My experiences with TGC are very similar to everyone else.
In June'04, I was looking for a home-based business. TGC intrigued me and the start up fee was not as high as entering a franchise (minimum of $50-100K).
On 6/23/04, O.B. Starnes was my TGC representative who told me about how the business worked, how promising it was and I remember specifically everyone told me that I would not have to do cold calling because I would be getting leads sheets of prescreened businesses who were interested in what I had to sell.
It turned out of course that all businesses I called had never heard of TGC and were not interested in doing business with me.
This was the list of affiliates I received:
Jody Aaron, TX 888-472-6568 (Alot, Alot)
John Allen, NJ 800-914-7074
Anne Bailey, SC 866-629-5067 (The Bottom Line)
Cory Fields, PA 866-241-7784 (CFI Distributing)
Bill George, FL 888-241-7784
George Harris, AZ 800-869-0019
Brandon Miller, NY 877-272-0464 (Surplus Source)
Andrew Solomon, NY 866-303-0786 (Solomon Supplies)
Patty Summers, CA/CO 888-350-2391 (Summers International)
Trevor Manning 888-248-65615 (Manning Surplus)
I was able to speak with most of these affiliates, who all vouched for the business and said they were able to break even on their investment between 3-6 months. I was also given numbers for the National Business Bureau and International Small Business Bureau and everything checked out. I thought I had done my homework, but apparently not. I wished I had known about usacomplaints.com!
OB Starnes said that prices were going up $500 by 8/1/04 so I decided to "lock-in" at $7450 and sent my payment and contract on 7/28/04. The promises of superior training, a designated mentor, the 35-60 hours of training, web site, and training materials left much to be desired. There were no training sessions, I only had email access to my trainer Steve Arnold, who left the company later and my next mentor was Jerry Park.
The training materials looked like a bunch of photocopies of businesses, numbers, and not anything I felt like reading to help me understand the business better.
I had not been active for a number of months but finally discovered around March'05 that TGC was out of business after an email I sent got bounced back. I called several of the references, and all numbers were pulled. It was at that time I realized I lost my $7450 initial investment and it felt awful.
I am happy to hear that the perpetraders are finally in court although a decision won't be reached for a number of months. A link to the FTC vs. World Traders can be found here:
http://www.ftc. Gov/os/caselist/wta/wta.htm
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