Caution: Beware of Fireballs

are there any regular readers out there?  anyone who might know about the whole upstart blogger and twitter/genesis rocket debacle?  a few?  well, good.  if not, check the archives for a refresher.

the short story is that over the last year i followed, became entangled with, and then uncovered all sorts of unsavory things about mister ashley morgan and his blog upstart blogger, about which i’m writing a book.  the sad thing is that i actually learned a lot about blogging in the process, but the downside is that he’s a scam artist and one of his cons is/was Twitter/Genesis Rocket, about which i wrote, then purchased, then exposed as a scam and a recipe for how to create a twitter spam account.  the good news is, i can’t imagine this new thing works anymore given twitter’s increasing crackdown on spammers, but the bad news is, no one’s told mister morgan, and he’s back at it again.

it came to my attention today when i suddenly saw two incoming links from comments i’d posted on upstart blogger from august and september 2009 on my wp-stats page.  given they weren’t there yesterday (and they weren’t, i’ve been checking since my traffic suddenly peaked with my post about the “test it and keep it” ipad scam).  i scanned the post for any link to me and saw that it was just my old comments.  but something else had changed on the posts.  he’s gone through, more than once, all the posts on upstart blogger replacing “twitter rocket” with “genesis rocket” and then “twitter rockstar” and then some other crap i can’t even remember, but this time he’s done the switcheroo again and the new name is “twitter fireball.”  (anyone following his blog will know there’s been a fire theme of late.)

let me make this as plain as possible:

Twitter Fireball is nothing more than a rebranded version of Twitter Rocket.

this is obvious when you consider that the promotional copy written about Twitter Fireball is almost identical to the copy for Twitter Rocket, then Genesis Rocket, with a few minor modifications here and there.

Twitter Rocket is a scam.  the method itself is not a scam, it works fine — it works fine, that is, if your goal is to build a zombie following of marketers and other spammers and add no value whatsoever to twitter or the blind hordes of followers you’ve raked up from the depths of twitter sludge.  no, the scam is the air of legitimacy that Twitter Rocket, and then Genesis Rocket given to it by the author and his untouchable PageRank 7.

Twitter Fireball is the latest attempt at reaching the success and level of income (at the expense of hundreds, if not thousands of marks — myself included) that he tasted briefly at the height of Twitter Rocket (before he got hit by EMI lawyers by posting about Lilly Allen and, simultaneously, have several of his own twitter accounts suspended for suspicious activity).

run far and fast.

after posting a half-hearted apology for some of what he had been caught doing the first time around, he’s trying to build up the empire again.  scrolling down to the bottom of the Twitter Fireball page, you’ll see that it’s an “upstart fireball” product.  (sound familiar?)  a google search for “upstart fireball” brought a wordpress site running the default theme on sonicfireball.com (his twitter name du jour is @morgansonic).  sonicfireball.com currently has all the content from upstartblogger.com that has to do with making money, and — as far as i can tell from a brief scan — not much else.  the tagline is “making money since 2009.”  the intent is fairly obvious.  this is going to be the hub.  he’s setting it up and he hasn’t launched it yet.

upstartfireball.com itself is being parked currently, but, having dug up all kinds of dirt on him back in december and january (that being the pretext to my book), i recognize the parking page as being a domain registrar he’s used in the past.

let me say it again: Twitter Fireball is a scam.  Do not purchase Twitter Fireball.  If you want to be a spammer, fine, whatever, by all means give ashley your $97.  twitter will deal with you eventually.  if you have any intention of using twitter for what it is — a social network and communication platform — run far, far away.

and, ashley, i know you’re reading this.  don’t think i’ve stopped working on the book.  i would just like to say thank you — this adds more fuel to the fire with which i can complete it.  fireball indeed.

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