Pyramid investment scheme worth £160MILLION shut down after taking money from 162,000 people

Traffic Monsoon, which is run by Charles Scoville, claimed to make people money through online advertising ‘AdPacks’. Mr.  Scoville, an American “entrepreneur” has a history of similar schemes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission stated that “Traffic Monsoon’s advertising business is an illusion designed to obscure the fact that it is offering and selling a pure Ponzi scheme” . “Over 99% of Traffic Monsoon’s revenue comes from the sale of AdPacks”.

“The company has virtually no other revenue from any other source”.

ADPACKS

Everyone who joined bought AdPacks at $50 each (£38) and was required to click on 50 banner adverts each day, staying on each for five seconds. It’s this online traffic that members were told would generate income, but it didn’t.

In April, PayPal notified Scoville that his business had the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme  and in time froze the company’s funds – approximately $61 million. Scoville continued to sell Adpacks even though he couldn’t pay anyone.

The PayPal freeze ended on July 11, and Scoville transferred $25.6 million out of the PayPal account into a separate Traffic Monsoon account and immediately transferred $21 million of those funds into his own personal account.

He attempted to transfer additional funds out of the PayPal account, but PayPal stopped this.

Scovile continues to maintain his company is genuine and posted he on Facebook – “For those of you who read the report and wonder why I moved funds from the business account to my personal…it truly was to protect those funds”.  Some people still believe in him and a petition has been launched on Change.org to raise money for Scoville.

The company has taken in $207 million dollars in actual cash, but on paper Traffic Monsoon had generated $738 million dollars in revenue.  Clearly that extra revenue does not exist and only by continually increasing the number of new members buying adpacks could the scheme continue to pay out, until its inevitable collapse.

Had the SEC of not stepped in, Scoville and the funds may have disappeared.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.