Myth Crusher Monday - You Can Take All People At Face Value (Forum Liars Revisited)

A while back I wrote a post about Forum Liars, where I cautioned people to be really careful about who they trust and when to be suspicious of certain claims people make. It's not always easy because if you're like me, you want to see the good in people. But I tell you, if my "liar-senses" start tingling, I no longer give anyone benefit of the doubt.

If you're a member of the Warrior Forum, you may have seen two liars outed on the weekend. The first was a woman claiming to be a lawyer who was giving out and selling legal advice. It was pretty bad. The second was a guy who, in my opinion, has ALREADY been outted at least 3 times, but people kept believing his lies.

In fact, in that post I mentioned above, I already mentioned that certain someone, without naming names. I figured whomever was a member of the Warrior Forum would know who I was talking about, so I didn't need to mention it.

(By the way: I don't think these incidents are necessarily any reflection on the Warrior Forum. It is a HUGE forum with so much activities and you've got all kinds coming out of the wood work. However, I do believe that in the case of the second guy, they should have taken some earlier action and I'm sad to report that at the time of writing this post, I don't think they've done anything.)

But back to the dude in question. In my previous post I wrote:

Over the weekend, there was a guy on a forum who claimed he made nearly 3 million dollars in the past year and he wrote a post to slyly promote an upcoming product/coaching product, or whatever undisclosed plan he had. He wrote it under the guise of just offering free information and he wasn't selling anything. However, he was collecting email addresses for additional information. But we know people do that every day. Self-promotion is rampant and even though it irks me, it's not the real issue to me. It's the guy's income claim. This is the same guy who, just a month or so prior, had trouble fulfilling some ghostwriting obligations he had made to the forum members. He said his writer took off with the money and now he was going to complete all the orders, but he needed time. Well, if I was a guy with nearly 3 mill burning a whole in my pocket, I'd either issue refunds or get some new ghostwriters on it. Maybe that's just me. What puzzled me is that people blindly accepted his claim...when his history was clear to see in his forum profile. And there were other posts in his profile to throw even more doubt on his claim, but the first doubt was enough for me. And what puzzled me even more, is that some of his advice in the thread was half-decent. Why the over-bloated income claim? Most of the people on that forum are struggling just to make $50 or $100 per day...why go so overboard? Or better yet, why not tell the truth?

Well, here's part of the story, I didn't tell you. This person, who I believe to be a chronic liar who will do anything to cover up what he's done and try to win people back over to his side, sent me an email in response to my blog post that said:

Hello Alice, I was hoping to catch you on the phone, but I left a message anyways. In any case, I wanted to personally talk to you in regards to your blog post and accusations against me. I know you didn't mention my name or website, and it has nothing to do with me being upset, however, it has to do with you not having the full story. You see, after I stopped all my memberships, i had a staff of 12 people, including 3 writers. I had nothing for them to do, so I made a WSO for ebooks for them to write, the WSO did well. I gave each one an even allocation of books. While this was going on, I needed to travel for a while, business related as well as personal. I would keep in contact with my writers making sure books were done and sent. Everyone worked at well except one writer, who kept continously lying to me, and I did not find out until i got back into town. This is when I made my forum post, just to rant/tell people about what happened. I had no problems giving refunds, and I had to personally refund a lot of money out of my own pocket. However, a few books I wanted to complete by myself. Simply because customers were waiting a month and a half for a book, and I didn't want to just refund their money and give them nothing. So, in fact, I refunded money and delivered ebooks to them for free. I personally was only able to get three done, but I had some warriors help that added to a total of 6 done out of the 11 left. I refunded the other 5, apologized and they understood. Basically, I highly suggest you read into a whole story before you post about it. It was nobel and considerate of you not to mention names or websites, because honestly without knowing an entire story, it would be just plain wrong. I have given proof of earnings to Richard Driver, Michael Tracey, Paul Short, and other moderators and administrators of the forum. I do not lie, it would be one hell of lie to make. Futhurmore, I never originally had any website, Richard Driver came to me asking me to do a live seminar for the topic, if you look here www.theliveteam.com you can see he is a part of the project. This is the Personal Message he sent me: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hey Steve! Got a brain fart that you just might think is awesome Let's talk. Skype me at NAME REMOVED or it you want I can call you. This is too A W E S O M E to waste time on. Richard ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I then spoke to him on the phone about the idea. In any case, I'm new to the Internet Marketing Communitty only around 6-7 months old. However, i have been making money online and offline for a few years and my big year in 2006. I never really expected things to turn into all this annoying and frusturating bad publicity, and quite honestly, if you were in my shoes I think you would understand as well. Well, I'm not here to ask you to take down your post, because frankly, it is a good post and makes valid points, however, I'm not the liar here. I hope one day, we could have a business relationship and understanding of eachother. Thank you for your time, Steve Celeste

I never listened to the voicemail, but from what my assistant said it was the same polite tone and explaining everything. When I got his message, I briefly felt a twinge of guilt. What if I was wrong about him? But it soon passed and I realized what this guy is all about and so I never responded to him. See, this is how he operates. He's always very apologetic, has one excuse after another and then he wins over so many of the people upset with him. I did not want to play that game.

Then over the weekend, a new thread surfaces on The Warrior Forum entitled, "Where is Steve Celeste?" Seems that through his self-promotion on the forum, he did set up a membership site (CORRECTION: He set up a payment process for a membership site that did NOT exist and still doesn't exist today) and collected payments. It's now some time later and the members haven't received anything and are now complaining about not receiving refunds.

His posts on this thread include:

• Excuses that he's been MIA because he's been working so hard on this product.
• Public refunds of a few people, so it looks like he's taking care of business (much like he has done in the past)
• Offers to PM information, or "call me if you want to talk on a more personal level" as he wrote to the Alicia woman on the thread...trying to look like he's approachable, yet further posts on the thread indicate he is still dodging people.
  
• An excuse that a refund was delayed because he had to withdraw money from his bank account to add to PayPal.
  

So tell me, where is this millionaire's support staff that should be doing this work? Why isn't his PayPal account LOADED with cash because he makes millions with membership sites?

I don't know, but I think enough is enough. If you have any suspicions that someone isn't on the up and up, do your research and if you're not satisfied walk on by...VERY QUICKLY.