ASD Cash Generator - a network marketing company that buys and sells advertising packages, has apparently been shut down by the SEC.
According to the company, ASD is a “Gateway to Financial Independence.” The company makes money by charging customers fees each month to buy advertising packages that they can they resell. Members can also make money selling monthly memberships to new recruits. According to ASD, purchasers can earn rebates up to 100 percent of their ad cost, and can even earn an additional 25 percent by convincing others to purchase packages for resale as well.
Details of exactly what has gone down are still a bit fuzzy, but from what we can gather, the Florida based company was sued by the Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum. Just last week, the company was raided by the U.S. Secret Service and was shut down by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia who claims that ASD was running a “massive internet based wire fraud scheme.
In the lawsuit filed in Florida, McCollum says that ASD and its President, Thomas Andy Bowdoin Jr, and employees, have conned and defrauded countless people out of money and McCollum is seeking civil damages as well as an injunction against the company, its president and employees to stop them from operating their deceptive business.
The Secret Service raided the ASD office last week and seized the Presidents home. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia called the business a “Ponzi scheme, masked as an advertising company. Nobody has been officially charged with a crime just yet, but the investigation is ongoing and for the time being, the company is shut down. The official message on ASD’s website reads:
–Upon direction from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, ASD will not be able to move funds into company accounts, or out of them. We will work to resolve this problem, and return to normal operation, as soon as we are permitted to do so.
-ASD Management
Bowdoin has not been answering calls, but on a message on his answering machine it says that he will not be making any comments on advice of lawyers. While I do not fully understand the business, something does seem a bit off about the services they are offering, and the amount of money the company has been raking in, is almost unreal. Bowdoin has told officials that he expects sales of more than $100 million this year with ad sales over the first half of the year reaching $40 million. There are over 75,000 members in the ASD network.
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