Long-time readers of this blog are familiar with the exploits of Mr. Vikram Jhaveri, founder of FreeNEzy.com. The whole thing started when Mr. Jhaveri decided to promote his site on the forums over at SlickDeals.net posing as an unaffiliated user. There is some question as to whether the site was actually ever legit or was a scam from the beginning, but after the posting of SlickDeals scores of users flooded the site, many of whom never received the items they had rightfully earned. A very close associate of the blog was one of those folks, which led me to post the story of the scam on this post in April 2007.

The posting went relatively unnoticed until September 2007 when someone purporting to be Mr. Jhaveri starting leaving comments on the original posting trying to justify himself. I posted a reply in the comments of that post which led to another reply, at which point I posted the string as a new post and left a challenge to Mr. Jhaveri to make my friend who is still waiting on his item whole by sending the item. The thought was that Mr. Jhaveri should have had all the information on past users of his site and know who he sent items to, so to fulfill the challenge he would have to make all the users whole since I did not divulge the user’s identity. Of course, still no item and no further reply.

I heard nothing else for about a month, when Mr. Jhaveri found my eBay username off a prior post and started sending me messages through eBay to lead me to believe he was offering other eBay users I had dealt with money for my identity and contact information, which I wrote about here. He pulled this stunt in early October, and then did a similar stunt in November.

Shortly afterwards he decided to list the site for sale on eBay, as posted about here. The asking price for the site at the time was $50,000. The listing I posted resulted in no sale, nor did a relist.

Well, this past week someone using the name Josh has started posting in the comments of the original posts both here and on the old WordPress site the following:

I bought this website not long ago (freenezy). I definitely didn’t pay 50k for it. I paid much, much less. I wish I knew that it/it’s owner had this reputation before I bought it though, or I wouldn’t have bought it, obviously. Unfortunately, I didn’t come across this until now though, and it’s too late.

Anyway, it looks like I have a lot of work to do to rebuild the reputation of this site, and I intend to do just that. So for starters:

To the person who wrote this article, if you’d like to email me, I’ll gladly give you my phone number. You can then call me to confirm that I am not the previous owner, and that I have every intention to reward members when they complete the necessary requirements. I’ll even email you a scan of my driver’s license if that’s what it takes for you to believe that I am who I say I am.

An interesting development indeed, however I’ll be honest that I don’t completely trust it. Why? Several reasons:

1. The FreeNEzy site looks exactly the same now as it did before. The page is still noted as being run by eJawab, Inc., which was/is Mr. Jhaveri’s company. The site also still notes that it is a California based student run organization and lists a PO Box in Chico, California as the mailing address for the site (Mr. Jhaveri was/is a student at a university in Chico).
2. This person is inviting me to email him for proof of his identity. Considering that Mr. Jhaveri has tried in the past to learn my identity and contact information, this could very well just be a scheme on his part to get that info. Sorry, not gonna do it!
3. Who in their right mind would buy a web site without even doing a Google search on the site’s name? My posts about this site are at the top of the second page of results for the term “freenezy.com”.

Here is what will convince me that the site was indeed sold:

1. A scan of a signed document evidencing sale of the site from Mr. Jhaveri to a new owner.
2. A copy of a canceled check or other proof of payment from the new owner to Mr. Jhaveri for the amount specified in the sales document.
3. A scan of the ID of the new owner with the name matching that in the sales document.
4. As new owner, what message you would like to give to those who are aware and may have been victims of the scams perpetrated through the FreeNEzy.com website.

If you have these things, you can reply back with a comment to this post. I have placed your IP and the name “Josh” on my list to hold for moderation, so any reply back would have to be approved by me to be visible on this site (Note: I did not do that on the old WordPress site, so don’t post it over there). Place the document copies on the site of your choice and provide the link in your comment. You may black out ID numbers, account numbers, etc., but there must be enough information for me to have a reasonable certainty that you are who you claim to be. I reserve the right to post any documents provided as evidenced, however I will remove the names of individuals, account numbers, contact information, pictures, and the sales price before posting.

I will review any documents provided, and if your story checks out I will make a new posting stating that it is my opinion based on the documents provided that the site was in fact sold and that Mr. Jhaveri is no longer associated with the site. Additionally, I will post the message provided (within reason) in that post and provide a note on each of the prior posts where FreeNEzy.com is mentioned that the site was sold with a link to the new posting. I will not delete the prior posts because these are things that actually happened and there are lessons to be learned from those posts to protect oneself from other scams that may be out there, however each of those pages will have an explanatory note that the site discussed is under new ownership.

This is the never ending saga of a boy and his scam site, and the victims left in his wake. I have posted previously about the infamous FreeNEzy.com, run by Vikram Jhaveri. I initially posted about this because of numerous users on SlickDeals, including one really good friend, who spent money completing offers through the site to earn points for various rewards but were consistently denied those rewards by Mr. Jhaveri. This posting caught the attention of Mr. Jhaveri and prompted him to give excuses for defrauding of some users, which I documented here. Apparently not happy that I refused to take down my post and only offered to post an update if my friend received his reward (offer still open, by the way), he resorted to sending a harassing message to me through eBay’s messaging system, documented here. He has since sent another message indicating that he received my user info from someone and sent them $50. Just for the record, here is the text of that message:

Thankyou so very much. I have sent $50 to your paypal. I have tried so hard to get this scammers info. Thanks again. Next week i am going to post his info everywhere…

Then today while following up to see if eBay had suspended this bastard for his continued harassing messages, I found this listing under his user name. You can own his scam website, FreeNEzy.com, plus some assorted crap with his logo on it for the mere sum of $50,000. He proceeds to say that you can make $75-$250 profit for each member, although he neglects to say if that amount is assuming the illegal withholding of earned rewards.

I guess if you are going to get out of the business of scamming internet users, the icing on the cake would be to sell the site you used to scam the users. Hopefully anyone that would seriously be thinking about buying a site like this does some homework and finds this blog and the other spots on the web where people have chronicled their trouble with this site.

I’m not quite the king of all media just yet, but I do take pride in the great influence my humble blog has. I posted months ago about the Reservation Rewards scam, and sometime later had a representative of the site come here to defend themselves.

Well, it has happened again, this time with the FreeNEzy.com scam run by Vikram Jhaveri. I posted some time ago about this piece of work who went onto the forums at SlickDeals posing as a regular user to promote his site. In response hundreds of SlickDeals users signed up for his site and completed offers to accumulate points to redeem for awards that in many cases never came. Smart users on SlickDeals eventually figured out that the SlickDeals post was self-promotion and had the post removed. Users who hadn’t received their awards then received excuses and lies, some had their accounts mysteriously deleted, and some were even accused of fraud themselves (how ironic!). To help protect others from being victims of this scam, I posted about it on this blog.

Well, last week the scammer himself found my blog and posted the following in the comments:

Hello,

I do not know who you are, but i am assuming you are a disgrunted member. This website was pointed out to me. If you let me correct the problem, I am sure we can work something out. Do let me know.
We are not a scam site. All our members were paid. Members that had to wait too long were even given bonus $25 Amazon Gift Certificates.

Let me explain what happened. Slickdeals.net admin found that i was the owner for the site i was promoting as a member. So they deleted the post.

This caused panic and members started redeeming products like crazy. Imagine 500 Members x $200 Products = $100000 in Products Redeemed. Our credit cards were maxed and we had to wait till the month end to get paid to pay the bills to send more orders in.

So orders that we usually send in 3 days took 3 weeks. But every one did get paid whatever they were supposed too.

In addition we did have database errors. Some account were deleted automatically. But when the error was found, within a month we moved to a dedicated server and eliminated that error forever.

I am not sure under which category you are. But if you let me, i am sure we can fix your problem if we havent already.

Thanks.
Vikram Jhaveri

To which I responded:

Vikram -

Actually I am not a disgruntled member. Thankfully I never signed up for your site, so you didn’t get the opportunity to screw me. However, I have followed the thread detailing your scams on Slickdeals and I know well one of your users that never received anything but a series of lies to constant inquiries and requests for the item he EARNED. Logic dictates that if in my small circle of friends there is a user that you still haven’t made whole, there are most certainly others out there in the same situation as my friend.

I would ask why you didn’t just give your users the same story you have given here if it was the truth? That would have been preferable to lying to your customers and even accusing some of fraud themselves as has been reported in the Slickdeals thread. I would also ask what became of the accounts that were “automatically” deleted? Did you ever restore all of these accounts, or were they a victim of your mysterious “database errors”?

I tell you what – if you make my friend whole, I will report such on this blog. My readers will be able to see that a disgruntled user has finally been made whole after all hope was lost. I will not tell you who my friend is, except that you should know who exactly you screwed over before as most of them likely emailed you in futile attempts to get their awards. Make all of those people whole, and you will get my friend in that process and I will post that he has been made whole. If disgruntled members are as rare as you indicate, that should be a pretty simple process. I will be sure to check in with my friend over the next several weeks to determine if he ever got his award, as well as the $25 Amazon gift certificate since supposedly everyone else got as an apology for the delays.

Finally, he responded to my post without addressing the issue of my friend who is STILL waiting on his item with the following sob story:

Well we did have actual problems.

1. One of our affiliate sites did accuse us of fraud. It was MaxBounty.com our account was suspended immediately. Thus we suspended accounts of members that had multiple freeNezy accounts to look into. Even today MaxBounty did not pay us and we do not do business with them.

2. We did have database erros. Some accounts instead of being suspended were being deleted. We posted that message on our site and moved to a dedicated server within a month.

3. All deleted and suspended accouts have been restored. All rewards have been Delivered. Most members contacted our live chat and received their product with a few days once we were up and running with 100% efficiency.

As for mistakes. WE all make mistakes. Atleast we admit that we did do something wrong. And are now correcting it. We are also taking measures to prevent that from ever happening again. Also slickdeals would not let us create an account to explain what went wrong. They somehow blocked our computer, not just the ip address.

Hope this helps. We are trying to correct the wrong we have done. Everyone deserves a second chance.

With that, let me make my last comments on this for now. As far as I am concerned, this is just the latest in the string of excuses and lies from this guy. Again, I know for a certainty that my friend rightfully earned the award he requested, that his account was deleted (likely in an attempt to eliminate the record of his having earned his reward), that his inquiries and requests for his earned award were met with lies and excuses, and that he was wrongfully accused of fraud himself in a last ditch attempt to get my friend off Mr. Jhaveri’s case. The assertion that all awards have been delivered is an outright lie AND MR. JHAVERI KNOWS IT!

As I said before, if my friend does finally receive his award and the $25 Amazon gift certificate that was supposedly given everyone else who experienced delays in receiving their items, I will post on this blog that he did finally receive his item. I do believe in second chances, however those second chances must be earned through actions, not words alone. My desire is that all of the victims are made whole, not just my friend, so I will not share his personal details to force Mr. Jhaveri to make good on your commitments to all of his users.

For anyone else that was a victim of this scam, I would encourage you to post your experiences here to add to the dialogue. I will also post tomorrow some good information on dealing with these types of scams that was provided to my friend when he submitted a complaint to the California Department of Consumer Affairs.

College students are so busy these days! Their days are filled with classes, projects, papers, exams, socializing, and creating websites to defraud internet users by promising to give them prizes for completing trial offers and then pretending to be a user of the site on a popular internet message board to drum up traffic and then ducking users when they ask questions about the promised prizes.

Ok, that might not be the lifestyle of every college student, but apparently it is the life of Vikram Jhaveri, engineering student at California State University – Chico. Mr. Jhaveri created several GPT sites, where registered users complete trial offers through the site to earn points towards various rewards.

One of those sites was freenezy.com, which Mr. Jhaveri then promoted in the forums at SlickDeals.net pretending to be a user of the site under the username StaplesCrazy and not disclosing that he actually owned the site (the original postings were deleted by the moderators after the scam was uncovered, but cached copies of the postings are linked here). Once he was found out users started reporting extremely slow if any response to inquiries, requested reward items not shipping, and accounts being deleted for no reason. There are several users over at SD that are still fighting for their reward items.

Anyway, several users have emailed this guy with limited success. Some have reported that they finally did receive their items, while many others are still fighting for them. One user over at SD even had this scumbag reply to an inquiry accusing him of fraud!

Well I’m sure that several users have already filed complaints with the BBB and the California AG’s office, so we will see what happens. Hopefully we will see this skinny little turd doing the perp walk real soon. If you come across this site or any of his others (see list below), STAY FAR AWAY! There are other legit sites out there that really will send your items as promised.

If you have been victimized by this bastard, are just bored, or have pre-teen children that are going through that prank calling stage, here is some of the contact info that the fine users over at SD have compiled for him:

Emails: vgjhav@hotmail.com, vgjhav@yahoo.com, updates@freeNezy.com, support@ejawab.com, admin@ejawab.com, vgjhave@ilstu.edu, vgjhave@csuchico.edu

Addresses:
300E Shelbourne, Normal, IL 61761

PO. Box 481, Normal, IL 61761

PO. Box 3332, Chico, CA 95928 – 9998

Phone numbers:

309-436-9555 (old number for archive sakes)
309-436-1683 (old number for archive sakes)

586-435-0675 *
530-591-9998 *
806-209-0837 *

Some of this guy’s other fraudulent sites are as follows:

www.freenezy.com
www.fastezyfree.com
www.affiliateflix.com
www.freeisagoodprice.com
www.dhulan.com

Credit for the information in this posting goes to our friends at SD and www.heyyoudeadbeat.com

As I indicated in my prior post, the idea is that you earn points for participating in certain offers through their website, ranging from 4 points for entering your email to 100+ points for signing up for trial subscriptions to sites like Netflix or True.com. You also get 200 points just for signing up. At 1000 points you can redeem for a 1GB shuffle, or if you are patient you can get a Nano at 2000 points or an iPod Video at 3000 points. Honestly, I don’t think it is worth the effort to try for the Nano or Video, but to each his own.

You can sign-up for the program here.  Be sure to use a disposable email address and phone number when completing these offers.

My brother-in-law did this one and has already received his iPod, and I just earned my 1000 points which I have redeemed for a Shuffle as well. It took minimal work and money ($6 for six $1 trial offers) to earn my iPod. If you are interested in signing up, you can do so at:

http://friends.ipodsweepstakes.com/r/4346ce7c309e102aa9ae

(Disclaimer: if you use this link I get extra points, so show some love!)

If you do this, be sure to use a disposable email address like Yahoo or Hotmail, and get a disposable phone number like Privatephone (see my previous post here.

The best one I’ve found is PrivatePhone by Netzero. It is completely free and allows you to create a local number (most other services require you to use a number wherever the provider is based).