From Jon Christian Ryter
Is the Internet’s most lucrative network fad—autosurfing— a Ponzi scheme? SEC shuts down 12dailyPro.com…StormPay seizes the assets of 30 to 35 thousand autosurf members, triggers investigation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] issued a blunt warning last week to website owners seeking increased traffic from autosurfers, and to network marketing entrepreneurs looking for a leg up on the latest moneymaking multilevel marketing scheme—autosurfing is high risk.
The SEC put the paid autosurf website industry on notice that the government is taking a very close look at them. In issuing its warning, the SEC noted that there are dozens of autosurf websites on the Internet and that while most of them are legitimate, some of them—those, the SEC said, that promise their members astronomical profits—are likely pyramid schemes and, as such, are scams that the government intends to shut down.
While the 12dailyPro website has been suspended …, Johnson’s anti-ponzi defense was that 12dailyPro was in business to increase the page views of its clients’ websites and that the company generated revenues from those click-throughs and, also, from the sale of advertising on its own site.
Here is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s autosurf press release…
The Securities and Exchange Commission (“Commission�) today announced the filing of securities fraud charges against the operators of www.12dailypro.com, a “paid autosurf program� that in fact was a massive Ponzi scheme which raised more than $50 million from over 300,000 investors worldwide by offering a 44% return on investment in just 12 days. As a result of the Commission’s charges, the defendants, Charis Johnson, age 33, of Charlotte, N.C., and her companies, 12daily Pro and LifeClicks, LLC (“LifeClicks�), ceased their solicitation of investors and agreed to a freeze of all their assets and the appointment of a receiver who will take control of the companies’ operations.
According to the Commission’s complaint, which was filed last week in federal district court in Los Angeles, California, www.12dailypro.com claimed to be a paid autosurf program — a form of online advertising program that purportedly generates advertising revenue by automatically rotating advertised websites into a viewer’s Internet browser. Advertisers purportedly pay “hosts,� which in turn pay their members to view the rotated websites. The Commission’s complaint alleges that 12daily Pro’s sale of membership units constituted the fraudulent and unregistered sale of securities under the federal securities laws.
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