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Transcript

Buy the Store. We Do the Work. You Collect the Profit. · Money, Trust and Deception

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine being offered a business where almost everything difficult has
• 0:03
  already been solved. You do not need to find a product.
• 0:06
  You do not need to build a website. You do
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  not need to learn advertising. You do not need to
• 0:11
  manage inventory. You do not even need to understand e-commerce
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  particularly well. Someone else will do it for you. You
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  provide the money. Experts build the store. Experts manage the business.
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  Customers place orders. you collect the profit. It sounds less
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  like starting a company than purchasing one that has already
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  been figured out. That was the attraction behind AO Elite.
• 0:34
  The company offered what was described as a done-for-you e-commerce business,
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  and prospective customers were given an impressive reason to believe
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  the system worked. AO Elite claimed it had already built
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  hundreds of online storefronts. Those businesses prospective customers were told,
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  had generated $ 112 million in revenue for clients, and there
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  was something even more attractive. Profit margins could supposedly be guaranteed.
• 1:01
  For someone dreaming of owning an online business, the hardest
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  question appeared to have already been answered. Does this work?
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  AO Elite seemed to have proof that it did. There
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  was only one problem. According to federal prosecutors, Those representations
• 1:16
  were not true. The successful stores were not what customers
• 1:19
  had been told. The $ 112 million track record was not
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  what customers had been told. The guaranteed profits were not
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  what customers had been told. And even one of the
• 1:30
  testimonials used to create confidence had originally been filmed for
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  somebody else. This is built on a lie. True stories
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  of businesses, fortunes, and reputations constructed on deception. The man
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  behind AO Elite was Alexander Alev. He was selling something
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  more valuable than an online store. He was selling distance.
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  Distance between the customer and the work normally required to
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  operate a business. That idea has enormous appeal. Starting a
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  business traditionally requires uncertainty. You choose a product, find suppliers,
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  understand customers, spend money on marketing, solve problems, lose money,
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  change strategy. and perhaps eventually become profitable. The process is
• 2:14
  difficult because the outcome is uncertain. The done-for-you model reverses
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  that experience. Instead of learning how to build the machine,
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  you pay someone who claims to already have the machine.
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  They provide the expertise, you provide the capital. This can
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  be a perfectly legitimate service. Businesses outsource operations every day,
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  but it creates an important vulnerability. the buyer may understand
• 2:37
  almost nothing about the business they supposedly own. That makes
• 2:41
  verification difficult, and it makes trust extremely valuable. AO Elite
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  needed that trust, so prospective customers were shown a history
• 2:49
  of success. Hundreds of stores, more than $ 100 million generated
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  for clients, guaranteed profit margins, those claims solve several psychological
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  problems at once. Hundreds of stores create social proof. If
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  so many other people are already doing this, perhaps the
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  model has been tested. $ 112 million creates scale. This is
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  no experimental operation, and guaranteed margins appear to remove the
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  final uncertainty. Risk. Together, the claims transform the opportunity. You
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  are no longer being asked to gamble on a new business.
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  You appear to be buying access to a proven system,
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  but prosecutors said none of those representations were true. There
• 3:32
  was another piece of credibility. a testimonial. Testimonials are powerful
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  because they appear to answer a question advertisements cannot answer
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  by themselves. What happened to someone who actually bought this?
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  A salesperson can say the service is excellent. A company
• 3:48
  website can publish impressive statistics, but another customer appears independent.
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  They were once where you are now. They paid. They
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  experienced the service. and now they are telling you what happened.
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  Except the testimonial perspective AO Elite customers were directed toward
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  had not been created for AO Elite. Federal prosecutors said
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  the video had been filmed for an unrelated company. Think
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  about what changes when that happens. The person in the
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  video may be real. The words may have genuinely been spoken.
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  The recording itself may be authentic. yet the conclusion the
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  viewer is encouraged to draw is false. That is a
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  sophisticated kind of deception because almost everything you see can
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  be technically real. The lie exists in the context, and
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  context is often what consumers trust without checking. Customers began
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  paying AO Elite upfront. They believed they were purchasing the
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  creation and management of their own e-commerce businesses, but prosecutors
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  said the promised storefronts were never delivered. That created a
• 4:51
  problem for Arlave. A customer can tolerate delays. Businesses encounter problems.
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  Websites take time. Suppliers fail. Technology breaks. Advertising campaigns need adjustment.
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  All of those explanations are plausible, and plausibility can buy time.
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  When customers began asking what was happening to their stores,
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  Alev made additional false representations. Refunds were delayed. The fraud
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  remained concealed. This is another important stage in many business schemes.
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  The original promise brings the money in. The secondary explanations
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  keep the money from going back out. Those are two
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  different sales jobs. First, convince someone to pay you. Then
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  when reality fails to match the promise, convince them to wait.
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  Just another week. Another supplier issue. Another technical problem. Another
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  processing delay. Another explanation. The victim does not immediately think
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  they have been defrauded. They may think the business is late.
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  That distinction gives the operator something extremely valuable. Time, meanwhile,
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  the customer money was being used, not to create the
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  businesses customers believed they had purchased. According to prosecutors, Alev
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  used customer funds to pay himself a salary. He also
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  used the money to lease luxury homes and vehicles. The
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  contrast is important. The customers believed their capital was building
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  assets for them. but some of that money was supporting
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  the lifestyle of the person selling the opportunity. Eventually AO
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  Elite stopped operating. For customers, that should have been the
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  end of the story, but it was not the end
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  of the business model. Prosecutors said Alev created two additional
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  companies using the same fraudulent approach. That detail reveals something
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  important about certain kinds of online business fraud. A company
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  name can disappear very quickly. The sales mechanism can survive.
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  Change the website. Change the brand. Change the logo. Create
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  another company, but keep the same promise. That is possible
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  because the real product is not the storefront. It is
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  the dream behind it. And that dream has an enormous market.
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  Passive income. The phrase itself is powerful. Money that arrives
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  while you sleep. A business that does not require your
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  constant attention. freedom from an employer, freedom from an office,
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  freedom from trading hours for money. None of those goals
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  are inherently unrealistic. Businesses can eventually produce relatively passive income.
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  Investments can generate income. Systems can be automated. Employees can
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  operate companies, but there is usually a missing stage in
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  the fantasy. Someone has to build the system first. Someone
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  has to understand it. Someone has to manage the risk.
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  Someone has to know why customers buy. and someone has
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  to notice when the numbers stop making sense. The done-for-you
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  promise removes the buyer from precisely those activities. That convenience
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  creates a paradox. The less involved you are in the business,
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  the harder it may be to know whether the business
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  actually exists in the form you were promised. You might
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  see a dashboard, but who controls the data? You might
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  receive a revenue report, but can you independently verify the transactions?
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  You might be shown successful stores, but who owns them?
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  You might watch testimonials, but were those customers actually customers
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  of this company? You might be promised a margin, but
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  where does that margin come from? These are simple questions,
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  yet they are easy to forget when the seller's central
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  promise is that you will not need to worry about
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  the details. Eventually, the federal investigation reconstructed what had happened.
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  The scale was significant. Approximately 100 victims, more than $ 3. 5
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  million lost. Alev pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Then, in
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  September of 2026, he appeared for sentencing in federal court
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  in Virginia. A judge sentenced him to two years and
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  nine months in prison. He was also ordered to pay restitution.
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  His supervised release came with an unusually appropriate restriction. For
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  three years after prison, he would be prohibited from selling
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  products or services on the internet without prior approval. But
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  the most useful lesson from AO Elite has little to
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  do with the sentence. It is about what people think
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  they are buying when they purchase a business opportunity. A
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  storefront is easy to create. A website is easy to create.
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  A company can be registered. A logo can be designed.
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  Products can be uploaded. None of those things prove there
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  is a functioning business underneath them. A functioning business requires customers. margins, operations, demand,
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  cash flow. And a reason the economics continue working after
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  the person selling you the opportunity has collected their fee.
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  This leads to one of the simplest questions anyone can
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  ask before purchasing a done-for-you business. If this system reliably
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  produces guaranteed profits, why is selling the system to me
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  more attractive than simply operating more of these businesses themselves?
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  There can be legitimate answers. Capital constraints. service business economics, specialization, franchising, licensing,
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  but there should be an answer, and it should make
• 10:02
  economic sense. Another question is even more important. Can the
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  track record be independently verified, not screenshots, not testimonials selected
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  by the seller, not numbers printed on the seller's website,
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  talk to actual customers, verify ownership of the stores being
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  presented as examples, Ask for results that can be independently confirmed.
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  Understand what happens when a store loses money. And be
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  extremely cautious whenever the word guaranteed appears beside the word profit.
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  Business involves risk. Removing work is passable. Removing uncertainty is
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  much harder. AO Elite offered customers a shortcut through both.
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  Pay the fee. Let someone else do the work. Collect
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  the result. But according to the conduct that led to
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  Alev's conviction, customers were not purchasing the automated businesses they
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  thought they were. They were purchasing a story about those businesses.
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  The statistics made the story convincing. The testimonial made the
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  story human. The guarantee made the story feel safe. And
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  the upfront payment made the story profitable. for the person
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  selling it. This is built on a lie, because sometimes
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  the easiest business to sell is the one where the
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  customer is promised they will never have to learn how
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  the business actually works.