This is an intriguing story about how I got scammed online. I wasn’t the only one and it wasn’t the only time. I know it is not a good subject to talk about as they say but I really want people to know about the nightmare I lived.
You will have to excuse how long it is. I was going to break it up but I want to make sure you all get to read it all at once.
I recently posted a Blog about how not to get scammed. But I had already been. I mentioned it happened to a friend as well with a different situation.
I wrote this years ago and never published it. This happened in 2013 the year we were all going to be rich. I hope you enjoy this. I really needed to write it and I did years ago. I have come so far and have never given up. With a story like this, I think you would have.
Life with Profitable Sunrise. I know this may be a little bit of a bad subject but someone has to talk about it. Someone has to talk to someone that knows exactly how you feel when you say the words “Profitable Sunrise”. Most people you talk to are your immediate circle and what you hear from them is “I told you so”. Oh, how we wanted them to be wrong.
If you don’t know what Profitable Sunrise is or was you will in just a bit. You will see what something like this can do to someone and decide whether you would ever take the chance that I and many others took.
In December 2012 I joined a program called Profitable Sunrise. It was designed by 2 brothers and I won’t name them in my blog. They said they were Christians and just wanted to help us. They gave us the opportunity to lend them our resources for them to be able to run their own business which involved lending money to businesses at an interest rate of 3% a day every day for the term of the loan. In turn, he would return to us a reward for lending him our resources at 2.15% a day for 170 business days. Not including weekends and holidays.
So I looked over everything and said ok I’m putting 100 dollars in. I would if I was at the slot machine but with having a child with Autism has really cramped my trips to the casino. I have saved myself a fortune in casino trips. So why not take a gamble.
The thing is it was supposed to be a gamble. But it was more than that. When you go to the casino and you look at the slot machine you don’t make a personal connection with that machine. The machine doesn’t say to you I am going to help you. I am going to give you lots of money and change your life. It doesn’t say hey tell your family and tell your friends put money in here I will change their lives too.
The slot machine doesn’t hold weekly calls showing you all the things you can do with your money. How you can maximize your earnings and then join in 2 different private ventures that will handle your money and give you peace of mind. The slot machine doesn’t tell you that you are going to do just fine. I will pay you for years to come. NO RISK.
Here is the rest of my story. When I joined of course. I knew this wasn’t real. But you have just as much chance walking into the casino or playing the lottery. So if I didn’t give it a try then I would be kicking myself later. So like I said I put in $100.00. I watched my account grow. The first day I had $2.15 added to my account and the next day it was a few cents higher than that.
It got addictive seeing me get richer with every sunrise. So I put in another $100.00 a couple weeks later. My account doubled in rewards. Next thing I knew by the end of February I was nearing $300.00.
We had a group leader that was a former beauty queen and she was the leader of a charity ministry. She had a Pastor in her organization that took over helping her with the group. Weekly calls and webinars. Webinars that took over 3 hours. The group was growing fast. In one of the webinars, they showed us how to set up multiple accounts. They showed us how we could get the same amount of money month after month by opening up 8 separate accounts for eight months. They even told us that if we put 30.00 in that in 2 years it would be 1.5 million. So now I opened accounts for my 2 kids and my stepson. They would be able to go to college. Plus my one boy has Autism and I wanted him to be able to never worry where he would get money. I even opened an account for my son’s baseball team. I really wanted to help them get their field together. They have no lights on the field. It was something I really wanted to do. It is all about giving. That’s what the leaders told us.
It was a saying that was always used. It’s all about giving. I love to give. But I rarely have enough to give. Many nights I sat with friends and family talking about how cool it would be to hand someone a 100 dollar tip. How fun it would be to mess with people’s minds. Just because you could. After all, it wasn’t your money, to begin with.
If you wanted to be safe you could keep compounding off for 47 days and you could withdraw your original contribution. So you wouldn’t have lost everything. Then you turn it on and get higher rewards for the remaining days.
I want to know why I am using the safe terms when describing something that is not there anymore thanks to many that just couldn’t control the greed. They had to plaster ads everywhere and get the attention of everyone. Explain the program the way it wasn’t meant to be. Even with the constant internet patrol of Profitable Sunrise members to protect what we all had.
They had a button on the site where you could actually give money to a member. There was also a place to give to the groups charity. That charity was doing well too. And people were giving. We were all having a great time. We never got sleep at night especially on the night of a webinar when they were showing you with an excel calculator made especially for our group.
With these calls and webinars that took up every Saturday and I remember Tuesdays and Thursdays sometimes Friday it became a part of our lives. We were living the dream. We were all going to make it. We had to tell others about it that we cared about. I didn’t care if I got a single person in on the internet I just wanted to help my family and friends.
With the information that we were given in the form of webinars and videos, I was able to get 3 friends and 3 family members in. Not to mention the accounts that I made for my family. The amount of members and the amount of money was growing in big numbers by the day. It seemed like everything was going great.
So I decided to put my money up for the Long Haul plan. Then I put in some more. We were showed how we could turn so little into so much. I put in 1200 this including my daily award and commissions from friends and families deposits and just a little bit of my income tax. We were told that what we put in would be matched and given back to us on March 25th. It was called an Easter Gift. The Easter gift then changed to April 1st. I knew that was going to happen for some reason. I was making a joke saying it was an April Fools.
So through the days I saw my money go up and up. I was getting a higher rate and I had more money in this time. I was making over 50.00 a day and I was feeling better. I was doing more around the house. I was less stressed about bills in the future. We have a loan hanging over us that is almost 160 grand and a family pay back at 20 grand and another at 7 grand. I joined network marketing to help pay back some of these debts. So far I am in the hole. I was doing this all the time. Ignoring my friends and family to do nothing but sit on the computer and market. Getting nowhere. A few bites here and there but nothing to brag about. I was feeling better and doing more spending less time in front of my computer.
We received updates and emails from the leaders and the owner telling us everything was going great and they looked forward to the Easter Gift. It was a lot of preaching scriptures on our calls and we weren’t all Christians. We were all the same. Just trying to make it out there and it seemed we had finally got our break. Profitable Sunrise had been since 2009 and it was still going. Some people had already cashed in on 3 terms. They went out of their way to show us how this program was sustainable. How we could be paid our Easter Gift without a problem.
Then one day North Carolina had a problem with Profitable Sunrise and asked to see some documents or just register in their state. Then I started to get nervous. We were told everything was fine. We were told the owner would do right by us. I knew that there was no way the US Government was going to let us participate. We were told it didn’t matter because it was offshore. Then more and more states and some countries joined in on the fight with Profitable Sunrise and we received a letter from the owner saying the IRS says we must pay taxes. So from now on only Bank Wires. We were starting to sweat it out but we were told we were ok that the owner is doing the right thing.
I was having nightmares. I would wake up in a puddle of sweat. I never really knew what it was I was dreaming about. I just knew it wasn’t good dreams. I was consumed with what was going to happen. But I kept on thinking about all the assurance we had gotten from the leaders and the owner. Everything was going to be ok cause the owner was going to do right by us.
Well then here it goes with the joke on us. One day I logged on and it was all gone. I was told the site was down for server migration. But it would be back. There were special calls telling us everything was ok. Even a girl that worked for Profitable Sunrise support was on the line telling us everything that was going to happen. She said they were changing the site making things better for us and more secure and they were hiring 150 people just for the US support. So everything sounded good.
Then the next thing I knew some guy was dedicating his time to making a site talking about Profitable Sunrise going down and how we were scammed and set out to make it miserable for everyone who joined. He just wanted some exposure of his own so everyone would come and join him in whatever he did. He may even still have the Profitable Sunrise counter on his site. Counting the time that the site has been down. He was mean and said so many terrible things. He doesn’t even think about who he may be hurting. He was running after the leader of our group and tracking her down to see if her stories were true. She was very angry and got on a call and told us not to listen to this man. He is just trying to get attention to his business and that he had been stalking her and her family. So we got a couple more updates with no word. The group leader who was in contact with the owner has not a thing to say because she hasn’t spoken with him. They blamed it on down servers. But I say what is wrong with the phone.
So by this time you know I was going nuts. I had to tell my family and friends that they were all right. I had lost their money just as they said I would right from the beginning. I was very down and depressed and actually just wanted to hide from the world. I slept all the time I cried all the time. I wrote a few letters to marketing friends that were in it too that I was giving up on everything because I never wanted to sell or involve another person in anything I was doing because it is just losing everyone money. I was not here. My mind was just drifting off. I could not focus on anything and I was still waking in sweats.
But there was still a chance everyone was hanging on to the dream. April 1st was to come soon and we would all get to see that he kept his word. April 1st is my oldest son’s birthday and it was supposed to be a happy day. I even had to tell him that I lost his money also and his dream of going to college and his brother living in Disney was gone for now. But I really wasn’t in the mood to think I could change anything. As far as I am concerned you can and me to the statistic of network marketing failures. I was giving up.
April 1st became the biggest April Fools joke I have ever had done to me. By someone that I didn’t even know. I was so tired and I didn’t care much anymore. I was never going to see all the things that money was going to do for us. Not the Easter Gift so much. It was the end result. In February 2014 I was going to be able to take the entire family to Disney World for a reunion and never miss the money. I would be able to pay back my loans and have enough money to move on our own again and get the services that we need for our son. I wouldn’t have even cared if I made another penny. I really just wanted to have that for us.
Thanks for taking the time to read my long story and if you were also a victim of this scam or any other and want to let others know. Leave a comment below.
Dawn Meyers Author of RaisingAutism.me
Raising Autism 