Beware of anyone identifying themselves as being associated with Ivy Inc. Or Omni Business Solutions. We moved to our present home to be closer to mother-in-law so we could help with her care. My wife couldn't work because she was taking care of her mother. I gave up a good job with the state when we moved and finding a job at our new location did not go as well as we had hoped. I had been unemployed for 7 months, and since I quit my last job, could not even draw unemployment for most of that time. We had cashed in a retirement plan to buy our home here, pay moving expenses and living costs until I found a job. It took a year to sell our house, and when finally did we took a major lose on it. We were to the point that we felt we had to try something to make some money. I signed up for the Ultimate Wealth Program on the internet. I didn't have a lot of hope in getting rich from it, but it was a minimum investment. Within a day or 2 of signing up for the Ultimate Wealth Program, we got a call from a man who identified himself as Justin Hickman with Ivy Capital Inc. He explained that his company was looking for a select few people to coach in setting up an online business. When thesepeople became successful their testimonials would be used by the company to help sell there program. Justin had us talk to Mike Allen who he identified as his boss. At this point they were really laying it on about how much money we could make if we invested the time. But even with just a small amount of time we would be making quite a lot of money. As I said I had been unemployed several months and we fell for the pitch. The whole process went so fast that as we look back we're not sure how it all came about. We are convinced that there are several companies working together to rip people off.
We signed up in September at the Joint Venture Level at a cost of $7,125.00. We were assured that this would cover everything we would need and there would be no further expense. We verbally agreed and were told we would be getting everything in writing in a few days. We never received any further correspondence, but forgot about it as we got into the excitement of the training. We were led to believe that we were signing up with Ivy Capital Inc., but it turned out that Omni Business Solutions was the company doing the training. We had our 1st training session on October 5. Our last session was January 17th. Our trainer was Marshall Staheli. He seemed to be a nice young man and we thought very knowledgeable. His only shortcoming was that he never answered emails and always had an excuse why.
Shortly after signing up for this program, I found a job working the graveyard shift. It was 50 miles away and with driving time I am gone from 10:15 P.M. Until 10:00 A.M. Even with these hours I spent a lot of time writing content pages and doing the other things our trainer told us to do, because we still believed this was a legitimate program and we could have a successful business.
We thought things went pretty well with the training. Since we knew nothing about what we were being trained to do, we believed everything we were told expecting to reap the rewards.
We had 16 lessons and at the end of the training we had an affiliate web site, with several pages of content. We were told we could contact Marshall with any questions. We sent a few emails, but he was not very good about responding. He had told us we needed to get income links to all our pages and that blogs and forums were a good way to do this. We wrote out what we thought we should put on the blog and sent it to him for his input.instead of answering us he sent us a web site for information. We got nothing from the web site, so blindly started writing on blogs and forums. Our first additional expense was singing up for Go To My PC. This was $20.00 or $30.00 a month. This allowed the trainer to access our computer from his office.
We were also told that we needed to get listed in directories. We did as much of this as we could, but were still not getting any hits on our site. Marshall told us that 300 Sub was a good source to use to get in a lot of directories. This cost around $200.00, but we still felt this could be a profitable business. It was interesting that when we got our credit card statement that the money paid for 300 Sub, went to Omni.
We kept adding new pages of content and writing in the blogs. When we would check our site we were getting 3 or 4 hits a day and had never made a cent. About this time we got a credit card statement that Omni had charged us $39.95 for a months web hosting. We had never provided our credit card information to anyone that identified themselves as working for Omni. We hadn't made a cent yet and now were expected to pay this hosting fee every month.
By this time we were pretty sure that we had been had. We searched the web and sure enough we found stories of others being ripped off. It doesn't appear that the same companies are always involved, but Omni is involved in all of them. We sent an email to Jeremy Cobb, the owner of Omni Business Solutions. We never received a response from him.instead he forwarded our concerns on to our trainer, who emailed us with his excuses and a promise to continue working with us. He also said he could get our hosting fee waived for 3 to 4 months. We had notified the Credit card Company to stop payment to Omni. This caused our account with Omni to be closed, even though we had been told that the charges would be waived. At this point we felt that we should get out before losing any more money.
When getting our training Marshall talked about hosting and told us that Omni was doing it now, but we could have anyone do it. After Omni canceled our account we signed up with another company to host our site. When we tried to go to our site it took us to the Omni Site Builder which we used to set up our site. When we contacted Marshall about this he informed us that the domain name was our builder account's domain name, therefore when Omni closed our account it reverted back to Omni Site Builder. He said he could get it switched over to our name, but there would be an IT transfer fee of $50 to have this done, He also informed us that this wouldn't include the content pages, it would just be the domain name.
I was also informed by Tanya Mutton DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT SUPPORT that as of yet with my hosting cost refunded they had yet to charge us for anything. She said we paid Ivy Capital for our training and Omni had yet to make any money from us. I guess Omni was working with us for free, and when we signed up with 300 Sub the credit card company had it wrong that this money went to Omni. Omni is quick to blame Ivy Capital, but I'm still convinced that they are in this together, but have no way of proving that
Trying to contact anyone at Ivy Capital is like talking to a tree. Only machines answer their phones and they never return calls.
To sum up our experience with Omni Business Solution, even though they are quick to explain that our agreement was with Ivy Capital Inc and they were only hired to do the training. We have spent about $7,400.00 and countless hours of work setting up a web site that now we do not own, because we didn't want to continue to pay Omni Business Solutions a monthly fee when we were making nothing, and getting no assistance from them. We have paid another company to host the site that now we realize we never owned. When all was said and done we owned nothing and had not made a cent. After reading of others attempts to get some of their money back and not having any luck, we have just marked it up to experience and are moving on. Please don't be taken in by anyone doing business with Omni.
Scammed in sdCuster, South Dakota
U.S.A.
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