Someone in my AIM friend list asked me to join Super Affiliates group on Facebook owned by Russell Rockefeller. That was when I came in touch with Russell and added him. He obviously believes in ostentatious display of his knowledge, wealth and carries this aura of being a millionaire-kind of attitude. He told me he is a pro-emailer and one of the best in the industry. So I thought of him as a very successful guy who achieved these heights just because of his hard-work, knowledge and contacts.
He once posted on his fb group that he is willing to teach people how to be a pro-mailer. Only limited slots left. I was in awe of him and thought it would be worth an investment. So I joined his program, wired him $11,000 and started daily sessions over Skype for couple of weeks. All of a sudden one day he blocked me in the middle of a session. I thought, he might be having some personal reasons and that’s why he is not online but then after a week’s time, I saw that he deleted me from his linkedin connections and facebook friends list. That’s when I thought something is fishy. I had no clue why he was behaving this way. I asked a common friend if she can check out with Russell online over skype. She asked him about me. He obviously didn’t want to look bad about this whole episode. Russell told her that I tried to “hack” into his system and that’s why he has blocked me and that I have done something which is against his company’s policy.
I was really shocked to hear that. I tried every possible way to contact him- Facebook, Skype, email and phone but he was completely unresponsive to everything. I never heard back from him that’s when I decided that people must know about him and I wanted them to decide who is at fault. So I posted about it online in every facebook group related to affiliate marketing I was part of. It raised few eyebrows. Despite all this there was no response from him. So I decided to post this whole story on MailerForum.com. That’s when he started replying to the thread and admitted that he might have done this by mistake and probably it wasn’t me, it was someone else who tried to hack him.
He was neither interested in explaining me anything nor had any intentions of paying my money back. But his own response on mailerforum thread backfired on him and he asked me to discuss it privately on facebook. He then offered to pay me $6000 only on one condition that I will quietly take down all these threads without trying to get any attention. Trust me it wasn’t worth loosing $5000 and that still hurts.
Anyways, I accepted it because I wanted to ensure that I get some part of my money back from him.
I accept that he paid me $6k back because of all the pressure I had built around him else I am sure he won’t have paid me a penny back. I can say this because few more people told me similar stories about how they were ripped off by Russell in past. (Trent Silver from Capstone leads and Charles Woolverton from ClickOfficial.com. These guys too were never paid and when they tried to contact him, he told them to go and f*** themselves). He asked me that he will just pay me $6k and if I want I can ask for remaining amount from his partner, the owner of OptinPlus.com. The break-down of the payments were never mentioned in the agreement. So in case of dispute it becomes his responsibility to pay me back. His partner was never involved anywhere. In fact, I didn’t even knew that he had a partner.
Many people told me that he is an old time and has been doing such things for years. He behaves very weirdly at times, no disrespect to his knowledge and achievements (if there are any). It’s just that people feel ashamed coming forward to report such things. After all, people would only laugh at me that I paid $11k only to learn how to mail? I was offered 2 months of data-feeds and Emailing platform as an add-on to this course.
The reason why I wanted to share this thing with everyone was to make sure that they don’t pay such people. Not everyone makes $10k in a day like him. It’s a big money and the last thing people want to pay them to people like Russell who goes around with a millionaire tag and thinks nobody would come out in open to report his activities, after all, he is in this industry since last 20 years. But I am really very thankful to all members of MailerForum for their support. I am sure nobody would have believed me without their support.
P.S. It’s not a crime to make mistakes. Best of us make mistakes in life. Russell is not my enemy. I still respect his achievements and knowledge but that doesn’t give him any right to de-fraud people this way. Time in again he blocks people this way and comes out with “against my company’s policy” explanation when they question him. Let’s make sure he doesn’t do that with anyone again ever.