$6,900 was weasled away from me last year, first with flashy promises in Entrepreneur and World Trade Association's (WTA) mailings, and finally by smooth-spoken, flat-out lies.
This is from the pre-contract-signing lies they send you.'No salesmanship'??? Once you've signed away your nest egg/life savings/thousands of dollars under their one-sided contract, you find out that the only you'll ever make a single dime is to doggedly sell, sell, sell on the phone to people who've never even heard of WTA before.
To get the money, WTA's Steve Hoover told me that all you had to do was fax a few price lists every day. That "nobody" (dismissively stated) did cold calling.
At the time, the BBB didn't seem to have anything negative on WTA, and as of 12-1-02 I was without employment. So, money we did not have ("we" being my wife, one-year-old boy, and myself) went towards this supposedly promising new venture.
Then the worthless manuals, well-described elsewhere in usacomplaints.com, arrived. Literally worth less than blank paper.
And they tell you file a business name with your county courthouse. And get a fax machine (for no given reason, they claim computer faxing won't do). And get a separate business phone line. And so you spend and spend and spend.
The training is also well-described elsewhere in usacomplaints.com. But you are not taught about faxing as I was lied to in order to induce me to send my check and sign my contract. Rather you are taught cold calling telemarketing. If they had not been successful in concealing this fact, such failure alone would have foiled their fraudulent scheme's designs on me.
I can't calculate the toll this has taken on myself and my wife over the last 8 months, financially or emotionally. (My now two-year-old boy is pretty resilient.) We haven't filed for bankruptcy, but we haven't ruled it out either.
The feeling of helplessness is apparently calculated by WTA. They assume most folks live pretty far from Los Angeles County, so they have no legal risk for their entirely unconscionable contract.
But I've determined that my WTA Contract is illegal. If they want to play under California law, then California law it is.
As another WTA member posted from the BBB website in California regarding WTA: "On February 13, we verified that this company is not registered with the California Attorney General as a Seller Assisted Marketing Plan. The company's registration was revoked for allegedly violating the SAMP Act."
The SAMP Act requires SAMPs to register with the CA Attorney General's Office "to provide significant disclosure statements to potential buyers prior to signing any contracts, and to provide the buyer specific contractual rights after a purchase has been made." (caag. State.ca.Us/consumers/general/samp.htm)
You see, WTA doesn't disclose anything. To the contrary, they HIDE everything UNTIL they get the money and the signature on the Contract. And the Contract is entirely one-sided, designed to provide the buyer with no rights at all after the purchase has been made. It's no wonder California opened its eyes and revoked WTA's registration.
This is illegal.
I want my family's resources back.
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