FreeNEzy.com Scam Site for Sale on eBay

4/22/08 Update:  The FreeNEzy.com website written about in this post appears to have been sold and under new management, as documented on this recent post. While this change in ownership does not change any of the events that have occurred previously with this site (and my friend never got his reward), there is currently no evidence we are aware of that the new owner has continued any of the fraudulent practices previously associated with the site. As always, use caution when dealing with this or any other site.

This is the never ending saga of a boy and his scam site, and the victims left in his wake. I have posted previously about the infamous FreeNEzy.com, run by Vikram Jhaveri. I initially posted about this because of numerous users on SlickDeals, including one really good friend, who spent money completing offers through the site to earn points for various rewards but were consistently denied those rewards by Mr. Jhaveri. This posting caught the attention of Mr. Jhaveri and prompted him to give excuses for defrauding of some users, which I documented here. Apparently not happy that I refused to take down my post and only offered to post an update if my friend received his reward (offer still open, by the way), he resorted to sending a harassing message to me through eBay’s messaging system, documented here. He has since sent another message indicating that he received my user info from someone and sent them $50. Just for the record, here is the text of that message:

Thankyou so very much. I have sent $50 to your paypal. I have tried so hard to get this scammers info. Thanks again. Next week i am going to post his info everywhere…

Then today while following up to see if eBay had suspended this bastard for his continued harassing messages, I found this listing under his user name. You can own his scam website, FreeNEzy.com, plus some assorted crap with his logo on it for the mere sum of $50,000. He proceeds to say that you can make $75-$250 profit for each member, although he neglects to say if that amount is assuming the illegal withholding of earned rewards.

I guess if you are going to get out of the business of scamming internet users, the icing on the cake would be to sell the site you used to scam the users. Hopefully anyone that would seriously be thinking about buying a site like this does some homework and finds this blog and the other spots on the web where people have chronicled their trouble with this site.

Another Scammer Speaks – FreeNEzy.com

4/22/08 Update:  The FreeNEzy.com website written about in this post appears to have been sold and under new management, as documented on this recent post. While this change in ownership does not change any of the events that have occurred previously with this site (and my friend never got his reward), there is currently no evidence we are aware of that the new owner has continued any of the fraudulent practices previously associated with the site. As always, use caution when dealing with this or any other site.

I’m not quite the king of all media just yet, but I do take pride in the great influence my humble blog has. I posted months ago about the Reservation Rewards scam, and sometime later had a representative of the site come here to defend themselves.

Well, it has happened again, this time with the FreeNEzy.com scam run by Vikram Jhaveri. I posted some time ago about this piece of work who went onto the forums at SlickDeals posing as a regular user to promote his site. In response hundreds of SlickDeals users signed up for his site and completed offers to accumulate points to redeem for awards that in many cases never came. Smart users on SlickDeals eventually figured out that the SlickDeals post was self-promotion and had the post removed. Users who hadn’t received their awards then received excuses and lies, some had their accounts mysteriously deleted, and some were even accused of fraud themselves (how ironic!). To help protect others from being victims of this scam, I posted about it on this blog.

Well, last week the scammer himself found my blog and posted the following in the comments:

Hello,

I do not know who you are, but i am assuming you are a disgrunted member. This website was pointed out to me. If you let me correct the problem, I am sure we can work something out. Do let me know.
We are not a scam site. All our members were paid. Members that had to wait too long were even given bonus $25 Amazon Gift Certificates.

Let me explain what happened. Slickdeals.net admin found that i was the owner for the site i was promoting as a member. So they deleted the post.

This caused panic and members started redeeming products like crazy. Imagine 500 Members x $200 Products = $100000 in Products Redeemed. Our credit cards were maxed and we had to wait till the month end to get paid to pay the bills to send more orders in.

So orders that we usually send in 3 days took 3 weeks. But every one did get paid whatever they were supposed too.

In addition we did have database errors. Some account were deleted automatically. But when the error was found, within a month we moved to a dedicated server and eliminated that error forever.

I am not sure under which category you are. But if you let me, i am sure we can fix your problem if we havent already.

Thanks.
Vikram Jhaveri

To which I responded:

Vikram –

Actually I am not a disgruntled member. Thankfully I never signed up for your site, so you didn’t get the opportunity to screw me. However, I have followed the thread detailing your scams on Slickdeals and I know well one of your users that never received anything but a series of lies to constant inquiries and requests for the item he EARNED. Logic dictates that if in my small circle of friends there is a user that you still haven’t made whole, there are most certainly others out there in the same situation as my friend.

I would ask why you didn’t just give your users the same story you have given here if it was the truth? That would have been preferable to lying to your customers and even accusing some of fraud themselves as has been reported in the Slickdeals thread. I would also ask what became of the accounts that were “automatically” deleted? Did you ever restore all of these accounts, or were they a victim of your mysterious “database errors”?

I tell you what – if you make my friend whole, I will report such on this blog. My readers will be able to see that a disgruntled user has finally been made whole after all hope was lost. I will not tell you who my friend is, except that you should know who exactly you screwed over before as most of them likely emailed you in futile attempts to get their awards. Make all of those people whole, and you will get my friend in that process and I will post that he has been made whole. If disgruntled members are as rare as you indicate, that should be a pretty simple process. I will be sure to check in with my friend over the next several weeks to determine if he ever got his award, as well as the $25 Amazon gift certificate since supposedly everyone else got as an apology for the delays.

Finally, he responded to my post without addressing the issue of my friend who is STILL waiting on his item with the following sob story:

Well we did have actual problems.

1. One of our affiliate sites did accuse us of fraud. It was MaxBounty.com our account was suspended immediately. Thus we suspended accounts of members that had multiple freeNezy accounts to look into. Even today MaxBounty did not pay us and we do not do business with them.

2. We did have database erros. Some accounts instead of being suspended were being deleted. We posted that message on our site and moved to a dedicated server within a month.

3. All deleted and suspended accouts have been restored. All rewards have been Delivered. Most members contacted our live chat and received their product with a few days once we were up and running with 100% efficiency.

As for mistakes. WE all make mistakes. Atleast we admit that we did do something wrong. And are now correcting it. We are also taking measures to prevent that from ever happening again. Also slickdeals would not let us create an account to explain what went wrong. They somehow blocked our computer, not just the ip address.

Hope this helps. We are trying to correct the wrong we have done. Everyone deserves a second chance.

With that, let me make my last comments on this for now. As far as I am concerned, this is just the latest in the string of excuses and lies from this guy. Again, I know for a certainty that my friend rightfully earned the award he requested, that his account was deleted (likely in an attempt to eliminate the record of his having earned his reward), that his inquiries and requests for his earned award were met with lies and excuses, and that he was wrongfully accused of fraud himself in a last ditch attempt to get my friend off Mr. Jhaveri’s case. The assertion that all awards have been delivered is an outright lie AND MR. JHAVERI KNOWS IT!

As I said before, if my friend does finally receive his award and the $25 Amazon gift certificate that was supposedly given everyone else who experienced delays in receiving their items, I will post on this blog that he did finally receive his item. I do believe in second chances, however those second chances must be earned through actions, not words alone. My desire is that all of the victims are made whole, not just my friend, so I will not share his personal details to force Mr. Jhaveri to make good on your commitments to all of his users.

For anyone else that was a victim of this scam, I would encourage you to post your experiences here to add to the dialogue. I will also post tomorrow some good information on dealing with these types of scams that was provided to my friend when he submitted a complaint to the California Department of Consumer Affairs.

GPT Scam: FreeNezy.com run by Vikram Jhaveri

4/22/08 Update:  The FreeNEzy.com website written about in this post appears to have been sold and under new management, as documented on this recent post. While this change in ownership does not change any of the events that have occurred previously with this site (and my friend never got his reward), there is currently no evidence we are aware of that the new owner has continued any of the fraudulent practices previously associated with the site. As always, use caution when dealing with this or any other site.

College students are so busy these days! Their days are filled with classes, projects, papers, exams, socializing, and creating websites to defraud internet users by promising to give them prizes for completing trial offers and then pretending to be a user of the site on a popular internet message board to drum up traffic and then ducking users when they ask questions about the promised prizes.

Ok, that might not be the lifestyle of every college student, but apparently it is the life of Vikram Jhaveri, engineering student at California State University – Chico. Mr. Jhaveri created several GPT sites, where registered users complete trial offers through the site to earn points towards various rewards.

One of those sites was freenezy.com, which Mr. Jhaveri then promoted in the forums at SlickDeals.net pretending to be a user of the site under the username StaplesCrazy and not disclosing that he actually owned the site (the original postings were deleted by the moderators after the scam was uncovered, but cached copies of the postings are linked here). Once he was found out users started reporting extremely slow if any response to inquiries, requested reward items not shipping, and accounts being deleted for no reason. There are several users over at SD that are still fighting for their reward items.

Anyway, several users have emailed this guy with limited success. Some have reported that they finally did receive their items, while many others are still fighting for them. One user over at SD even had this scumbag reply to an inquiry accusing him of fraud!

Well I’m sure that several users have already filed complaints with the BBB and the California AG’s office, so we will see what happens. Hopefully we will see this skinny little turd doing the perp walk real soon. If you come across this site or any of his others (see list below), STAY FAR AWAY! There are other legit sites out there that really will send your items as promised.

If you have been victimized by this bastard, are just bored, or have pre-teen children that are going through that prank calling stage, here is some of the contact info that the fine users over at SD have compiled for him:

Emails: vgjhav@hotmail.com, vgjhav@yahoo.com, updates@freeNezy.com, support@ejawab.com, admin@ejawab.com, vgjhave@ilstu.edu, vgjhave@csuchico.edu

Addresses:
300E Shelbourne, Normal, IL 61761

PO. Box 481, Normal, IL 61761

PO. Box 3332, Chico, CA 95928 – 9998

Phone numbers:

309-436-9555 (old number for archive sakes)
309-436-1683 (old number for archive sakes)

586-435-0675 *
530-591-9998 *
806-209-0837 *

Some of this guy’s other fraudulent sites are as follows:

www.freenezy.com
www.fastezyfree.com
www.affiliateflix.com
www.freeisagoodprice.com
www.dhulan.com

Credit for the information in this posting goes to our friends at SD and www.heyyoudeadbeat.com

Got my free iPod from iPodSweepstakes.com

Close Encounters of the Cheap Kind has a new home at www.CheapEncounters.com!

A couple of weeks ago I posted that I had earned enough points for my free 1GB iPod Shuffle from iPodSweepstakes.com. Well, I finally got it in today as promised. It was brand new in the package and shipped directly from their vendor. The only thing to indicate what it was for was a line on the packing slip that said “thank you for using ipodsweepstakes.com”.

As I indicated in my prior post, the idea is that you earn points for participating in certain offers through their website, ranging from 4 points for entering your email to 100+ points for signing up for trial subscriptions to sites like Netflix or True.com. You also get 200 points just for signing up. At 1000 points you can redeem for a 1GB shuffle, or if you are patient you can get a Nano at 2000 points or an iPod Video at 3000 points. Honestly, I don’t think it is worth the effort to try for the Nano or Video, but to each his own.

You can sign-up for the program here. Be sure to use a disposable email address and phone number when completing these offers.

Finally earned my (kind of) free iPod on ipodsweepstakes.com

Close Encounters of the Cheap Kind has a new home at www.CheapEncounters.com!

Ok, because I have nothing better to do I decided to play around with a site I found a discussion on at Slickdeals called ipodsweepstakes.com. It is a GPT (get paid to) site that awards you “points” for completing different offers ranging from 4 points for entering your zip code or email address to 136 points for signing up for a Netflix trial. They also give you 200 points for signing up. The points are redeemable for iPods where 1000 points gets you a 1GB iPod Shuffle, 2000 points gets you a 2GB iPod Nano, and 3000 points gets you a 30GB iPod Video.

My brother-in-law did this one and has already received his iPod, and I just earned my 1000 points which I have redeemed for a Shuffle as well. It took minimal work and money ($6 for six $1 trial offers) to earn my iPod. If you are interested in signing up, you can do so at:

http://friends.ipodsweepstakes.com/r/4346ce7c309e102aa9ae

(Disclaimer: if you use this link I get extra points, so show some love!)

If you do this, be sure to use a disposable email address like Yahoo or Hotmail, and get a disposable phone number like Privatephone (see my previous post here.

Free Disposable Phone Numbers – Protect Your Real Number

Close Encounters of the Cheap Kind has a new home at www.CheapEncounters.com!

Have you ever signed up for a mailing list, entered a contest, or done a trial offer where you were asked for your phone number? We all have, and by giving out our real number we leave ourselves open to getting annoying telemarketing calls at all hours that not even enrollment in the “Do Not Call” list can help you with (Companies with which you have a prior business relationship, which could include things like this, can still call you even if you’re on the DNC list). Thankfully there are services online that allow you to create a disposable phone number for just such occasions.

The best one I’ve found is PrivatePhone by Netzero. It is completely free and allows you to create a local number (most other services require you to use a number wherever the provider is based).