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Hymie writes about IA2000 and internet gossip: Luke, Noticeably absent from this IA2000 was Seth W. from IEG. Maybe he's afraid his next victim will kill him at a trade show. But the chutzpah of Shuster to sneak into this show is even more amazing! Brian Shuster is the founder and head honcho of Xpics Publishing, the infamous net ripoff artists and FTC poster child. Shuster never attends these shows, although his presence is firmly represented by Brull, Piccionelli, Sarno and Vradenburg (his sharks). This is a big surprise since Shuster burned so many webmasters when he suddenly folded his webmaster affiliate program Halloween '98. Word on the streets is that Shuster is in the process of selling his non-adult Web Jump for $12 million (...he needs the cash). Shuster is singularly responsible for bringing the FTC (federal trade commission) into the adult web industry after his bogus free trials where he charged millions of visitors credit cards. Interesting enough, Xpics has never had a booth at any of the internet shows. They were the de facto sleeping giant. The got their start by ripping off Fantasyman (Cyberotica) for half a million dollars (using bogus machine hits to extract webmaster hits). His partner in crime Mario Carmona was seen at the show sneeking off to his suite in the company of porn girl Alex Dane (Wouldn't Mrs. Carmona love to have seen those pics). I believe that you wrote about Alex disappearing from her gig at the Orlando show....because she and Mario never left her suite!! For more info on the famous Brian Shuster reference these sites: http://www.shuster.com/gary/ (brother Gary was the head lawyer for Brian Shuster's empire) also http://www.psnw.com/~radocshu/ (proud parents of the un incarcerated con man) Let me quote from the site: "Our oldest son Gary and his wife Margaret Arechiga live in Pasadena with their two dogs and two cats.Gary graduated Magna cum Laude from Harvard Law School and works for Dewey Ballantine in their LA office. Margaret is an A student at Pasadena City College. "Our middle son Brian and his wife Stephanie live in Lake Tahoe. They got married June 21, 1997. Brian graduated Magna cum Laude from UCLA and wrote the syndicated cartoon Chaos. Stephanie has a degree in Hotel and Restaurant management from Cal Poly Pomona, also Magna cum Laude." You also wrote about the libel/slander with Scott Phillips of Pink Bits. (another Shuster Sham). Scott supposedly published info about Shuster/XPics shaving hits on their webmaster affiliate click programs (ripping them off). Shuster sued Phillips for libel/slander. Shuster almost never allows himself to be photographed or mixes with Webmasters. Xpics at one time boasted 40,000 webmasters in their affiliate program and seven thousand new signups a day!!! I didn't attend the workshop/seminar in the pic, but do know for a fact that Carmona was there along with the entire legal team. Also of coincidence, when Xpics suspended their affiliate program, they redirected most of the traffic to Dumas at Igallery! Coincidence....I think not. XPics and Dumas shared the same lawyers. Maybe Dumas paid off Carmona or ?
Brian Shuster and the XPics Ripoff From RiverfrontTimes.com: Until the fall of 1997, Xpics was a fairly low-key operation. Then Xpics started paying webmasters 18 cents for every person who clicked on an ad. By early 1998, business was booming. Shuster and Carmona set their annual pay at $1.25 million apiece on the basis of projections showing that Xpics would reach $100 million in annual sales. But Xpics couldn't do it alone. The company needed a bank to process its credit-card transactions, and finding a bank willing to take on transactions for an Internet-porn company wasn't easy. Banks assume risk when they process credit cards, especially when consumers dispute charges and demand refunds. If a merchant doesn't make good on refund demands, the bank that processed the transaction is on the hook. And refunds -- or chargebacks -- for transactions conducted over the Internet are virtually automatic if a cardholder disputes a charge, because no one physically swipes a credit card or signs a receipt. In essence, a cardholder need only say "I didn't do it" to get a refund. The FTC says Xpics immediately billed customers who provided card numbers thinking they wouldn't be charged if they canceled the service within 30 days. The FTC -- which sued Xpics in January 1999 for alleged violations of federal laws barring unfair and deceptive business practices -- also says Carmona and Shuster charged consumers who never visited the company's Web sites and made it impossible for cardholders to cancel trial memberships. In some cases, Xpics upgraded cardholders to more expensive memberships when they tried canceling by e-mail, according to the FTC. Cardholders who tried telephoning Xpics couldn't get through. It's not clear how Xpics got card numbers from cardholders who didn't visit the company's sites. Xpics settled the lawsuit in July without admitting any wrongdoing. Read On "I know how to run an internet company, and I know how to run it properly and profitably. I know how Internet marketing works. I am an absolute pro at virtually every aspect of running an Internet company," says Brian Shuster as he reclines in his chair in his sparsely decorated, wood-paneled office. A minute later, he upgrades his assessment of himself: "I feel that I am probably the most experienced and most competent chief executive officer of any Internet company." A diminutive -- almost elfin -- 31-year-old, Shuster is telling the story of how, in two short years, he built his Internet empire into a profitable operation pulling in $10 million a month in revenue, and then saw it all fall apart. It's a long story -- five hours long, to be exact -- replete with timely innovations, contentious legal wrangling, and powerful forces conspiring to bring him down. His tale would be nothing more than a wild display of hubris were it not for the fact that so much of it is true. The linchpin of Shuster's empire was XPics, the largest online purveyor of pornography through much of 1997 and 1998. According to Relevant Knowledge (now a part of Jupiter Media Metrix), XPics's network of sites was the top porn network and ranked 19th in overall traffic in May 1998, tallying just under 5 million unique visitors that month -- ahead of MapQuest, ahead of Blue Mountain, ahead of Amazon. A year later, it had all but disappeared.
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