“Deeply Insolvent” Banners Broker to Surrender Assets

It looks like justice is finally catching up with Chris Smith, Rajiv Dixit and the men behind Banners Broker.

Two years ago, I wrote a series of posts exposing Banners Broker, a so-called ‘online advertising broker’, as a sordid ponzi scheme.

I received all kinds of threats, smears and public verbal bashings.

You can read the 2000+ comments from these posts to see just how personal it got:

This week, liquidators obtained a court order to seize all assets owned by Banners Broker International (BBIL), and to force its owners to reveal the whereabouts of money taken from affiliates.

Court papers labelled BBIL “deeply insolvent”, but that hasn’t stopped many affiliates clinging to hope of payment on the company’s official Facebook page.

The Banners Broker website remains ‘temporarily closed’.

bb-closed

BBIL has been granted continued use of telephone numbers, facsimile numbers, Internet addresses and domain names providing all payments are made at the normal price. The website will stay physically online for now (despite being closed), but a host of other BB services including: all computer software, communication services, banking services, reservation systems, credit card processors, payroll services, and armoured car services (lol) are now restrained by the court order.

Remaining BB disciples are being coaxed in to accessing the TalkingBB forum for the ‘full story’ of what’s happening.

Yes, the TalkingBB forum.

Or as I prefer to call it: Animal Farm.

An Orwellian hideout if ever there were such a thing.

To gain access, you must register, post once in a vetted forum, wait for approval, and then swear on your dog’s life not to emit the slightest whiff of negativity or face an instant lifetime ban.

I’ve seen some ‘ignorance is bliss’ circle jerks in my time, but this one takes the biscuit.

Anyway, if you want the real story on why Banners Broker is finished, look no further than the recent court orders.

You can view them here: Banners Broker in Liquidation

They are crystal clear and devoid of ‘trolling’, as court papers tend to be.

Highlights from the Court Orders

Seeing how there are still believers who refuse to accept that Banners Broker’s demise is anything less than Chris Smith ‘making a few changes to the website’…

Feed the Trolls

court-lies

…I thought I’d post some of The Best Bits from these latest orders.

Remember B-Believers: The court is not a troll.

Banners Broker Scam

If Banners Broker was to do something shady, like, I don’t know, completely lie about its sources of revenue or the nature of its clients… then this spells trouble.

Banners Broker Scam

Shiver me timbers. Accounting records? Contracts?

I guess we’re going to find out the truth about where all those affiliate payouts came from.

Banners Broker Scam

WANTED: Video recording.

If only to answer that burning question: is the real Chris Smith black or white?

Banners Broker Scam

And here is why the Banners Broker website is offline.

It’s the last remaining artefact of a company that has, for all intensive purposes, ceased to exist.

Disclaimers

I hate to have to include this, but there is an ongoing rumour that I have somehow profited from writing negatively about Banners Broker.

Some have even claimed I’m linked to a ‘troll list’ of former BB members now trying to claim back money by dragging the company’s name through the dirt.

Troll List

Let me be clear on this:

1. I have not pocketed a single penny from Banners Broker.

I have never been a Banners Broker member, affiliate, or investor.

My first exposure to Banners Broker came through a family member investing her money in it. I was immediately suspicious over whether her earnings could be sustained, or legally explained.

So I investigated the company — the online advertising sector is how I make my living, after all. I can see bullshit for bullshit — but what I found was worse than bullshit:

A shining turd of a ponzi scheme.

A scheme so far detached from how it said it made money that I simply had to blog about it.

2. Neither do I make money by blogging about Banners Broker.

I lose money.

Yes, it’s a waste of my time to be sitting here trumpeting about a bunch of fraudsters who will soon meet their comeuppance. But I do it anyway because I’ve had my name and character slandered by them.

Call it a pastime, if you will.

The second attack against me is that in an interview two years ago, I referred to myself as an Internet scumbag, and therefore cannot be trusted.

Seriously, I shit you not.

This quote has been immortalised in the BB Handbook of Responding to Criticism.

Q: “Hi Finch, tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from, where do you live now?”

A: “Well, I’m a 24-year-old affiliate marketer, which I guess is interchangeable with Internet Scumbag.”

Banners Broker latched on to this quote and used it as their single line of defence against my 30,000+ words of arguments dissecting their dysfunctional, fraudulent business model.

When was the last time you heard a senior director of a respectable company rebuke public criticism by insisting “it’s okay, guys, don’t listen to Finch, he called himself an Internet Scumbag in 2012.”

Well, of course I did.

I’m British.

Self-deprecation is what we do best.

What these MLM guys don’t understand, and I’m talking to the ‘Oh here I am driving nowhere in my rented Mercedes whilst recording a YouTube video about my latest whack-job investment that you should definitely sign up to under my link’ is this: the joke is on them.

I may be a self-professed Internet scumbag, but at least I’m not in the throngs of a mid-life crisis, willingly selling my friends and family down the shitter for a 20% commission.

Now that’s a scumbag.

What’s Left?

Beyond the lunacy, there is genuine tragedy to the unravelling of Banners Broker.

And that tragedy is the many real lives that it has affected, and still affects to this day.

Just last week, a post emerged on Facebook of a former affiliate who couldn’t handle the guilt of involving his family in Banners Broker.

He had encouraged them to set up accounts, with good intentions no doubt. But what are good intentions to a bunch of fraudsters riding high on those deposits? Those lifetime savings, plunged in to a program that is rigged to fail from the very beginning?

This man’s family lost all of their money, and he couldn’t live with the guilt.

Wracked with depression, he hung himself.

This is a terrible story, but a familiar ending to anybody who has witnessed the fallout of other pyramid schemes.

The lies they spread, the false hope they bring, the relentless incentives to involve your friends and family… it’s sickening. And of course, exquisitely executed. A perfect fraud.

Scams like Banners Broker ruin lives.

Even those ardently defending Banners Broker to this day… you know it. Deep down you know that as a ‘get rich quick’ scheme, it’s over.

If you have been affected by Banners Broker, I hope you do three things:

1. Check out this post on Tara Talks. A comprehensive guide to getting your money back. It’s not guaranteed to work given the “deeply insolvent” nature of what’s left of BBIL — but it’s better than nothing.

2. Learn for the future: if somebody promises you life-changing money for doing relatively little — it’s too good to be true.

3. Stop blaming others. The reason Banners Broker has failed you is because it was rigged to fail you from the very start. All ponzi schemes are. They feed the men at the top, the Chris Smiths and Raj Dixits of the world, whilst taking from the poor at the bottom.

Following the story of Banners Broker has been a real eye opener for me.

A descent in to some truly fucked-up minds, not least the havoc they can wreak on those who buy in to pipe dreams too easily.

I hope justice is served, and I’ll be following the Canadian court proceedings with interest.

About the author

Finch
Finch

A 29 year old high school dropout (slash academic failure) who sold his soul to make money from the Internet. This blog follows the successes, fuck-ups and ball gags of my career in affiliate marketing.

19 Comments

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  • Awesome post and an in-depth look at this failure. I don’t know how you find the time to research these things but I appreciate your efforts.

  • Wow. That sucks. There are way too many scams out there. Too bad people can’t figure this stuff out.

  • l can tell you right now the reason why banners went broke is that they
    over paid every body. Instead of paying their affiliates once they end
    up paying their affiliates 3 times the amount.Obviously they lost a lot of money doing this. It was a mistake on BB’s
    part… Are you aware that this happened?

  • I know for a fact that they over paid people, i was one and a friend of mine also! if they over paid us, i can only imagine how many others.. This definitely had a lot to do with their demise..

  • You may have been overpaid, but that has nothing to do with why the company ran out of money. Read the court papers.

    It essentially boils down to: there never was enough money. Because it was a ponzi scheme.

  • I don’t know if any of the same people are involved but I guess they are, please be aware of THE ACHIEVE COMMUNITY

    a Facebook group with membership approaching 20k who pay for matrix positions that are promised to return 800% Payoneer have just pulled the plug but they all live in la la land saying they will be back bigger and stronger. Same old BB story repeating itself.

  • Russ Achieve has nothing to do with BB and is a completely different opportunity.
    They are a Matrix scheme – love or hate matrix schemes, they are legal.
    You are just scaremongering over baseless speculation. 🙁
    Payoneer is pants anyway.. the new processor handles the volume. Do some proper research before deciding what something is or isn’t.

  • Payoneer is a proven genuine company and your matrix is pure fraud for the simple reason high returns are not real – only the victims who believe in fiction are real and their money.All matrix schemes live short but still enough long to produce loss for large majority and that’s the only truth !!

  • yes…like every serious business leader out there…they all just can’t avoid to fall in love with their affiliates…normally 2 times should be enough but probably Chris used Viagra not to disappoint hungry beloved ones

  • Banners Brokers latest court proceedings have enabled the receivers to unfreeze the money held in payment processor accounts and are presently seizing those funds and transferring them into a trust account for future dispersal to creditors. Chargeback is still available, but the window is fast closing. If you haven’t tried already, it is definitely worth a shot. Many thousands of pounds/dollars have been returned to affiliates already. There is also another big PYRAMID scheme around called My Advertising Pays. We have a facebook page called My Advertising Pays Scam, so please drop by. I also have a blog page with info on it. Its another closed loop traffic exchange with crummy ads that are supposed to make you a profit by clicking on each others sites. Stay away!

  • Finch I now your busy man, but please could you do a review on My Advertising Pays (MAPS) another ponzi scheme similar to Banners Broker

  • I love you, I have been crying with joy and laughter and these sentences:

    ‘Remember B-Believers: The court is not a troll.’

    WANTED: Video recording.

    If only to answer that burning question: is the real Chris Smith black or white?

    These are the most amazing funny in-jokes.

    FYI, I invested like $80 a few years back but quickly accepted i’d lost it.

  • Hello Finch– it was my friend who unfortunately hung himself as a result of Banners Broker. It is now 9 months since his untimely death- he would have been 41yrs on the 15th May, and his family and close friends like myself, still struggle to believe he has gone. He had a huge funeral and was well liked in the community here as a motor mechanic. I only hope the likes of Chris Smith and his cronies pay for this terrible action they are responsible for.

  • I know how you feel. I called out JBP calling it a Ponzi and was berated by members. I called BB a Ponzi and was abused by members. Some people just can’t see it for what it is. There are others out there but people think earning 2% per day is achievable in normal online business to an exponentially growing membership. Sorry, no it isn’t. It does not take mush to work out which programs are the real ones but unfortunately those ones do not tend to pay as well. The difference is they will still be around in 5 years time.

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