As one of the best salespeople at Norvergence, I was recruited to be a significant part of the original Inflexion team. I have a lot of information and I'll endeavor to put it all down here.
First of all, everyone dealing with Inflexion should know all about Norvergence, one of the major scams of the year (read about it on this board). At Norvergence, you had to APPLY for the service, which included unlimited local, LD and cellular, plus a phone system. It all sounded great — until Norvergence didn't pay it's carrier bills and went bankrupt.
What Norvergence was REALLY doing was renting a useless box to the customer for a very high amount of money, and then charging little or nothing for T1 and cell usage. They would then sell the rental agreement's income stream to a financial company (GE Capital or Wells Fargo) and simply pay the customers' bills. However, when Norvergence went out of business, the customers STILL had to pay those leases and ALSO pay retail for their T1s and usage. Major lawsuits are pending.
When Inflexion called me, I told them I would under no circumstances get into that situation again, and I would not rip off a customer — they assured me this was not the case, that they were different, and that they were fully legit. I accepted the position, and we booked a meeting with myself and a slew of other former Norvergence players to meet my new management.
First, I looked up my new bosses, Dwayne Goldsmith, Dan Berninger, and Keith Machen. It turns out they once ran a company called Ntegrity that — tell me if this sounds familiar — went bankrupt after failing to pay its carrier.
Apparently they refused to pay their debt and sued Verizon to release them from a $4M debt for unspecified "antitrust issue". And Ntegrity went out of business. When I asked them about Ntegrity, they told me they actually WON the lawsuit, but I found no evidence of this on-line
Talking about a great conspiracy at Verizon to "get" Keith). I found it odd that they would "win" such a major lawsuit, yet there would be no evidence of this (indeed written evidence to the contrary), and that Ntegrity no longer exists. I got scared and asked more questions.
Inflexion is a Norvergence clone, made up of Dwayne, Keith, Daniel, and a whole bunch of former Norvergence sales execs. Their plan is the same as Norvergence. They will make you APPLY to get their system which includes a very cheap T1 and an IP-PBX, with unlimited domestic calling and possibly high-usage cellular phones. They will take your total phone bill, take off a percentage (about 20%), and this new number will be your total amount paid each month (that's why they collect your bills and can't give you numbers without them).
Most of that new payment will be the rental agreement of the phone system, which Inflexion will sell to a finance company.inflexion will get a large lump sum from the finance company in exchange for this uncancellable revenue stream. The rest of the customer's charge will be below-retail amounts for T1s and other services.
THE CATCH is the same as Norvergence. If/When Inflexion goes belly up (like Norvergence and Ntegrity), customers will be required to pay the same rate for the phone system rental AND FULL REGULAR PRICE FOR THE T1 AND SERVICES. The rental agreement will be non-cancelable, even in the event that the service goes away. This is what happened to the thousands of unfortunate Norvergence customers.
Another problem is that they are not a reseller per-se, but an aggregator. They buy transport in bulk and send it over their private network. All customer T1s go to the Inflexion switch, which then sends it out over their carrier. If they don't pay their bills, the carrier can turn off their whole network, and customers' phone services go dead. This also happened with Norvergence.
Obviously, we did not move forward and I did not work for Inflexion after that day.
They didn't like my suggestion that they pre-pay all the services (including the T1 and cellular), thereby insuring that the customers would not be ripped off if IFXC went bust. Hopefully, by posting this report, they will be forced to take this action and run a safe and completely legitimate business. However, even if they tell you it's safe and that they have paid for everything in advance (which I highly doubt since they hated the idea), be sure to get the receipt for the prepaid T1 IN WRITING FROM THE CARRIER — not from Inflexion — for the FULL TERM OF THE RENTAL.
Norvergence boldly lied to its customers, and Inflexion is using the Norvergence sales force veterans. When dealing with Inflexion, use your gut, don't take double talk, don't be worried about "not being approved", and get every single little thing in writing, especially the guarantees. Read about Norvergence on usacomplaints.com, and if Inflexion doesn't promise to prepay the T1 and Cellular bills for the full term with receipts from carriers, consider yourself open for a ripoff.
My strong recommendation is just to look for the best deal you can get from a legitimate company that's been in business for more than a few months and that has lots of local references.
David
Piscataway, New Jersey
U.S.A.
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