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It’s hard to get a sense of what happened between Bidify and the payment processor Towah. Starting around mid to early 2012, Bidify affiliates began reporting problems with getting their money out of the payment processor, who cited some investigation that could take “540 days” to get resolved.

The details of this investigation are sketchy and I don’t think Towah have ever actually clarified what it entailed. At least not in any great detail.

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.

Meanwhile Bidify affiliates were effectively cut off from the funds they’d invested into Bidify, as Bidify simply handballed the problem off to Towah and attempted to carry on business as usual.

Fast forward a year and a half later and other than Bidify changing its name to MyCenterBid, not much has changed. Echoing the furstrations of Bidify affiliates, now a British bank has also had enough.

The Newcastle Building Society bank (NBS) was approached by Towah to provide its customers with prepaid debit cards in 2011. By March 2011 problems began as Towah had failed to pass on money affiliates had deposited with the ewallet to the bank.

NBS contacted Towah and were told the company had ‘sent the money to the wrong account‘.

Another irregularity was Towah’s use of a single account to store affiliate money, which prompted NBS to send another email on the 7th of June 2011. NBS advised Towah that ‘in accordance with UK law, seperate, segregated accounts‘ were to be used to store affiliate money.

As of the 17th of June Towah had done nothing. The requested segregated accounts had not been setup and neither had the deposited affiliate money turned up in Towah’s account.

This prompted yet another email from NBS to the company, who at the time were starting to feel concerned considering they themselves had funded the 3 million Euro ($4.04 million USD) Towah’s customers had withdrawn from the NBS account.

Whether Towah responded to NBS is unclear, but to date the bank has not been reimbursed for their funding of Towah’s business operations.

Likely as fed up as Bidify’s affiliates with a lack of communication on matters of money, NBS have now petitioned the Norway’s Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) to investigate Towah. Responding to questions from Norway’s “Dagbladet”, NBS spokesperson Angela Russel said that ‘the petition has gone in our favor‘.

Dagbladet contacted the FSA about their investigation and were advised that

Towah does not have permission to promote or conduct banking business  (including the issuing and administering means of payment (credit cards)) in Norway.

What exactly, if anything, might come of the FSA’s investigation I’m not sure. Those more familiar with European law might be able to offer some more insight in the comments below.

Of note are the allegations made by former Bidify CEO Albert Liske, who claimed

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.

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.

$100,000? One can only wonder where the other $8.9 million USD went. NBS certainly have no idea.

Liske signed on as Bidify’s CEO but resigned after just a month. He never retracted the above but did apparently reach some sort of settlement with Bidify shortly after making the above claims. Liske claims that in this settlement “nothing of value was exchanged”.

Meanwhile Towah boss Anders Petterøe, who has a long association with pyramid scheme scams in Norway, has thus far been unavailable for comment. On a recent Towah conference call however Petterøe claimed Bidify was responsible for Towah “losing” 50 million Krone ($9 million USD).

Where exactly that money went is a mystery.

Petterøe’s friends over at Bidify have been a bit more forward with comment, publicly pondering why nobody has been interested in depositing money with the company since they abandoned the US in June, then changing the company name to MyCenterBid two weeks later.

There’s a lot of holes in the Bidify Towah saga but I can think of at least 9 million reasons as a start…