I distinctly remember the night I came across Chris Campbell's "Big Money Millionaire" site or whatever the domain was that it was hawked on.

I had just recently been studying marketing & sales fundamentals. As everyone knows or as heard at one point, the "sizzle" sells the steak. Not the steak itself.

You look on the menu at McDonald's. That's one sexy ass burger. Compare it to what you actually get & you're not as excited as you were when you saw that steaming fresh hotness of a burger in the neon billboard.

So to with this 23 year old, Chris Campbell. His video right there showing exactly his merchant account and all the income laid out. I'm very tech savvy as that's what I do for a living -- these kinds of videos cannot be faked, at least not easily, not by a schmaltzy 23 year old.

Enter EDC Gold

I called the phone number listed on the website. I got someone else, not Chris. Let's call him "Jay". Jay told me that he was Chris' business partner, that Chris wasn't there (even though that's what the website made it look like, that I was calling Chris directly)

But since Chris seemed hard to get ahold of (I mean, counting all his money and taking dives in it, Scrooge-style, must be hard work), I was willing to let this slide & work through Jay, though I still expected to hear from Chris as soon as he got some free time on his hands.

Work Sucks, You Know?

I've seen some posters here poo-poo about how some people expect to work a 9-5 and retire a millionaire (when that rarely happens), and meanwhile things like EDC seem shady or only "work" for all but a select few.

You know what they call that, kid? Life. Thems the breaks, kiddo. You either make it or break it out there in your own, with whatever sh*tty hand you were dealt with in life. (or relatively lucky one, for that matter)

So, I can't stand working at a place after about 6 months - 1 year. It just gets really boring & old after a while. I'm definitely meant to be an entrepreneur in life -- so many of us are. But it's not easy.

So Chris' message spoke to me... but I knew, I just felt, that there had to be something shady going on.

But you know what? And this is sad, sad to admit this, I was willing to compromise my integrity and actually schlock this crap if I could just have a teeny, tiny fraction of the success he has had.

I had racked up a lot of credit card debt and was looking to get out of it (still am, though I'm better off now). This would be a way to pay down my debt, get a little nest egg & then work on other stuff full-time.

Hook Line & Sinker

So I was in such a hurry to signup with EDC Gold and start my cash quest, that I plunked down the $997 to Jay, never having spoken to Chris directly. Jay explained the whole deal. I had heard of "2-ups" before, but didn't really know too much about em. I'm definitely the kind of guy who will Google the crap out of something before I make any big moves. Part of the problem was that EDC was just starting up, so there were hardly *any* negative sites on the web about it yet.

Jay explained to me that I would simply do what he had done. I understand franchising & that the best way to succeed as a "franchise" was to replicate the system. i.e. you get the McManual on your desk, you don't throw that out the window & re-invent the wheel. You follow it to the letter, at least for a while, because a lot of bright people have optimized this stuff over time.

That's how I viewed my experiment, and honestly, I wanted to see the inner workings of one of these kinds of operations. How much of a scam was it? How much of it was legit?

But of course, I wanted to make a decent chunk of change from this thing as well (my goal was $10-20k at least).

Building Momentum

So I was supposed to get this "replicated marketing site" that was exactly like Jay had, the one that "sold" me. Instead it was some piece of crap, nothing like I had seen & signed up for. After all, his site had hooked me -- I wanted the same thing, not some cheap imitation that's only good enough for second-rate downlines.

Being savvy with HTML, I actually pulled down the entire site & started hosting all 10-15 pages on my own domain. The only differences were my custom phone # and URLs throughout.

Instead of the links saying "Call 888-123-4567 and ask for Chris (or Jay)" it would say "Call 888-555-1234 and ask for Chris (or __me___)"

I also started buying AdWords on related topics and driving targetted traffic to the site in whatever ways I could.

When you googled "Chris Campbell", which I would think, any normal person would do after reading about this kid's story and wondering if he was legit, one of the sites said "Official Site of Chris Campbell". Well Holy F*ck! How am I supposed to compete with that?

Won't everyone just go to that site, and signup there? So I started using that language in my AdWords campaigns for the "replicated site."

Oh boy. What happened next was funny, and really pissed me off. Chris emails & calls me threatening me with copyright infringement of all his materials. Eventually his hot head cools down & he talks to my upline, who explains what I had done & that Jay had said it was okay. The one thing they said I'm not allowed to do is use "Official" or anything like that in AdWords campaigns.

Ok fine, whatever. This left a sour taste in my mouth around Chris (who came off like a total dick of course), but I had a lot of $$ and time invested at this point and didn't want to back out just yet. (yeah I totally understand why he wouldn't want ME saying I have the Official Site, but still, the whole idea is we get a site just like his... anyway)

The AdWords campaigns persisted and I actually spoke to about 15-25 people about EDC Gold. Most were callins (these were the best), but I also tried some of their "home business opportunity leads" which were just a joke. It was clear from speaking with these people, just about all of them, that they were not very tech savvy at all. I had a huge advantage here because I already knew about all this stuff and could setup websites, etc. in short order.

These poor saps were clueless, and just wanted to make some extra money so they didn't have to work their sh*tty jobs anymore, or escape whatever problem they were facing at the time (debt, medical bills, etc).

Coming to a Head

Eventually what brought the whole thing to a head, was Chris was still basically pissed that Jay and I had taken, really, his main marketing site and co-opted it as if we were really him.

This, in my mind, was the one hook / piece of leverage we had as deep resellers of his personal money-making brand, as it were. As others have stated in this thread, what's to stop someone visiting a David Dubbs marketing partner site, only to eventually track down the "Real" or "Official" D. Dubbs site and signup directly with him? That's what I'd have done if I knew what I was doing.

Anyway Chris sent another series of angry emails & voicemails, and I had just had enough with this punk. I just wanted to make a few k, and meanwhile he was so freaking greedy he couldn't even help his marketing partners by leveraging the same tools he used to make all his $$$.

All for the Best

It was all for the best though, my upline was willing to give me a refund. He even offered to let me "skip" the 2-ups that would've been due to him, so that if I had been able to bring someone in, I'd see that cash into my pocket immediately. The whole thing was too tainted at this point and I just wanted to get my money back as quickly as possible.

I even called my CC company and canceled the card I had used, to ensure that no future recurring billing's would go through at all for all the related EDC services I had signed up for.