Making 2010 Better Than 2009

Making 2010 Better Than 2009

Well I sit here on the first day of January 2010 looking back at what 2009 had to offer. It seems that I was not the only one grateful that 2009 has come to an end. You look at the posting on MySpace, Facebook and just about any other Social Network site and the common posting it seems for 2009 was “Thank God it’s Over”! People commenting that they hope that 2010 is better than 2009. Quite a few people spent the majority of 2009 unemployed but are hopeful that 2010 has more to offer. So with all of this in mind I decided to try to figure out every way that I can to make 2010 better than 2009 was and I am hoping that each person can share their knowledge and we can all help each other to achieve this goal.

So my first thoughts are to learn from the mistakes I made in 2009. One of the biggest ones that I have learned from is that no matter how trustworthy someone may seem or how legitimate they might seem always dig a little further. After I lost my job at the end of August I began looking for work just to find that everyone else is looking as well. There are very few employment opportunities out there and there are even more qualified candidates for each opening. I am by no means an entry level employee having more than 7 years of experience in my field of expertise working at varied levels of responsibility within my field working with high level management, within small to medium to large corporations. Yet with all this in mind I have had not a single request for an interview, a call back I mean I have heard from no one. So when the holidays began to creep upon us in November and we still didn’t have enough money for Christmas for the kids. We had really wanted to give them something special this year as they had really given up a lot over the last several years due to financial difficulties. Hoping that this year would be different for them we set out to find a way to try to make some money online. I have never seen so many scam sights, swearing you can make loads of money if you just sign up for this program and provide them with a little bit of information (which if you read the fine print and research these sites online you find out right away that they or another site with the same basic theme and function are using this information to steal people’s identities, clean out their bank accounts and ruin their lives)……

Any ways the point of all of this is that when we became desperate and set out to make some extra cash for the holidays we came across several sites that were obvious scams. However, then there was one in which the site and the opportunity seemed legitimate in every which way. We were on Craigslist looking at the Gigs, Free Items and Community to see if there were any offers that we could offer our services on. Other than some postings for things we weren’t able to do there really wasn’t a lot offered until we came across this ad for a new website that was launching here locally and the website designer was offering $10.00 per post for the first 10 posting to his site to be paid via Cash, Check or Paypal whichever you chose. So we did some research on this guy and his website and at first glance everything seemed very much in order. He was from right here local in our own city, he had a few friends that vouched for him, he was very good at his scam. The site was designed at several levels, had a lot of options offered, didn’t have a lot of members so you could tell it was as the guy had said a new site. The list just goes on and on. Then the website owner offered us the opportunity to continue with our postings and continue to receive the $10.00 per post to continue to post to the site as he did not get as much response as he had originally hoped for. So we agreed to continue to post. After our first batch of posts we spoke to him about pay for our posts and he was very eager to pay us so that he could show us that he was legitimate and he could be trusted. So we sent him the information so that he could make the payment via PayPal. He came back right away with a stating that he got a confirmation back from the bank and PayPal that the money transfer was being processed and would take 2-3 business days for the transfer to complete. It being the week of Thanksgiving this 2-3 business days for the banks and because of the busiest shopping day of the year we get another excuse that the transfer would go through early the next week. So by this time it had already been a total of 7 days and we were still being told that it should be any day now. Working in retail and financial during this time of the year I could see how it might be remotely possible for it to take a few extra days because of Thanksgiving. So we didn’t begin to really worry about it until almost a full 2 weeks had passed. Once that happened though we knew something wasn’t right here.

So that is when we began to question what was going on? Why wasn’t payment going through? So we asked him….his answer was that this was why he hated dealing with PayPal there was always issues with it. Well this being our first time using it we really didn’t have any experience with it. So he at this point offers to pay us cash and begins talking to me about working for him at the headquarters for his site making $80k + a year. Being unemployed I must admit that this offers sounded great. I was going to help him promote the site, which is something that I have done in the past for other things so I thought I could totally do it. Promoting business is something I love to do. This however was also where I became very concerned that something just wasn’t right about this guy. He did everything he could to try to put our minds at ease, he gave us his cell phone # (however he never answered it but he used it for a lot of text correspondence), offered to meet us and pay us cash because of the payment glitch with PayPal. It was just one thing after another. So by this time we really began to wonder if this guy was part of something else. We started to research him online and by the information he had listed in his profiles and in other various places we were able to find out what his name was. Then we mentioned to him something about another business that we had found that it looked as though he was at least partial owner in and during a conversation this was mentioned and that was when things went bad. He had asked what we were talking about and my husband had mentioned that I had been doing some research on him online as this is what I do, I want to know about the people that I am doing business with. That was when he made the statement that made it very obvious to us that something wasn’t right with this whole situation. He said, “You can’t always believe what you read online about a person and that in the past one of his ex girlfriends got upset about a business deal she lost out on with him and began to post bad things on the web about him” Well I hadn’t found anything like that at all at that point but once he made that statement you can be damn sure that I was going to go and look for it.

After finding out what his real name was as he had told us that it was Kevin Patrick when in fast his full name was Kevin Patrick Preusse. Well when you input that name into Google the first thing that pops up is a link to www.ripoffreport.com . This guy had been pulling different variations of this website scam for quite sometime now. He gets people to help him launch his sites usually it seems right before the holidays each year or two. He has had several different sites that range from him being a talent agent of sorts that can help actors, actresses, writes and such get public recognition either to get their work out their or to get their face or talent out there. He promises that you will get all sorts of results and he has some good websites that make it look as though he is on the up and up. Preusse Productions is the name of this scam. Then he has another scam in which he swears that he has a script that is going to make millions of dollars but he can’t get it launched without some investors and he then asks individuals to contribute amounts of money ranging from $750.00 to $2000.00 from what I have read and been able to gather from other reports that I have read on this guy. Then it seems that he is stating that he has a copyright lawsuit in the works against Michael Crichton regarding a script that he had written earlier. He states that a movie is made up of 90% of his script that was stolen from him. Well this site has been up for several years and I haven’t heard anything about this nor could I find any other proof that the information that he has listed on yet another scam website is true! Then it seems from there he moved on to creating sites and approaching people about posting on his site and helping promote it for varied amounts of money to each person. Then people start to get traffic coming to his site from their address books, their blogs, their friends all the while he sits back and comes up with one good excuse after another why he can’t pay you today or why PayPal is his worst enemy and so on and so forth. Why exactly he is using this scam at this point and what he is really gaining from it is beyond me unless somehow he is getting affiliate marketing payments from it somehow on the content posted within each of the posting of the members of the sites and forums. I am really not sure how much money he could have been making from the site that we were posting too however as there were only 4 members and himself that were posting anything to the site. We posted quite a bit however seeing how it was just the 5 of us. But it really couldn’t have been a huge moneymaker for him. I think that is in part however because we caught him in his scam much quicker than others had in the past.

Since I found out just how many people this guy has screwed over and what type of damage he has done in the past I have decided that I am going to do everything in my power to make it so that this guy is unable to continue to do this to people in the future. So not only will I continue to go after this guy for what he has done both legally and financially. I am also going to continue to research the best ways to research ways to detect fraud within websites, mail and other forms of contact from the outside world. I am going to research where to go if you think you have been a victim of this type of crime. I am going to do whatever it takes to help myself and others prevent this from happening to them in the future. So watch this site for new ways to protect yourself and watch for the launch of a new site set specifically at what has happened, what is happening and what is planned for the future of Kevin Patrick Preusse and his scamming ways!

So check out the different sections of my blog to see what’s going on with each thing. Making 2009 Better than 2010, this section will highlight the things that we do this year marking which ventures worked for us and which ones didn’t and the lessons we learned along the way. Please feel free to submit your stories and advice for others. Then the other section will focus on our adventure in dealing with Kevin Patrick Preusse and his different scams and what we are doing in moving forward with bringing him to justice. Also we will list information as we come across it that will help you to keep yourself safe, where to report fraud, what laws we come across that might help if you have been a victim. So please check back as we will update information as we obtain it.

We wish you all a very Safe, Happy and Prosperous 2010!