Making money online at home just by clicking links. Sounds like a fairytale world but this is exactly what the SocialTrade.Biz website was selling to its customers. The recent arrest of its founder Anubhav Mittal has put this website into the limelight and further uncovered the dirty secrets behind ‘like’ marketing.
How does SocialTrade.biz Rope In Customers
SocialTrade is an online social portal registered under Ablaze Info Solutions Private Limited. The website was created by Anubhav Mittal along with his team back in August 2015.The website took use of the like culture. Charging a fee of Rs 5,750 to Rs 57,500, investors were told that they would receive Rs 5 for every link that click.
“Registered under the name of Ablaze Info Solutions Pvt Ltd. in Noida, they used to constantly change the portal’s name”, Superintendent of Police (Uttar Pradesh STF) Triveni Singh stated.
Allegations state that fake URLs were sent to subscribers click. But many would sometimes be links to Facebook or Twitter profiles of other subscribers. All links would be terminated by a fake server.
According to the special investigation done by a local news portal, Devbhoomi News, these clickable links were just to lure subscribers to believe that they are actually doing something to earn money. But in real, most of these links were fake, non-existent or SocialTrade’s owned domains.
Devbhoomi News is probably the first news portal which was making real efforts to expose SocialTrade.biz scam since October 2016.
Here is one of their investigating video ( in Hindi)
How The Truth Came Out
The system came under question after some users weren’t receiving any cash. The website guaranteed money within 21 days. Otherwise, their incomes would increase.
With more than 6.5 lakh users falling victim to the scheme, the troubles only mounted. An FIR was registered at Surajpur police station on January 31 and February 1 at Phase III police station. The STF collected complaints from over a hundred thousand people. Founder Anubhav Mittal was arrested along with two more employees and brought in for questioning.
The Story Behind the Scenes
The SocialTrade.biz was a well-planned project of Abhinav Mittal. Like many pyramid schemes, the website rarely showed stability and trust. As per various reports, the website was transferred to freehub.com in December 2016. It was later shifted to intmaart.com ten days later.
On January 27 the IT department shifted it to frenzzup.com. Last week, the website reportedly changed the company’s name and displayed a W-3 Company banner.
A more critical allegation is that Ablaze was churning out a monthly rent of Rs 7 lakh from which Mittal would transfer Rs 5 lakh. Alexa and net rankings for the website rose sharply ever since the complaints soared and dipped once the arrests were made.
In a country where the Prime Minister stresses on a ‘startup India,’ it’s dreadful to think what effect the scandal would have on future entrepreneurs. But certainly paid investors have come out in support of the company alleging that it was the center of a conspiracy
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