Grandgold Marketing and Karisma Marketing are two companies that operate out of the same address that are both involved in committing fraud and misrepresentation of their clients. I began doing business with these two companies back in April. Grandgold Marketing sold me a website for $399 and I went on to pay their sister company Karisma Marketing another $8,000 for the advertising to this website. I have not seen any money or referrals from my original advertising investment. I have been told by a former employee of Grandgold that the reason for this is simply that not one cent of my money ever went towards the advertising I supposedly paid for. Where did it go? Well when I hear that one of the owners is driving around in a new Mercedes I think you can figure out where it went. I have been in contact with another victim who was scammed out of $20,000.00 by these crooks and he says there are even more victims out there who haven't come forward yet! This scam is happening all over the U.S. Their scam starts out like most other scams. They telephone their victims claiming to be answering an internet inquirey by the victim for a home based business. They then offer to sell you a wesite for an on-line shopping mall called the Grandscale Mall. The only thing grandscale about this is the size of the rip off to the victim. The on-line mall web entry page looks like the floor plan to a typical shopping mall. When you click on a particular store like, as an example, pets, another page will pop up with sub-categories of pet supplies within the pet store. If you click on these sub-categories then you see the pet merchandise with prices. If you see something you want to buy then you click on it and follow the "go to cart" instructions where you pay for the item. As an affiliate and website owner you are supposed to receive a percentage commission for the sale of merchandise sold to people who enter your website. After you paid Grandgold for your web page a slick salesperson tells you that you need to get traffic to your website. They then talk you into spending thousands for advertising called "popunders" and "redirects". Here is the truth. The on-line mall website is a scam. Of the 21 stores in this mall, 16 actually have merchandise in them. The rest of these stores will say "Coming Soon". The remaining stores contain only a limited selection of merchandise and that merchandise is way overpriced. This situation with the mall has not changed from the time I got involved in April until now. I complained enough about this and they then set me up to be an affiliate with another scam company they are a part of and that is Bank Card Empire (I believe that there is another complaint about them). My $8,000.00 worth of advertising was then supposed to be switched to my new Bank Card Empire website. BCE heavily promotes an interest free business loan as an option for those merchants who sign up with them and agree to use their credit card machines. As an affiliate with BCE I am supposed to get a bonus of $500.00 for each merchant that I sign up plus I am supposed to get a percentage of that merchant's sales. I think it is 1 or 2%. Since August of the only referral that showed up in my back office was my stepson who owns kiosks at a real shopping mall and needed a loan.By the way my stepson didn't sign up to Bank Card Empire because of the advertising that I paid $8,000 for. It was because I told him about BCE. I found out from my stepson that when he applied to BCE for a $20,000.00 business loan they were going to charge him an $8,000.00 fee for this loan. That amounts to nearly 45% interest! This fee is paid back as customers swipe their credit cards from the merchant's machines that are in BCE's control. I complained enough about this scam so Grandgold set me up with yet another fraudulent website, their own. It contains Travelocity, i-Tunes, Amazon.com links as well as health & fitness products, on-line poker (I thought that was illegal) and of course the bogus on-line mall that started this fiasco in the first place, Grandscale Mall. Trouble is when I type in my domain name, it gets defaulted to Grandgold Marketing's domain name. I don't believe that I am even getting credit for anyone who types in or clicks on my domain name. Isn't that fraud? I have since contacted them demanding my money back. They have answered my demand by stating a sentence from their Product Agency and License Agreement which basically says that they never promised me any return from my money and that beyond the three day right of rescission, they are not obligated to return any of my money to me. I want to let those of you who read this know that this same policy includes a privacy statement by Grandgold. They state that they will keep all of their client's information confidential. They violated this policy. I was contacted by another company who told me that they got my name and phone number from Grandgold. As a result of this I had to close my bank account and I have no way of knowing if anyone has access to my SS#. My advice to those people who are approached by Grandgold / Karisma Marketing by phone or email is DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE OR EMAIL!!! Stay away from these crooks!!! You have been warned.
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