Streetwise Publications, John Harrison

off_to_market

The secret millionaire... and a DVD refund riddle (by Tony Hetherington - This is Money/Mail on Sunday)

Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday's ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket.

R.B.writes: I received a mailshot from Streetwise Publications, offering a DVD for £147, which they claim can earn me up to £25,000 a month for just a few hours’ work each day. What surprised me was Streetwise’s statement that there could be ‘No Refunds’.

I thought this was in contravention of mail-order rules that protect customers by guaranteeing a full refund if they are not satisfied and return the product in good condition. If not illegal, isn’t this at least unethical?


Streetwise Publications, based in Rotherham, is a long established marketer of what it might call ‘business opportunities’, while others including myself would call them ‘easy money schemes’.
As with all such schemes, you have to ask yourself why Streetwise’s own staff stick to their jobs instead of raking in the riches. The only logical answer is that the real profits lie in selling the sizzle and not eating the sausage.

The mailshot signed by Streetwise boss John Harrison paints an interesting picture. It claims the DVD was meant to be secret, with only 19 copies in existence until Harrison ‘had an illicit viewing’. How did he get hold of the DVD? Apparently Streetwise had sold a different DVD, and when the customer returned it for a refund he sent the secret DVD by mistake. What Harrison saw when he watched it was a private lecture given by an unnamed millionaire to a small audience.

He now says: ‘To say I was blown away would be an understatement. I can’t recall feeling so excited before.’ He adds: ‘Put everything else aside that you were thinking of doing in the wealth creation zone. Shelve it all. This video could make you rich.’
Harrison says he convinced the secret millionaire to let him sell copies of the DVD, and now we come to the point of your letter.

He says the millionaire insisted on no refunds. He explains: ‘I have to tell you this guy hates refunders. He considers them weak beyond belief. They cannot take responsibility for their actions and want to be protected.’

And Harrison adds his own opinion that it would be ‘a total insult’ for anyone to request a refund. This is a ‘take it or leave it deal’, he emphasises. But there is no explanation in the eight-page mailshot of what the DVD really offers, so how can anyone be expected to give up their legal right to a refund if it turns out to be nonsense or unworkable?

I put this to Harrison. I also asked him if it was pure coincidence that his millionaire lives in a five-bedroom property with a huge garden and a Range Rover parked outside – the same description Harrison gave in a different mailshot offering the secrets of a ‘broom-pushing no-hoper’ who made £297,000 in 180 days after buying a mysterious old book in a jumble sale. He told me that ‘the offer with regard to the DVD is very clearly stated’.

But in apparent contradiction he added: ‘Any DVDs returned within the conditions of the Distance Selling Regulations have been, and will continue to be, refunded promptly.’ So it seems the ‘no refunds’ rule does not apply after all.

As for the millionaire, Harrison denied he was the former broom-pusher. He explained that people of this sort ‘tend to make similar purchase and lifestyle decisions’.

But then things turned distinctly bizarre. Harrison told me: ‘Your correspondent RB has never purchased anything from us and has no knowledge of our publications or other products.’ You could not have received the DVD mailshot, because ‘this promotion has only been sent to some of our best customers.’ You told me that you had, in fact, bought something from Streetwise, and by quoting the reference numbers from the mailshot I proved to Harrison that he really did invite you to buy the DVD.

Going from bizarre to even more bizarre, Harrison then told me that The Mail on Sunday should refuse to print your letter. He had done some digging into your personal politics, and he told me: ‘I don’t feel that a national newspaper should provide a forum for someone who apparently holds and promotes such racist, homophobic and anti-semitic views to question the ethical behaviour of someone else.’

I have no knowledge of your politics, but even if Harrison is correct, your letter does not promote those views and they don’t bar you from questioning his ethics. Nor, apparently, would they have barred Harrison from pocketing your £147 if you had forked out for his DVD.

hollydays

No refunds on my advice.
Get -rich -quick schemes are a joke.
The irony of someone who pushes an " unrepeatable offer" , only to come back and say ( yes you've guessed it) he's going to repeat the offer):rotfl:

dacouch

off_to_market wrote: »

Going from bizarre to even more bizarre, Harrison then told me that The Mail on Sunday should refuse to print your letter. He had done some digging into your personal politics, and he told me: ‘I don’t feel that a national newspaper should provide a forum for someone who apparently holds and promotes such racist, homophobic and anti-semitic views to question the ethical behaviour of someone else.’

Sounds like a typical Mail reader so it's a given they would publish the letter

allyhall

By Tony Hetherington - Daily Mail

J.S.writes: You might be interested in the offer from Streetwise Publications, about bank codes that can make you £600 in five minutes. It is one of the craziest mailshots I have received, but no doubt someone will bite as you only need to start with £1,000 to make more than £1 million.

I do wonder why anyone at Streetwise Publications turns up for work. Three weeks ago I reported on the Rotherham-based company’s offer of a ‘secret’ DVD that costs £147, which could show you how to pocket £25,000 a month. Now there is a ‘highly confidential’ scheme that lets you tap a few coded letters into your computer, and, hey presto, hundreds of pounds will appear in your bank account.

According to Streetwise, which has been marketing similar easy money schemes for years, this is nothing less than ‘an insider’s lane to a luxury retirement’. And it only costs £29.95 per month for a ten-month explanation of what it is all about.

The mailshot is supposedly from a former bank employee. He says: ‘My name is Jim Hunt, but to the big-name bank I used to work for, my name is “blacklisted”.’ He explains that he stumbled across the bank’s ‘dirtiest secrets’, including ‘a hole in the banking system’ that legally generates hundreds of pounds a time.

Before being made ‘mysteriously’ redundant, Hunt photocopied the codes and kept them. Now, according to the mailshot, the information he is selling is so sensitive that ‘two UK banks have already blocked their customers from getting this!’

What a load of tosh. For a start, ‘Jim Hunt’ does not exist. I found that a similar offer of ‘secret banking loopholes’ had come from a different company, Lifetime Enterprises Limited of King’s Lynn, Norfolk. And when I took a close look at that firm, the name of one former director jumped off the page: James Sheridan.

In 2005, Streetwise offered seminars at £4,000 a time, teaching would-be mail order moguls how to set up in business. The teacher was Sheridan, and I warned that he had previously used the alias James Edwards in a scam involving a fake arthritis cure.

So is Sheridan, alias Edwards, also Jim Hunt of the bank codes offer? Yes, he is. When I put the evidence to him, Streetwise boss John Harrison admitted: ‘I can confirm Jim Hunt is a pen name used by James Sheridan in collaboration with the co-author on this project.’

Harrison added: ‘James Sheridan was director of a company that made a mistake.’ His health claims would have been legal in the US, but were illegal in Britain, he explained. And in any case, the first instalment of Sheridan’s secret new product can be tried for free as Streetwise will collect payment in arrears. However, Harrison declined to name the two banks that supposedly stopped their customers applying for Sheridan’s secrets.

When I reported on Streetwise a few weeks ago, I revealed that Harrison had tried to persuade me not to print a letter from a reader who was doubtful about his DVD offer, because, Harrison claimed, the reader was a homophobic racist.

This time, his response was equally bizarre. When I invited him to comment, he replied: ‘Let’s hope JS isn’t linked to Operation Yewtree!’ (the police investigation into alleged sexual offences linked to Jimmy Savile and others). When I asked if he really knows that you are a suspected child sex abuser, Harrison retreated, saying that linking you to the investigation ‘was quite clearly a joke’. The man’s idea of a joke clearly matches his idea of money-making schemes. Both are best avoided.

artbaron

Is that bunch of BS artists still going? I remember them sending me a load of unsolicited guff about 12 years back, typical get rich quick garbage.

allyhall

Another great from Tony Hetherington - Daily Mail

Ken or Jeff – who is the real ATM man?

Secret bank codes are not the only area in which people connected to Streetwise have more than one name. The company promoted a scheme called ‘API’, which it described with the claim that a ‘controversial Government move releases free money every Wednesday’.

Streetwise pictured a man named Ken Kingstone at a cash machine, and advertised that he had claimed £11,827.20 in 24 hours.
However, the same scheme was marketed in the US, where the man at the cash machine was said to be Jeff McBride, and his takings were exactly the same, but in dollars and cents, not pounds and pence.

Does Ken Kingstone really exist? Is it really true that he made £11,827.20? Streetwise’s John Harrison was evasive, saying only that ‘pen names were used in this promotion to make a clear differentiation between the UK and US versions of the promotion, the latter of which we had no involvement with.’

He described this as ‘all perfectly normal’, but if Kingstone does not exist, doesn’t this mean he did not really make the mountain of money claimed in Streetwise’s advertising?