Article: Get rich quick' schemes mutate into an online monster

On a warm summer day in 2002, in Charlevoix, Michigan, Richard Joseph?s bad luck began. The lawyer, husband, and father of two was walking across the driveway with a bag of garbage when his bare foot slipped in a puddle of water that had collected beneath his car?s air conditioner. His leg gave out and he landed on his back. While nothing was broken, the blow prevented blood from reaching his spinal cord. He laid there for an hour, unable to move, while his daughters watched television in the living room. By the time he was discovered, the damage had been done. He'd never walk again.
Eventually, Joseph would make it back to work at his law firm, although he couldn?t keep up his old pace. By August 2007, complications prevented him from working at all ? possibly forever.
Joseph describes his mental state after yet another stint in rehab: ?I?m moping, pretty much, and right around Christmas time I decided, you know, I?d better get my butt in gear and find something I can do from home. So, I tried to find work as a lawyer from home, but that was right when Michigan?s economy started to go to hell, and a lot of law firms weren?t outsourcing work.?
So he took to the internet, looking for "work from home" opportunities and requesting information from various websites.


In February 2008, "out of the blue," Joseph got a call from a salesman that identified himself as Ron Martino from PushTraffic, with a work from home opportunity.
"I told him what had happened to me, and he said, ?gee... I have a brother who?s paraplegic. I know what you?re going through, and I will help you out.?"
Martino couldn?t talk him into anything straight away, so he began calling regularly, often just to chat. It was while this was going on that Joseph contracted MRSA, a multidrug-resistant infection he wasn?t expected to survive.
"He called me enough times. Because I knew him well enough I told him what hospital I was in. He called the hospital, got my room number, talked to me in the hospital. I remember this really well, because I was watching CSPAN and how the economy was going, and I?m sitting in this ICU room talking to him on the phone, and he?s talking to me like a good friend. He was being my friend."
The courtship lasted around six months, and eventually Joseph agreed to purchase an e-commerce site from PushTraffic.
According to Joseph, Martino was going to set up the new website while he was in the hospital, and he guaranteed that in thirty days Joseph would be making between $4,000 and $5,000 a month, working from his bed for an hour a day.
Joseph hoped that, if he didn?t survive the infection, this source of income would be a lasting gift to his family.
While relating this all to me, he starts to choke up a little. "And I know all this stuff about ?too good to be true,? but he went into great detail about how his brother was a paraplegic, and he helped his brother do this, and that the reason he was going to do it was because of me, he could only have one person under his wing, so to speak."
It was in this vulnerable state, facing death and trying to care for his family, that Richard Joseph charged $20,000 on his credit card, money that he has yet to reclaim after phone calls, a lawsuit, and nearly three lean years.


What Joseph didn't know was that Martino was part of a vast criminal organization run by Los Angeles resident John Paul Raygoza.
Raygoza is an Internet Marketer ? a 21st century snake oil salesman.
The term Internet Marketing describes both a particular business model used to sell fraudulent products and services online, and the community or subculture that embraces it. It operates out in the open ? with poorly designed websites, tacky infomercials, and outrageous claims designed to scare off the wary and draw in the curious, desperate, and naive. The Internet Marketer positions himself as a marketing ?guru? with a product or coaching services guaranteed to generate income.
The path to internet riches begins with an introductory product, such as a book or DVD. This is often a loss leader: the real value for the Internet Marketer is that it allows him to capture your contact information. Once you?re in the system, your inbox will be flooded with offers for software, DVD sets, and coaching programs costing several hundreds or thousands of dollars.
This is what happened to Richard Joseph: after requesting free information online, some unscrupulous Internet Marketer sold his name to Raygoza?s company, PushTraffic, who ripped Joseph off.

In some ways, Internet Marketing is an evolution of the old "make money from home, stuffing envelopes" ads you used to find in the back of Rolling Stone magazine, alongside those promising to make you a world famous songwriter or a musclehead who no longer has to take crap from bullies on the beach. In the internet, con artists have found a platform that allows them to scale their scams far beyond the penny stocks and worthless real estate deals of the past.

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theaxe12 said:

"The term Internet Marketing describes both a particular business model used to sell fraudulent products and services online, and the community or subculture that embraces it. "

WTF is this guy talking about? What a load of horse manure.

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