Stripped Down Profits is a Stripped Down Ripoff!

I'm like anyone else out there trying to make money using the internet. I make most of my money online through writing articles, and reviews, editing, and creating book covers. Over this last weekend I was perusing e-mails that I get through one of my safe lists when I happened upon what looked like a half-way decent deal. The video was by a young lady named Haley Milano who claimed to be a former stripper. Okay, yeah I admit I got sucked in by the poor little stripper girl makes it rich storyline, after all her product only cost $47, and she was willing to give you a refund as long as you asked for one before your 60 day trial was up. It was a win win situation, right? Wrong!

So figuring I had nothing to lose, after all I could ask for a refund right? I went ahead and ordered the product thinking I would get an instant download of the "software" she was talking about. All through her video she kept saying it was "1-click" software and that with "1-click" you could start earning money. I should have known better, I really should have, but this girl, yeah she's good, so good she convinced a tightwad like me who never buys anything unless she has to, to part with $47. So....I get my username and password and login to my account. I immediately click on the software link and get, wait for it, absolutely nothing! According to the message there, the launch wasn't supposed to happen for a few more days and there was a message at the bottom claiming the software would be available in 24 hours. 24 hours later and still no software. What was there were a couple of tiny pictures of two different website templates. I started to get a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had been royally had. I clicked on one of the pictures and it opened a template that said all I had to do was add my clickbank ID and my awebber account number and then hit save. Ummmmm....you didn't say anything about having to have an awebber account, or any kind of autoresponder, Haley! In fact, the idea was you were going to do it all for me with just "1-click." But I was still willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I played around a bit with the template and yes by double clicking on certain areas you could edit them. However, as you've probably imagined this wasn't a "1-click" deal. I was very disappointed but I reeled that in and figured I had 60 days so maybe I just needed to wait, maybe it was too soon for all of the nine streams of income she'd promised me, to appear. After all this was still before the launch. So, finally the day of the launch I logged in hoping there was some software for me to download as she had promised. Was there? Nope, there were now two links, one with two website templates that were already filled out for you with content, and one that led to three templates that could be customized as previously mentioned by double clicking on certain parts. It turns out two of them were identical to the ones that couldn't be customized, so you were really only getting two templates and two possible streams of income. Where was the software? Where were the nine streams of income? They didn't exist.

By this time I was extremely frustrated. Hoping I could figure out what was going on I clicked on all the different sections of the website trying to figure out how I could get all this to work and maybe somehow make money from my $47 investment. That just frustrated me even more. She had videos galore and tons of other internet marketing "junk" that so didn't impress me. Most if not all of it, I could have found for free with a little checking around at JV giveaways or elsewhere on the internet. Talk about a let down. Plus, she was saying that in order to really make money you should upload the website templates she had given you and purchase your own hosting and domain name. By this time I'm thinking, "But I thought the whole I idea was I did a few clicks and you did everything else for me." Yeah, I was naive, but I'm one of those, says what she means and means what she says, kind of gals and sometimes there is a tiny part of me that just wants to believe someone else is like that too. I was wrong! But hey, I always try to find the silver lining, right, and I thought I had found it with the two thousand original content articles she was giving away for buyers to post on their websites so they'd have ready made content. Unfortunately, that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach started coming back when I downloaded the zip and began reading some of the articles. At first I figured they were PLR articles she had paid someone to write so they'd be different from all the other free junk plr that you can find around the internet. However, as I began reading them I discovered something that is the nightmare of every writer.

If you're a writer you probably already know what I found, but I'll tell you anyway. I discovered that Ms. Milano, or one of her employees had gone to article directories and copied and pasted the articles into a Notepad document and then saved it. No credit was given to the original author, heck, they didn't even try to rewrite them so as to at least give the appearance of making the articles different. These articles were word for word copied straight from these directories. I was stunned. No wonder she could call these articles "original content," they were so original that she or one of her employees just ripped them off from an article directory and claimed them to give away as a bonus package of PLR articles. She doesn't call them that, but you and I both know that when you submit an article to an article directory it is to drive traffic to your website and that those who use the articles have to leave the signature box with the author's link(s) at the bottom. You can't just copy and paste them into your blog or website and not give the author credit, if you do, that's to put it bluntly, plagiarism. So, here was this package of two thousand articles that Haley Milano is advocating for the buyers of her program "Stripped Down Profits" to post on their websites as content and claim it as their own. As I pointed out before, when you copy someone else's writing and then call it your own, that is plagiarism. Even if you rewrite the article, if it is not PLR or private label content that gives you the license to rewrite it, then that is plagiarism. There's no difference. Now she may have thought she'd gotten around that whole pesky PLR idea by not labeling these articles PLR, and instead calling them "original content," but she had to know that that is what buyers would think these articles were when she gave them away and told them they could post them to their websites as though they themselves had written them.

I finally got fed up with all the lies and sent a ticket in to her help desk requesting a refund. What was my response? An e-mail saying that they could not give me a refund at this time because I needed to give the program time to work, and here were some more freebies, and there was a link. However, after that if I still wanted a refund I could contact Clickbank to get one. The freebies weren't even real freebies because all the links led to another internet marketing junk website. Needless to say, I was unimpressed and went right to Clickbank and requested a refund. I received an e-mail yesterday saying that my refund was processed but that it could take up to 5 days before it showed up in my Paypal account. Personally, that's fine with me as long as it does show up.

What's the moral of this particular story? Don't believe everything you read or watch on videos on the internet because there are tons of scammers out there, particularly in the internet marketing arena. One thing I forgot to mention too, is that as soon as I paid for the product, another page with a second video popped up trying to get me to pay $267 for another so-called software of hers. Fortunately, I didn't take the bait, especially after I discovered she wasn't selling software at all.

The other lesson I learned from this experience is if you are a writer, to be very diligent in researching just where your articles are turning up online. You may just discover as I did that someone is encouraging others to plagiarize your content, or is plagiarizing it themselves. It has certainly taught me that rather than being passive about who uses my articles that I post to article directories and elsewhere, that I need to be more active so that if others are using my articles without giving me credit I can do what is necessary to put a stop to it.