Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
29Prime – Would you Buy a Used Car From These Guys Let Alone SEO?
This is a cautionary tale to 29Prime’s remaining 8000 clients. If this company abuses their own Google Places listing imagine what they might be doing in your name.
Let me be upfront with my bias.. 29Prime is not one of my favorite companies. And I have in the past commented on their abuse of Google Place’s reviews to hide the reality of who they really are. But reader Dave Middleton pointed out that in addition to abusing Google Places’s review policy they are also abusing the Google Places Guidelines as well by adding a tagline to their business name in their Places listing:
Their claim of having served 20,000 clients, while an abuse of Google’s guideline against tag lines in the business name, is an interesting one. Linda Buquet pointed out one of their recent PR releases where they claim to have a current client base of more than 8,000 small business owners. The article notes that they were founded in 2010 (although their website notes a start date of 2007 and the domain was claimed in 2008).
If we take their most recent word at face value (Tough I know but..) and assume (for the sake of simple calculation) a May 2010 founding we can get a sense of their churn. They have lost 6000 customers a year. It would appear that they have lost 1.5 clients for each one still claimed to be under contract.
Still curious I wanted to see who actually owned the building that they show on their website as their presumed location so I typed their address into Google Maps to look at the Streetview of their location.
OOOPS. Turns out they violated another Places guideline and claimed their listing at the local UPS Store. The address, 2233 West Balboa Blvd # 115, Newport Beach, is the same one used in their Whois record and their website. This was no accident.
Still not convinced about 29Prime’s ethical behaviors? The image of their HQ on their website appeared to have been photoshopped so I dropped it into Google image search to see what I found.
Surprise! They seemed to be “occupying” the Unisys offices at 9701 Jeronimo RD Irvine, Ca. They may in fact be at that location occupying some space but the building most definitely isn’t labeled as 29Prime and they are but a renter. Hmm, stranger and stranger.
To any client of 29Prime: If these folks can’t get their own marketing story straight, how can you expect that they will get yours straight? They are obviously violating Google Places guidelines, run the risk of being suspended, are gathering fake reviews and are photoshopping images on their website that have one intention, to imply that they are more successful than they really are. Their churn rate is at best disturbing. They are willing to “cut corners” (to say the least) on their own marketing, can you really trust them with yours? Or will your listing end up suspended like theirs is likely to be?
Just for the record here is the image from the website and an unretouched image of the same location reflecting the actual occupant. It appears that they didn’t even take the time to take an original photograph and just used the one from the Wikipedia article on Unisys. They did appear to have adjusted the colors.
How many corners can one company cut?
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
97 Comments
The real point behind this is the question of whether or not 29prime has the ability to manage local listings for small business owners.
29prime is violating Google Quality Guidelines on their own local listing.
29prime’s use of a mailbox address other than their physical address promoted on their website doesn’t make any sense considering NAP.
Nonetheless, 29prime also operates under Reliable Places. Another name photoshop’d into the same building found on their job recruitement.
The strategy behind all these “reseller” agreements is to circulate their cancellations and merchant agreements.
Make sense?
This page says it all. Look at the compensation towards the bottom of the page.
http://www.reliableplacesrecruiting.com/Employment.html
@Dave Middleton
Everything made sense until you said: “The strategy behind all these “reseller” agreements is to circulate their cancellations and merchant agreements.
Yep Dave another photoshop job.
This one is even better. ReliablePlaces now is on the building!
BIG and BOLD!
http://img1.uploadscreenshot.com/images/orig/5/14306431159-orig.png
@Linda
Thanks for the other photoshop job…. wondering how many other SEO firms have a similar photo.
Oh and 2 obviously fake reviews on the Reliable Places Place page.
http://g.co/maps/dns4t
They both review other 29 Prime locations.
@Mike
When one of the alter ego’s receives a client cancellation, the cancellation is then retained by another alter ego through a separate sales approach. Often times the alter ego making the new sales approach will goes as far as to discredit the services of the previous alter ego in an overall confidence game – even though directly related!
In time these alter egos will close down because they have been black listed by Visa/MasterCard for excessive chargebacks. The head of the snake is always in business because the alter egos are the ones taking the hit. Profit is streamlined back to the snake head in the form of IP fees.
Its a vortex.
@Dave
Thanks for the explanation. Yes I think you have detailed their modus operandi…I wonder if the alter ego offers up a discount to the client that cancelled… How do you know that this is the process?
Check Trustlink reviews on all alter egos dating back to the original posted reviews – they are all the same. Trustlink doesn’t care about duplicate review postings?
Interesting.
From one of the reviewers Linda referenced:
http://goo.gl/po6TY (R)
SEO firms (?):
http://goo.gl/maps/HtXh (Place Fuel)
http://goo.gl/maps/Kdyu (29’search.com)
http://goo.gl/maps/vBi4 (29′ Maps)
http://goo.gl/maps/N29o (29Local)
@Dan
There is a phrase in Spanish: sinverguenza that has no direct translation into English but is something along the lines of “without shame”, “brazen to the point of absurdity” that seems to apply in this situation.
Have you noticed that they have removed everything from their place page listing?
And that the edits occurred 2 days after your post they marked the place as “Removed”? Coincidence? 😉
@GH86
It is likely that Google picked up this data from one of their data feeds.
Those other companies are either
a)resellers who are using the 29prime platform
b)an alter ego created by the company due to enormous bad press and the desire to call as many leads as possible
“reliableplaces” is their telemarketing scheme coming out of Irvine. When the sales people sit in training, they are told explicitly that they are NOT 29prime, they are ‘reliable places’..however 29 prime also operates out of there as well. i also saw they were trying to pilot another one of these programs but it looks like they decided against it.
YELP so far (and this site) have the most honest reviews, since they cannot administratively change the reviews. Trustlink, yellow pages, and many others can be manipulated by there side. Yes, they do BLOW UP the feeds with positive reviews, but it’s more so a ‘SEO Technique’-they want current positive reviews on these sites so sites like YELP get pushed back on the search engines. I think they are aware that no one believes them but they try to flood YELP with these reviews the moment a negative comes, so it looks like the negative is a “false” review and hoping YELP will screen it out.
What scares me right now about this place is that they’ve partnered with another company to provide jobs for Veterans…in theory great, but when the job income is completely based on how well you can sell a product that doesn’t work AND is a complete scam, it’s scary to think where those vets might be in a couple months after working there.
29 Prime provided me the impetus to start my business when I worked for them several years ago. Then they were called “Reliable Listings” (which I will not link to benefit them). Those interested may start Google that and follow the threads from there. Quite a journey!
It is a classic telemarketing boiler-room setup. Robo-dialers and “closers” who floated around the room ready to jump onto a call if a prospect was even close to expressing an interest.
I truly believed in the service, if only they would/could execute it. But they would’nt/could’nt. Clients called me day & night (I always provide my cell # to those I serve) complaining of their lack of execution and even answering their customer service phone lines. I tried to resolve problems with “Customer Service” myself and was basically told to “F%$# OFF!”.
I cannot and will not hurt hard working people (or their businesses) especially in this (or that) economy. So I quit and started my own company, (949) Local. After a couple of years I moved to an office at 26040 Acero in Mission Viejo, CA. Ironically, 29′ was across the parking lot. I hit their website and noticed the exact same theme and design as when I had worked for them years before (Hello, Russ). Ironic how things turn full circle.
I now attend lots of offline networking groups in Orange County CA and occasionally one (or more) 29′ new recruits show up full of “vim and vigor”. They don’t last long. Gone after a few weeks.
Because of thieves like 29′, our business has de-volved into one predicated upon an inter-personal relationship. Good for me, actually. Relationships take time to develop. I have the time, and I know outfitsl like this don’t have the patience. Yet in the meantime they (and dozens of their kind e.g. aliases) have bilked another couple hundred small businesses of their lifeblood for the promise of their dreams. Shame on you, 29′ Prime!
What we do is not “rocket science”. It just takes time. Patience. Some deductive reasoning. But this is more than the typical small business person can spend to navigate the Internet marketing ocean. We do this for them and are gratified with our success, and theirs.
Utilizing the “best practices” for my clients, (much of which I have culled from Mike, Andrew Shotland, and David Mihm, among others), my firm now enhances the business and lives of our clients and we are well pleased.
The 29′ Primes of the world will continue to steal the dreams of many but ironically, it has born my dream: to enhance the lives of those I have yet to meet…one business at a time.
Thank you Mike for your guidance and education! You have spawned the “Anti-29 Prime”. At least I am working hard at it.
Great article! Very true, everyone in the industry knows about these guys. They have changed the name of their business several times to avoid paying employees. Also please fix the margins of your site in chrome, thanks.
Holy cow, have you looked at your blog on Safari, Firefox, or Chrome on a Mac? The text extends beyond the white text area all the way to the edge of the green on the right hand side. And THAT seriously undercuts your ethos on web matters. No?
Dan-
The fact stand regardless of whether my WordPress theme has heartburn. You can chose to think they are important or not. Your call.
Unreal, is all I have to say.
I was also defrauded by 29’Prime
Hello,
Thank you for your blog site.
I am emailing to let you know that I also was a victim of 29’Prime.
I was called by 29’Prime on April 17, 2012, and given a sales pitch that they could place my website on Google Page 1 (for a minimum of 3 out of 10 keywords) and of course I was a little doubtful, but I listened to their guarantees (“Rank On Google Page One in 60 Days…or IT’s FREE”.
So I decided to try them out.
Their initial Set-up charge on my credit card was $299.
The following day, April 18th, they called me to remind me and clarify that I would be receiving a Google Postcard with a 5 digit PIN from Google, and that I MUST call them immediately upon receipt of my Google PIN for them to activate my account and begin the SEO for my 10 keywords.
Again I asked how long this would take, and he replied 3-5 days, at the most, and to make sure that I called 29’Prime as soon as I got it.
I then asked him again, how long will it then take for my site to rank on Google Page One? and he confirmed that it could take up to 60 days, but often some of my keywords would rank sooner, even in 30 days or less.
Again I asked him to confirm that if they could not get at least 3 of my keywords to rank on page one in the 60 days, their service was FREE … and he assured me that the 29’Prime Guarantee was exactly that: “Rank On Google Page One in 60 Days…or it’s FREE”.
Later that same day a charge of $99 appeared on my credit card statement (apparently for the first month’s ‘service charge’).
Four days later I had not yet received my Google PIN, so I emailed them a service ticket…immediately received a service ticket auto-confirmation response…but no one ever personally replied or answered my questions, and no one ever called me to resolve my inquiry!
One month after signing up, May 17th, I still had not received my Google PIN.
Later that same day a charge of $99 appeared on my credit card statement (apparently for the second month’s ‘service charge’).
So I sent another email service ticket…and again I received the same auto-responder service-ticket auto-confirmation response…but no one ever personally replied or answered my questions, and no one ever called me to resolve my inquiry!
19 days later, May 26th, I finally got fed-up with them totally ignoring me and emailed the following:
“I am extremely frustrated and angry at the total lack of service from 29 Prime…
Since my initial payments of $299 on Apr 17th and $99 on Apr 18th, I had waited for 29 days for your postcard with my PIN number to arrive in order to activate my account!
Nothing had come…
Another payment of $99 was taken from my credit card again today, May 17th, and still nothing has been done with my account.
So I had by then already spent $497, with absolutely nothing to show for.
So I wrote you an e-mail with my displeasure and also placed a service ticket (#21928) to get an answer, but no one ever responded!
I was completely ignored…
So after patiently waiting for another 8 days, with no response from anyone human, I received an automatic auto-responder canned e-mail!
Your service is absolutely non existent and deplorable. You should be utterly ashamed!
It is now 38 days and I still have not received my PIN or even one single courtesy or follow-up call from any one at 29 Prime…
This is terribly and shamefully unprofessional behavior.
I have been in the construction service industry 30 years and I personally respond to every call within 8-12 hours, by myself, with no secretaries.
Your total lack of response is absolutely inexcusable and unacceptable.
This morning, May 26th, I finally made a phone call and waited, and was finally told that I was now first in line in the queue when a recorded message directed me to leave a voice message, so I opted for speaking with a service consultant, and waited, and repeated the process twice, and waited, and waited, until finally I could wait no longer and left a voice message…but no one responded to my message either.
I now have come to realize that 29 Prime cannot be relied upon or trusted at all. Your service really stinks!
I am so incensed with 29 Prime…yet I am still by the grace of God restraining my anger…for now…
I actually trusted your promise: “Front Page Placement Or It’s FREE”!
Well the reality and the fact is that I already paid out $497 and 29 Prime has done absolutely nothing for me in 38 days, not even activated an account.
This is absolutely disgusting and totally intolerable!
NOT ONE SINGLE thing was done! An Absolute BIG FAT ZERO?
EXCEPT TAKE MY MONEY !
I thus demand a FULL REFUND of all my monies paid to date…and an immediate termination of any further or future payments ever again.
PLEASE REVERSE ALL AMOUNTS CHARGED TO MY CREDIT CARD IMMEDIATELY
– ALL CHARGES UP TO THIS DATE – ALL $497 – AND NOT ONE RED CENT LESS –
AND DO NOT EVER APPLY ANY FUTURE CHARGES – EVER AGAIN –
YOU DID NOT EVEN COME CLOSE TO KEEPING YOUR PROMISE
I DEMAND A FULL REFUND – NOW – – IS THAT CLEAR ENOUGH ?
Furious,
—
Peter L Brenner”
Well, as usual… that was totally ignored as well, just like all of my other attempts.
8 days later, June 4th, I sent another email cancellation notice, and again was ignored on my third attempt.
I realized that in 2 weeks they would again be charging my credit card with another $99 for their ‘monthly service charge’ so I then called my credit card company to bar this merchant and stop 29’Prime from taking any more money from my account, and also initiated a dispute to reverse the first 3 charges (total of $497) for NON-PERFORMANCE of so-called services. So Mastercard proceeded to reverse these 3 charges on my behalf. Boy was I relieved!!!
The next day, surprise, surprise! I got an email from 29’Prime …
Never got any responses before this, not even once, until I finally cut them off and got the 3 previous charges reversed…!
They had the gall to sound surprised as to ‘Why I had Cancelled?”
So I sent them a long email with all of the service tickets’ numbers and finally they responded by email that they had closed my account and confirmed that my account was now shutdown.
And yet the “push-button Template webpage” they had put up for my so-called personal account, was still live, and still is today (August 13th, 2012) as of this writing.
Then about two weeks ago the BAD NEWS came that 29’Prime had sent my credit card company a 12 page record of service performance and Mastercard had re-billed my account with the 3 original charges, and I was out $497 …
I have tried several times to dispute these fraudulant charges with Mastercard, but they insist that since I voluntarily gave 29’Prime my card number and agreed to their TOS that I am on the hook…
In order to re-open my dispute I now have to prove to Mastercard that 29’Prime DID NOT perform the service as per their Terms Of Service, by providing an unbiased Third Party letter on that company’s letterhead, providing a documented Second Opinion to the improbability of 29’Prime ever achieving their promises, demonstrating they did not perform the service, and that they violated their TOS…(since I paid for 60 days but nothing at all was done), and only then can my dispute be re-opened, with no guarantee that I will get my money back.
So the long and short is that I have been screwed out of my $497…
29’Prime is a scam and they will try to take you for as much money as they can.
Please beware…Stay away from them like the plague.
I sure would love to get these crooks behind bars, where they can no longer scam innocent business owners, but first must try to help all of us victims to get some of our stolen money back while we still can.
—
Peter L Brenner
Toronto, Canada
August 13, 2012
P.S. I give my express permission for you to publish this story on the site.
It’s distugsting that they now brag about their “Inc 500” awards. This company is given awards to steal money from hard working business owners!
YourLocalMerchant = 29 Prime = RELIABLE PLACES = YMS LOCAL = Russel Wallace = SCAM!
All true SEO experts should work together to produce content in order to rank the proper keywords to expose 29 prime until the DOJ shuts them down!
Picked up the phone today and got one of those silly spammy automated voice recordings about Google Places. We get these every day now. Instead of hanging up, I listened to it:
“don’t hang up! Your Google Places listing is at risk of being marked as permanently closed!! If you do not claim your business listing today your business might disappear from Google!!!….” and on it went.
“press one to have your Google Places listing claimed”
And so I did.
I asked the pushy slimy jerk on who picked up the phone – “what company is this that’s calling me?”
A very long pause…..
“what company do you work for?”
“ehndmdia”
“excuse me, what was the name of the company?”
….long pause….”ehound media”
…..silence….
“and what’s this bullshit scare tactic about my business listing being forever market as closed?”
…..silence……
after a minute of silence I hung up.
If you look up the ehound media website you’ll find their address to be in the lovely city of Newport Beach. Is this a coincidence? Of all the cities in the world? Come on guys. Looks like your domain name was registered on July 19th 2012.
4500 Campus Drive Suite #460 Newport Beach, CA 92660 Tel: 949-357-0950
I tried to see the address on Google Maps Street View but for some reason I couldn’t find it.
Honestly if I lived anywhere near these criminals I’d go there myself with a baseball bat and bash in their office windows.
Somebody please shut this operation down before they succeed in ripping off business owners.
Our Digital Media Firm, PinPoint Local, had a personal run-in around March with this “company” and similar fraudulent companies approaching our clients. As a result we wrote a blog post explaining how to determine the legitimacy of these firms. We also recorded the call from one of these firms to increase awareness of these disturbing organizations. If you would like to see our informational post to learn about this, check it out at http://blog.pinpointlocal.com/?p=113 and for the recording follow this link http://www.pinpointlocal.com/Blog/beware.mp3.
Wow, all these years I was riding my bike past such a giant SEO firm here in Newport Beach. I never knew. The clever disguise as a UPS store worked very well.
The people in charge of this JOKE of a company should be ashamed of themselves.
Buyer beware, I only have myself to blame.
I am a prior employee, actually a Sales Manager and I know the ins and outs of 29Prime or should I say Reliableplaces.com or BeeVisibleOnline.com or FrontPagePlacement.com or Parkplace.com or however many more names they go by, because the 29Prime name is damaged and they cannot use that name any longer to promote the company. Their tactics are underhanded, they make completely OUTRAGEOUS promises they cannot and will not ever deliver and they use employees to get sales out of them, have them leave, so they don’t have to pay them the residuals they make from that sale every month. DO NOT work with this company!!! They lie, they steal and they will continue to have a revolving door for employees and customers, because customers are finally getting smart and canceling their service, because they are not receiving what was promised – and the return on their monthly investment. They are snakes!
DO NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS SERVICE! IT IS A SCAM!
I could write a book on the way I have been scammed by this company. But in a nutshell:
• They had the wrong email address for me, so I never never received any email communication or weekly reports for the first year of service, or more correctly, non-service.
• When I contacted by them by email in regard to no communication and no service, they immediately sent me a copy of their agreement and my login information to the corrected email address AFTER insisting that they were sending reports all along for the last year.
• I got a call from their accounting department, asking why I had not paid for my second year of service. I informed him that there had indeed been an automatic draft on my bank account for $1,290 for a second year of service; he insisted that it did not show up in his records.
• I called their customer service department to tell them their records showed me as not paid for my second year and I wanted to cancel a second year of service as I had received NONE. I was passed around from representative to representative who all told me they would look into it, or call me back, or pass it along to a senior manager and he would call me back… which never happened. I never heard from them. I called back several times asking to be connected to these individuals by name, but they were never “in”.
• Since no one would return my calls, I sent them an email immediately through their online system and said I wanted to cancel service, as I had received none anyway for the first year. Finally, in an email, they refused, saying they could not cancel service once it had been paid.
• Getting nowhere and wanting to ensure I was not automatically charged for a third year in June of 2014, I emailed them to officially cancel. Initially I was told that I had to cancel before the payment was made, then shocked to get a reply that I could not cancel now, but had to wait until 2014 to do so. In a later email I was told that I could not cancel until May 2014, one month before service would automatically renew.
• Finally, today I received a call from a “customer service” representative, asking how she could help me! Was she kidding? I had left phone messages and sent emails for an entire week asking them to address my lack of service, their false accusation that I was delinquent in my payment, my request for several months of free service to make up for service that had not been rendered, and to PLEASE cancel service that would begin in June of 2014 . The woman danced around every issue, repeating the same carefully worded responses that did not come close to addressing any of my issues.
If you receive a phone solicitation from 29 Prime, hang up! They want your money, and once they get it, do not feel any obligation to apologize for their lack of service or to make things right.
Thank you all for your posts, we are a call centre business based in South Africa and we have been approached by 29Prime to run a telemarketing campaign for them. We will not be doing work for them
29 prime is the epitome of bad service, with Yolanda ext. 7147 as head of state. in the past 3 months not once have i seen my business on the front page of Google as GUARANTEED. they give me the run around about not having reviews being the leading cause of no clientele turnout. i believe they are a small group of unprofessional hustlers a posing as a corporate business with a select few “employees” to keep up their scam. the avg domain name cost about $10 a year and the guarantee which they are not providing is $89/month. these scam artists must be stopped.
there is no need in my reiterating the above comments as to how the scam took place. i believe… #73 Comment by Jeffrey (68 comments) — September 14, 2012 @ 1:40 pm… summed up their process. can anyone offer advice on how to at least receive a refund from this company?
@Dominique S
Regarding getting a refund, good luck! Others have tried to block auto debits from them to no avail. About the only thing that works is canceling the card they have on file for you.
I worked for these clowns for 2 weeks and left right away. 29crime is a scam folks, they want to charge you about $295 to start plus $200 a month for WHAT? They take a bunch of free and low cost services, and call it one service which is there SEO garbage. There main package which costs about $295 to start and $200 a month consists of:
1) GOOGLE places page(free)
2) Facebook page(free)
3)Twitter page(free)
4) A domain name(as someone stated above about $10 a year)
5) A cookie cutter website that can be loosely related to your business(free, took about 1 minute of effort to make)
oh and if you want to get ripped off even more you can get a upgraded package so they can up-charge you to be listed on tomtom GPS and other services, so now there selling other peoples services and charging you more. and pre-pay a year so your f***ed even more!!!!
so yes they did about 30 mins of work for you that you could do yourself, and want to bill you $200 a month and have you convinced that this optimized your business and that you have to pay for this useless service or they will remove your business from google. oh and my manager explained too that we should report peoples google places pages to remove there businesses and then call them and explain that the business is not listed on google and that they need to be optimized. what the f*** is wrong with this company!!! OH and beware they are also known as many other sister companies/resellers of the 29prime platform, other comments above mine have stated almost all of them already. obviously theres something f***ed up about this business if they have to hide under different names, because one name gets slandered so they pop up with a new one. BEWARE OF 29PRIME PEOPLE WE NEED TO SHUT THESE CLOWNS DOWN!!! THEY KEEP POSTING FAKE JOB OPPORTUNITIES ON CRAIGSLIST AND OTHER JOB SITES CONVINCING PEOPLE TO WORK FOR THEM AS IF THEY ARE A REAL JOB OPPORTUNITY WHICH THEY ARE NOT!!!! DO NOT WORK FOR THEM! DO NOT USE THERE FAKE SCAM SERVICE! YOU WILL REGRET IT!
From whoismind.com – the last line is the best:
“The list below contains all domains related to the email address milton@29prime.com. The list is made of domains using the above email address on their website or in their whois record. We also link domains to email addresses by using our internal algorithm.
The email milton@29prime.com is related to these domains :
1. bigfishsem.com
2. billboardinteractive.com
3. dirtcorp.com
4. dirtventure.com
5. growthsem.com
6. localseomaven.com
7. m5local.com
8. onlineadvertisingmaven.com
9. onlinecouponmaven.com
10. rankingresults.com
11. reliableplaces1.com
12. reliableplaces11.com
13. reliableplaces12.com
14. reliableplaces14.com
15. reliableplaces15.com
16. reliableplaces2.com
17. reliableplaces3.com
18. reliableplaces4.com
19. reliableplaces5.com
20. reliableplaces6.com
21. reliableplaces7.com
22. reliableplaces8.com
23. reliableplaces9.com
24. reliableplacesrecruiting.com
25. reliableplacesrecruiting2.com
Showing only the first 25 domains…”
@Milton,
One of your 29prime sales guys, Josh, reached out to me about a month ago with the subject “I got 24 hour SEO leads, Give me a call”
Josh seemed like a cool guy and a great salesperson. I don’t need leads but I really wanted to know what he was pitching. We chatted for about 10 minutes.
He explained that 29Prime only “has time to manage leads that are responded to in the first 24 hours” and that leaves them with a ton of relatively fresh leads that are kindof just wasted. He offered me the top-shelf leads for only $5 each. How many did I want to buy?
“Hold on a minute,” I replied. “Let me get a clear picture of this. Your sales guys (lead generators) hammer away on the phones, cold calling businesses, and if there is a hot lead, the call is handed off to a “closer”. But if the businesses don’t call you back within 24 hours, you never deal with that lead again?”
“Exactly,” Josh explained. “We’re so high volume that we only deal with leads within the first 24 hours.”
I had one important question: “If these leads are so great, why are you selling them? Wouldn’t YOU want them?”
“We’re so high volume that we only deal with leads within the first 24 hours.” he said.
“Oh.” So we’re talking in circles now.
After thinking about this, it’s actually BRILLIANT! Milton, did you think this strategy up? Not only do you have your core business of scamming business owners every month, you have added a new revenue stream – scamming agencys & your “affiliates” into buying leads that are “really good, but not good enough for you”.
Josh made it sound really good, actually. But it makes no sense at all. None.
How is anyone supposed to trust anything that you sell? I can’t imagine what these leads look like. I should have bought some to check it out.
I signed up contract with them for a year… Now I want cancel my service after 4 months, because no any Guaranteed results have been showed… If I will change my card are they able send me to collection?
P.S. I am sorry, I know my English is horrible..
@Ursula,
Cancelling your credit card is about the only way you can stop the charges from recurring monthly. Yes, it is a hassle cancelling and waiting for a new card. But it is the most effective way to avoid further charges.
Don’t worry about the contract, they won’t sue you. Besides, contracts are a two way agreement. If they haven’t provided the services they promised, they have essentially broken the contract and released you from any obligation to pay them, as agreed under the contract.
I am quite sure that you would have NO trouble documenting the fact that they do not provide the services promised from just this forum alone. And there are other forums you mine for more examples of their business practices.
Post back here if you need specific sources and I’ll send them along.
Thank you so much for your answer.. It made my day… Thank you
Got a call on 1-24-2014 from 29 Prime,a woman that had very bad english,said she was with Google?Then I was transfered to a young man that spoke like he was born in the U.S.A,$149.00 for set up and $79.00 a month,but if I act now he will wave the $149.00,after hearing this,i knew it was a scam,because I Know what it cost to be on the number one top page of Google,I pay $250.00 a month and have 4 keywords!
I worked there for over a year which is about 5x longer then anyone else. Ill put it simply, they don’t mean to be a scam. The executive staff are just selfish and they really just don’t how the hell to run a business.
the CSO, Tony, was a customer service rep, about 5 years ago that the CEO became friends with.
the CDO is a woman who use to do sales for 29 prime and worked her way up in the 3 years the business has been around, and a complete bitch.
the CEO, Russ, inspiring guy, but no business ethnic. Horrible business man, with no respect, and morals. he’s all about the dollar and dosent care who he steps on as long as he can continue to make the payments on his r8.
They pay a guy John, 90k a year to manage their online reputation who’s main job is to hide the negative shit online.
The CDO is the only on with an education, a BS.
They have no idea what they’re doing.
They’ll shut themselves down eventually.
They try to hire good people but the good ones eventually walk out after they really get to know the execs they work under.
they are currently dealing with the IRS and Labor Law issues.
I hope they’re gone soon.
They deserved to be jobless after the amount of people they’ve scammed out of jobs.
Just the other day I got the recorded phone call and transfered to a representative who wanted to sell me a package of any 3 of twelve SEO services on their web site for $29.00 a month no contract and $30.00 set up fee. Their getting desperate. Anyhow, I kept the sales person on the phone while I asked questions and abruptly declined. Minutes latter the phone rings, I find I am listening to an irate representative scolding me for keeping him on the line for 30+ minutes and not purchasing a web package. I hung up. This company is not well organized.
They Called my Small Family owned a/c Company. They said were from Google they want to help us improve our placement to first on the page for a low price of $1050. After they charged my master card they have done nothing for my company.Do not let them steal your hard earned money.
Thank you for your comments about 29Prime. It saved me from making a mistake.
As two additional pieces of information showing that something is wrong, I Googled many of the businesses that were quoted on the “Review” tab of the 29Prime website. When I looked at the websites of these businesses, I found the footer of many of them indicated who developed their website. The sites were developed by many groups but NOT by 29Prime.
Finally, I did not find an address for 29Prime on their website. For a business in general and certainly with the importance Google puts on NAP (Name, Address & Phone) it’s a major red flag to be missing.
I was actually dumb enough to go to work for these scamming, scummy, low life, con-artists. Lasted about 2 months. They steal commissions, they lie to customers, they lie to employees and frankly the people the people in management are just assholes.
Here’s my Yelp review of 29 Prime – http://www.yelp.com/biz/29-prime-irvine?hrid=QpgGmK7GTJDOOjxZ-JkYQA
I just sued 29 Prime in federal district court is San Diego. I sued 29 Prime for Racketeering and violations of the TCPA for telemarketing. The case number is 15 CV 1850 if you want to go on pacer and follow it.
29 Prime is also being sued in the Northern District of CA 14CV00550
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