Great job , Klein.
The more I look into this George Ama III character, the more intrigued I get. He is obviously a hustler and quite probably a con man.
In 2002 he was running a business called "The Note Buyers" in Provo, the same Provo, Utah where Vector7 lived. One of his victims posted a report on ripoffreport.com. Interestingly, George talked to this guy on the phone and--get this--assured him that he was a miilionaire. Where have we heard that before? He also claimed to have been investing in notes for more than ten years. George Ama was 31 years old last February (from the results of a marathon he ran in South Carolina) so that would have made him 27 or 28 in 2002 and he would have had to have been buying notes when he was younger than 18. As soon as he got reported to ripoffreports, he decided to give up his business of 10+ years.
What I find most interesting about this is that that deal did not come about by George misrepresenting himself on the Internet, but he talked to the phone for an hour and half with the guy who reported him. Lying about yourself on message boards is one thing, but I think it is another step up to do it while talking. It reenforces my view that George is a cold blooded liar and displays the sort of sociopathy that is required to be con man.
He seems to have bounced through a whole series of small businesses, all of which involve marketing on the Internet.
Maybe I am cynical, but I see his childsafenetwork.org (CSN) as a scam designed to get donations and corporate sponsorship, some of which he could skim off for himself in the form of salary. I also question how successful it is/was. He has a testimonial used by Freedomvoice that Freedomvoice has saved CSN a $100K from its phone operations. That figure in savings would imply that the whole operation had a fair bit of cash flowing through it and beg the question of why George has to sell **** on ebay to make extra money.
Freedomvoice is also interesting. They have crapflooded the Internet with information about their services. Their products are marketed using many different domain names and further information shows up in message forums and Internet press releases. There are so many pages that refer to them that it is difficult to untangle exactly what is going on. My first thought was that the operation appears to be George's Internet marketing tactics writ large.
Many of the of the Freedomvoice sites use testimonials that include quotes from George Ama III. One of their press releases about earnings strangely includese a testimonial by George even though there does not appear to be any reason why it would be included. It is likely that George has/had some sort of relationship with Freedomvoice, probably something other than just being a customer.
Freedomvoice offers phone services like 800 numbers, voicemail, and virtual office solutions. If you have a small, or non-existant, business that needs to have a phone answered by a receptionist then they can provide that. By sheer coincidence, in 2001 George Ama was working for telelawyer.com and his bio notes six years of experience in customer service phone operations prior to coming to work for them. Yes, carbonweasel does appear to have worked at a firm that had something to do with lawyers, but instead of working as a million dollar a year, high powered attorney, he appears to have been running their call service. This coincidence makes me suspect that George worked for freedomvoice before branching out on his own.
George's bio lists a B.S. in accounting from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Utah. Anyone who knows anything about Utah knows that it is rife with scam artists. I have heard, but do not know if it is true, that the FBI's largest white collar crime department is based in Salt Lake City; and it is definitely true that Utah County has more multi level marketing companies than any other county in the entire country.
Freedomvoice has affiliate and distributer offers, but they are not designated exclusive regions. This is similar to many MLM companies where lack of exclusivity makes it impossible to operate a viable distributership. In fact freedomvoice has many ads that seem eerily similar to many work from home scams. There does appear to be some sort of real business that freedomvoice is based on--they have operated since 1996--but again the information is so convoluted that it is difficult to tell exactly what they are doing.
Interestingly, CSN also has an offer for people to set up affiliates in other states, which is one reason why I suspect it to be a scam. I can imagine George doing fund raising in Utah and getting others to do fund raising in their states, kicking up a portion of the money to the mother company. Or maybe that was the plan but it did not work out.
Lastly, his connection to Utah makes him somewhat suspect. He is a mormon and there are a certain portion of mormons that beleive that ripping off non-mormons (gentiles as they call them) is okay. That might be one of the reasons that there are so many MLM companies in Utah, most of which make their money by duping people out of state.
