The latest installment in a series of work at home kits, Ultimate Home Based Wealth (www.ultimatehomebasedwealth.com) makes its debut. As with the majority of these kits the promoters will claim that you don’t need any experience to start and that you’ll learn how to work with leading search engines and social media networks.

What these kits consist of are courses and tutorials in internet marketing. They’ll show you how to promote other peoples’ products through various online mediums. They don’t tell you much information upfront but currently this is the most prevalent method of making money online.

Now there’s nothing wrong with internet marketing, it’s a legitimate method for earning a living and is the farthest thing from a scam. However, the reason that programs like “Ultimate Home Based Wealth” get torn apart by customers is twofold.

First off they never give you the full story of what this opportunity entails and often promote it through misleading ads. They’ll say things like, “get paid to post links on Google” and other misconceptions that convince people this is a traditional job or a series of simple tasks they can do for money.

In reality when it comes to internet marketing you work for yourself and only get paid when your marketing efforts generate enough internet traffic that you start seeing some sales. You only get paid when people buy the products that you’re promoting.

Now the second reason that kits like Ultimate Home Based Wealth get riddled with negative customer complaints is because of their billing practices. In this case they advertise Ultimate Home Based Wealth for an initial trial fee of $2.97. However there’s much more to that than meets the eye

This one takes the cake when it comes to hidden charges and deceptive billing. After you fill in your personal info you’ll be taken to an order screen that looks like this.

Underneath the itemized cost you’ll see some small print which states,

See the full terms of this offer for full details as they explain that if you take advantage of the trial you only pay $2.97 today instead of the regular monthly membership price of $19.71 and the one time join fee of $129.96. If you enjoy the trial please call customer service to provide feedback of purchase at a special discount of 10%, or call the same number to let us know if you do not want to continue or be billed for the program after the trial. Call 1-877-456-2472.

The wording is purposefully vague, not to mention hard to read. If you’re not careful you might get the impression that you’re only paying the $2.97 but if you keep reading and check out their full terms and conditions you’ll find out the truth.

Once you submit your payment information your trial will begin, after which you have 2 days to decide if you want to keep the product. If you don’t cancel within that time then they’ll bill you a nonrefundable fee of $129.96 and will begin monthly charges of $19.71 and a monthly account maintenance fee of $3.85 until you tell them to stop.

Now I hope you’re starting to see why there’s never anything good said about programs like Ultimate Home Based Wealth. Tons of people fall for these without ever seeing these added charges, in this case they’ve made their offer even more sinister by including the nonrefundable clause for the main fee.

It’s clear that they’re simply trying to catch people sleeping at the wheel, realistically even if you did read the terms and conditions how could 2 days possibly be enough time to review all the materials and decide if it’s worth the high cost.

If you did fall for this and want to cancel call their customer service number, 1-877-456-2472, from the looks of things it seems like getting that $129 charge reversed will be a real problem, your best bet will be to report the charges as fraudulent to your bank or credit card company.

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The Home Income Profit System (recently renamed The Home Income Wealth System) is a now notorious internet scheme that claims to help you make money from home. Their make money kit is often promoted through the use of fake newspaper articles and other unscrupulous means.

You may have seen “news articles” talking about a Kelly Richards (who incidentally lives in your area) and how much money she made working online. If you look at the article more carefully you’ll see that it’s nothing but a farce, closely resembling what real news sites commonly look like.

It comes as no surprise to me that Home Income Wealth System is almost a direct copy of previous make money online scams called Home Income Profit System, Home Income Black, and BlackBelt Profit System among others. This sort of tactic is often used by experienced online scammers…

When the customer complaints start piling up they simply give it a new name, move some graphics around, and start over fresh.  This process goes on and on while they continue to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting customers.

If this seems hard to believe just take a look at the two screen shots from BlackBelt Profit Systems and The Home Income Profit System.

Update 09/28/10: The Home Income Profit Kit is now also sold as the “Home Income Wealth System”


The reason why there’re so many complaints against these types of kits is because the companies running them use very shady billing practices.  They offer the program as a Free Trial, charging you only several dollars for S&H, but as soon as they get your credit card details they quickly hit you with a much larger charge.

Take a look at their terms and conditions:

When you submit your order, you agree to pay the shipping and handling fee of $2.97 for your Road Map to Success; please allow up to two weeks for delivery.   After your 3-day trial period, you will be charged a ONE TIME fee of $139.95 for the product that will not be billed again for access to all of the features above. Thereafter, a $4.95 fee will serve as a monthly website hosting and maintenance fee until canceled.

They say that it can take up to two weeks to receive your materials, yet they charge you after just 3 days!  So basically there’s no chance of you having enough time to review the materials and decide if it’s worth the $139.95 + $4.95 a month. Some people have even reported being charged the $139.95 fee the same day as their order.

The other problem with this type of billing is that many people don’t even read the terms and only find out about the true costs when it’s already too late. In addition, lots of people have reported difficulties reaching customer support in order to cancel the trial or get a refund.

So what do you get with the Home Income Wealth System, and can you really make money using it?

Well what you get is several website templates and instructions telling you to promote products from your website. While some marketers do make money promoting products online, you’ll never succeed with the Home Income Profit/Wealth System and here’s why…

They don’t actually teach you how to do it.  The course materials are purposefully incomplete to make it easier for their telemarketers to up-sell you costly coaching and mentoring programs. Moreover, they don’t tell you upfront that you’ll need to spend money on advertising for your website, a tactic that doesn’t always pay for itself and can lead to losses, especially when you’re just learning internet marketing.

This, coupled with the fact that you’re already out over $140 in unexpected charges can be a real blow to most folks.

If these guys really did have a product that could teach you how to make money online then they wouldn’t have to use deceptive billing and false advertising to get customers.  A high value product would make them enough money on its own merit and they wouldn’t have to keep changing the name, not to mention they might actually generate testimonials instead of complaints.

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I was surprised to come across two websites still featuring Kevin Hoeffer and his make money posting links on Google kits.  Websites like www.kevinsmoney-tree.com and www.kevins-money-tree.com were rampant in 2009 until the authorities caught on and launched massive investigations into these fraudulent businesses.

Google itself stepped in and banned the advertising accounts of anyone promoting anything that had to do with make money on Google kits.  These actions seemed to work as these programs disappeared, which makes the reemergence of Kevins Money Tree all the more puzzling, as the owner must know it’s only a matter of time till the sites gets flagged.

Why are The Kevin Hoeffer Money Tree Sites a Scam?

For those who don’t know the back story to this and aren’t sure why these sites are so dangerous let me explain.  Literally everything that has to do with these sites is deceptive in nature: the blog is fake, there is no Kevin Hoeffer, the entire system of getting paid to post links does not exist, and the kits that are sold through these Kevins Money Tree Sites come with hidden monthly charges.

This is why when these sites were in their heyday they generated hundreds of thousands of complaints from customers who got taken into this fabricated story. Ultimately they ended up taking millions of dollars from hard working people just looking to make some extra money.

Realistically the only way to get paid by Google, outside of actually working for the company, is to use the Google AdSense program which pays webmasters for hosting Google Ads on their site.  These can be seen everywhere online from major news sites to popular blogs under the title Ads by Google.  When website visitors click those links the owner of the site gets paid.

On these “Kevins Money Tree” sites the pictures of people holding checks are from this AdSense program, and are used to sell you on the idea that you can make money posting links.  Obviously this is not the case and they’re simply using the pictures to fool you.

Some other deceptive tactics that they use are geographically targeted sales pitches based on your IP Address.  For instance if you visit the site from Alabama it will say Hi I’m Kevin Hoeffer from, closest town to you, Alabama.  I haven’t seen this script installed on these two newest sites, www.kevinsmoney-tree.com and www.kevins-money-tree.com but I know it’s a tactic they used in the past.

Bottom line is stay away from Kevin Hoeffer and whatever Kit of the week is being pushed through his site as you’ll only end up regretting it.

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The BlackBelt Profit System is the latest work at home kit to hit the internet.  This program is being aggressively advertised through many online mediums with highly enticing tag lines, all promising work at home riches.

The website, tryblackbeltprofits.com, uses the standard Google kit template and business model.  This translates to a website that doesn’t tell you much about what you’re investing in, only that you’ll be joining other successful people and that it’s been advertised on CNN.

The other more alarming characteristic that the Black Belt Profit System picks up from the Google kits is the deceptive billing practice.  If you don’t carefully read the fine print before ordering this product you’ll be very unpleasantly surprised.

Here’s what they hope you don’t see:

By placing my order, I agree to the Terms of Offer, which explain that I must cancel within 10 days of today to avoid annual membership fee of $149.95 and enrollment in monthly delivery program. Delivery program ships fresh supply and charges $12.95 monthly. All charges will be charged to same card provided today. To cancel anytime call: 866-445-4241.

They market the kit for a trial period for just $3.95, but based on past reviews of similar products I can tell you that the majority of people who sign up never read the fine print.  In fact by the time most folks notice the monthly billings and large fees they’ve already been charged multiple times.

Even if you do read the fine print and understand the additional charges that are forthcoming the other thing that you need to be aware of is that they start counting your trial from the day you purchase not from the day that you receive your kit.  This basically means that your 10 day trial is really 10 days minus delivery time.

The fact that the BlackBelt Profit System has to resort to this sneaky billing method to extract as much money from their customers as possible is very telling of their product’s quality.  If they had a solid training course of real value then they wouldn’t have to rely on these types of tactics to make money.

These kinds of kits have been exposed numerous times here and on many other websites.  There are always tons of customer complaints ranging from difficulty in obtaining refunds to unhappiness with the actual product.

Bottom line is that courses like the BlackBelt Profit System take basic internet marketing information, like how to be an affiliate marketer and how to post ads on Google for profit and weave them into this messy billing scheme.

The owners of the kit do this for as long as people keep buying their product.  When the inevitable bad press catches up with them all they do is change the name of the program, swap out some graphics, and reinvent the company under a different name.

This is why the BlackBelt Profit System is probably the one hundredth reincarnation of the original Google kit scam.  Since then the only things that have changed is that Google has sued to keep its name out of their advertisements and the FTC has added their own additional regulations.

The only affect that this has had on proponents of these types of scams is that their sales pitch is now even vaguer then it’s ever been.  Again, if you signed up for the BlackBelt Profit System and need to cancel use this number 866-445-4241, if that fails report the charges to your credit card or bank as fraudulent.

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I just ran across an ad for Quick Profit Kit (quickprofitkit.com) and I must say that as far as make money from Google kits go this one stands alone.  It’s clear that the owners of the site have heeded FTC and Google warnings to restrain claims and associations made in their sales pitch, but is that really enough to separate them from the rest of the Google scams?

These so called Google kits have inflicted so much damage on the public that the FTC had to issue new guidelines for all internet marketers to follow.  And because these scammers were using Google’s name to deceive consumers the search engine giant was forced to step in with a lawsuit of their own.

So where and how does the Quick Profit Kit fit in?  For starters,  they’re using the exact same template to sell their information product as the hundreds of scammers who were breaking the law.  The only difference being some minor changes in wording for compliance purposes.

For instance instead of saying “as seen on NBC, CNN, and Yahoo!…” they’re saying “This type of product has been featured on NBC, CNN, and Yahoo!…” also to avoid complications from Google they say “Quick Profit Kit using Google as opposed to implying that they’re offering a job working for Google.

In addition to these minor changes, which some might argue is just an exercise in semantics; they cite a long list of infractions perpetrated by their scammy competitors which they abstain from.  Ironically, the Quick Profit Kit is just as guilty as the companies they lambaste.

So is the Quick Profit Kit Different or a Scam like the Rest?

While they do make an effort to comply with new internet marketing regulations and even set strict guidelines for their affiliates it’s hard to commend them for these actions.  Rest assured everything that they do is for their own benefit not yours.

The reason they want to restrain their affiliates from making outlandish claims about their product is not to protect the consumer but simply because as part of the new FTC guidelines they can be held accountable for the actions of their affiliates.

Likewise they don’t care about making sure that you don’t get the wrong idea about their product, all the changes they’ve made to the wording in their pitch are done simply to keep them from being sued for false advertising.

The real reason why I don’t think the Quick Profit Kit is any different from their scam competitors is because despite all the “good faith” changes they didn’t address the main problem with these Google kits, and that’s the negative option billing practice.

They offer you the kit for a $2.95 trial but if you read the fine print you’ll see that you have only 2 days to decide if you want to keep it.  Afterwards you’ll be charged a whopping $79.86 for every month that you don’t cancel.

Considering that they’re selling information on how to use Google which can be found for much cheaper if not for free this is a huge rip-off.  Moreover, if they were as confident in their product as they claim to be then they’d let you try it out for more than just the unreasonable two days before charging you the full amount.

If you signed up for the kit without reading the fine print you can call this number to cancel, (866)-451-4235.

Another red flag that I noticed is that there seems to be a discrepancy of where the company behind the Quick Profit Kit is located. The domain, quickprofitkit.com is registered to:

983 Washington Avenue,

Los Angeles, CA

but on their contact page they list the address a:

Farend Services Limited

22100 E. 26th Ave. #100,

Aurora, CO 80019

which is fine except that on their false advertising page they list the address as:

Farend Services Limited
3 Athinodorou Street

2025 Dasoupoli Strovolos,

Nicosia, Cyprus

Which is very worrisome as some of the most notorious scams have come out of the country of Cyprus, it also means greater difficulty in getting your money back.

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