in members accounts, however the same funds are frozen by the Acquiring Bank accepting payments In and Out of Towah.

We have been, and are still fighting hard for each individual case in order to prove to the Bank these funds should be released, however this may still take a while before being resolved.

I want to firmly say that Towah has no intentions of holding these members funds, but we are required to do so at this point due to the situation explained.

If Bidify or Bidsson should decide to reenter into a contract and re use Towah as a payment provider, all future payments will be considered as new money and will prevail the frozen amount, however I can inform the current situation is that Towah is not optioned as a payment provider with Bidify or Bidsson.

As I am sure you can understand, this is a situation that has resulted in an extensive investigation in which we are still in the middle of, and it can still take quite some time before this is resolved.

We of course regret the effect this has on your personal finances, but please know that we are doing all we can to resolve this.

Liske takes a slightly less optimistic tone, claiming that

Towah is unaware of how large this Ponzi scheme is. In fact they only believe the exposure to this is minimal as they only transacted specific payment types for them, mainly auction payments and bid pack purchases.

With only $100,000 in the Towah account it is NOT POSSIBLE FOR TOWAH TO REFUND YOU as this money was already taken to cover charge backs.

The Towah problems are a cover story your reps are using to hide the real story.

With most Bidify affiliates reporting earnings of barely a few Euros a day, much of what Liske claims appears to fit.

Oh, and can anyone say “collusion”?

Towah and Bidify have a much closer relationship then anyone might acknowledge publicly.

In fact, Frode Jørgensen and the owner and CEO of Towah Tor Anders Petteroe have a well established friendship going back to Plexpay and Frodes other failed Ponzi schemes.

Recently Frode bailed out the owner of Towah from another MLM failure they were involved in. This saved the processing accounts Towah had. This enabled Frode to use this service and it’s payment processing completely unchecked.

A Vietnamese hacker stole just under $80,000 from Bidify because
Robin Bakkejord is the gatekeeper of your money at Skyfri. Skyfri is a fake payment processor owned by the Bidify group.

Frode’s experience with Plexpay allowed him to setup a Payment processor using Robin Bakkejord as his front man to accept Million of dollars in wire transfers.

The Skifri payment processor accounts are all registered with anti money laundering agencies such as Fincen, Fintrac and Interpol. This is how they have been able to move Millions of dollars of YOUR money without having any intervention from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Robin Bakkejord believes he is a part owner of the current operation. He is however not. He was lied to by Frode and others on the team and intentionally left off of the official corporate registrations.

Being a longtime observer of the MLM industry now though, naturally I couldn’t help but ask “Why now? Why has Liske waited nearly three months to expose what is going on at Bidify and what are his motivations?”

Liske writes:

The Bidify team owes Christopher and myself wages from October, our office staff in Canada’s wages and rent and travel expenses from going on the Cruise. None of which to date has been paid.

We will not be perusing this money as it would be paid with stolen investor money anyways and we do not want any further part in this.

The constant lying to affiliates. Numerous times I witnessed what was actually going on and what was being told to YOU the investor as being two completely different stories.

Frode seemed to be an expert at spinning more and more lies to cover up anything that looked suspicious or out of place.

Even after my departure I still watched press release after press release, change after change in the compensation plan. All in an effort to make it appear they were trying to make YOU more money. When IN FACT they are just trying to keep you paying your monthly fee’s.

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.

This is completely false and the real reasons why both myself and Christopher Robinson left is stated above. Obviously this story will be pushed out now even more to try and discredit Chris and myself.

It appears whilst Bidify were content to remain publicly silent on Liske and Robinson’s resignations, internally they were attempting damage control and this has prompted Liske to push his side of the story.

Whilst most of what Liske writes fits, his story isn’t without discrepancy. Whereas Liske portrays Chris Robinson as having attended his last Bidify cruise in an attempt to ‘try to convince the owners to change the business model in order to make it legal and salvage the websites‘, Bidify’s legal advisor and attorney Kevin Thompson paints somewhat of a different picture:

Regarding Chris, I have a different recollection of his activities on the boat.

While he had ample opportunity to express reservations to me, he never did. In fact, he very calmly expressed his enthusiasm to be with a program that could take penny auctions “to the next level.”

This was done while playing cards. He seemed like an affable person. Liske’s characterization of Chris’s departure from the company differ from my understanding.

Contacted for a response to Liske’s claims, Thompson (of the widely respected MLM attorney firm Thompson Burton) writes:

I’m not able to comment as to the veracity of Liske’s claims. Bottom line, Liske will get his chance to show his cards and prove to the world the legitimacy of his statements.

In fact, there’s nothing stopping him from revealing the “smoking gun” evidence now.

It’s currently a soup sandwich of he said / she said. But it’ll get more clear in the coming days and weeks.

Understanding the position Thompson is in professionally, fair enough. Liske however, apparently incensed at Bidify’s attempts to discredit himself and Robinson, does appear to want to take this further and indeed claims to have the proof to back it all up:

Bidify’s lawyer Kevin Thompson from ThompsonBurton has been aware of the Shill bidding tactics above yet still continues to represent his Criminal clients.

Despite this knowledge has assisted with numerous compensation plan rewrites in order to give it the appearance of flying under the law.

Everything posted can be backed up with documented evidence that I collected during my time as CEO.

This includes recorded Skype and telephone conversations,chat logs, both databases of both websites that were given to me by the owners of Bidify and a Vietnamese hacker (who I identified and thwarted an Fraud attack on Bidify when I returned from the Cruise with the help of Meshka), screen shots, receipts and other documents.

At some point I will be contacted by Interpol or another law enforcement agency and this information will be turned over to them to complete the investigation.

All information obtained from Bidsson and Bidify was authorized on behalf of the company during my employment with them.

The only exception to this is when the Vietnamese hacker I was speaking with on Skype sent me the Bidify user database to prove that he had compromised the Bidify website using a SQL injection attack.

Fortunately I have both Skype chat logs AND I even made a video of the hackers screen share session he had while conversing with me.

Now that the air is cleared you can choose to believe whatever you like.

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.

Still have doubts? Contact me on Skype or by email and I will show you proof.

No contact details are provided on the Bidify Fraud website so I’m not sure how Liske expects people to contact him.

I also can’t say I understand why a “Vietnamese hacker” would feel he or she had to prove they’d actually hacked the Bidify database to the CEO of Bidsson, but that aside it seems Liske is confident this isn’t over yet.

As for “interpol or another law enforcement agency” investigating Bidify, here’s what one Bidify affiliate wrote just a few hours ago on a popular income opportunity forum:

Payza is no more ‘out of money’ than Towah. It is Bidify that is out of money. They are grinding to a halt I hope.

Now to chase down and prosecute the ring leaders for conspiracy, wire fraud, etc. etc.

Someone in the home city of Mr. Frode is in the process of obtaining the personal contact information for the judge and prosecuting team that put him away in 2006.

They will be flooded with contact and find him where he lives.

Stay tuned.

 

Update 29th January 2013 – Bidify have publicly responded to Albert Liske’s accusations above. You can read their response, along with my analysis here.