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ISWhistleblower

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Dec 14, 2019
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Do you know how many internal and contract staff they have used over the last year?

We are 125 full-time employees here. Don’t know too much about contractors.. There are 2 companies overseas and few dozens freelancers, bloggers, influencers..
 
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MakMac

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Jun 19, 2019
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We are 125 full-time employees here. Don’t know too much about contractors.. There are 2 companies overseas and few dozens freelancers, bloggers, influencers..

And for core staff like yourself...would you estimate the average annualized salary was more or less than $50,000?
 
G

GuestUser4aMPs1

Guest
I work for Income Store in the digital marketing department and I found this forum because I was looking for more information about the current situation of the company.

Something is not right. The managers are cancelling the meetings, the tools I’m working with are no longer working because of no payment and our contractors stopped delivering any new content more than a month ago.

The traffic on the websites I manage abruptly declined and no one shake a leg. Few days ago they moved some of the websites on new servers, canceled the credentials and didn't issue new ones so basically now I don't have any work to do.

Things don’t look good at all here.

Last week I finally received my paycheck after multiple delays but I think is the last one and I’m already searching for a new employer. I'm frustrated with this company and I have multiple proofs the managers lie to me.
Username checks out.
 

tiffanyclark

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Dec 15, 2019
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I'm a contractor, one of about 100 who haven't been paid in a month. Some of us are going to food banks and are about to be homeless because Income Store has been our main client for years. Merry Christmas!
 
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Last edited:

ISContactor

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Dec 16, 2019
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I work for Income Store in the digital marketing department and I found this forum because I was looking for more information about the current situation of the company.

Something is not right. The managers are cancelling the meetings, the tools I’m working with are no longer working because of no payment and our contractors stopped delivering any new content more than a month ago.

The traffic on the websites I manage abruptly declined and no one shake a leg. Few days ago they moved some of the websites on new servers, canceled the credentials and didn't issue new ones so basically now I don't have any work to do.

Things don’t look good at all here.

Last week I finally received my paycheck after multiple delays but I think is the last one and I’m already searching for a new employer. I'm frustrated with this company and I have multiple proofs the managers lie to me.
I am a contractor for Income Store and they stopped paying us 4 weeks ago. We are owed tens of thousands of dollars. When we’ve asked for our pay we’ve been met with awful attitudes from the execs and owners. Kerry Courtright was particularly nasty. She threatened to sue one of us for slander and stalking. Nice lady.

There are more than 100 contractors in the SEO Content division. It’s lovely.
 

Tiffany Clark

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Dec 17, 2019
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I was a contracted writer with Income Store. They were a month behind in paying us, and the communication from the company was terrible. However, last week, Ken contacted me personally and asked to reach out to other people on the team. As of 12/17, we've been paid. Some people are awaiting full payment due to a Paypal issue limiting the company's cash flow (Paypal does this sometimes if you send too much money in one day).

What I know is that for many years, this was a company that treated its employees and contractors very well and paid on time. I loved the work I did for them. I hope they get their issues ironed out so that we can all get back to enjoying our work there once again.
 

MakMac

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The group of about 100 contracted writers have been paid! The company had a little setback but they're working to fix it.

"Little setback" Not paying their entire customer base for 4 months...counts as a "little setback" in what spin zone?
 
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CareCPA

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I'm curious how many of these new accounts are Income Store employees/owners/investors trying to put a positive spin on things...
 

transient

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Dec 5, 2019
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Some of them were what I would guess is real and just got edited later on. They were initially straight complaints. They just got paid finally so now they have incentive to not help sink the ship. Then again they if they were content writers on my payroll I know what content I'd pay them to write ;)
 
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Tiffany Clark

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Some of them were what I would guess is real and just got edited later on. They were initially straight complaints. They just got paid finally so now they have incentive to not help sink the ship. Then again they if they were content writers on my payroll I know what content I'd pay them to write ;)

It's not like that. Contracted writers (I'm one of them) got paid what was due us but we're no longer contracted with the company and have no expectation of being contracted anytime in the near future. If reviews are being inflated, I promise you it's not by us. To suggest that writers are being paid to leave good reviews is patently false. Note that unlike many people here, including you, I'm transparently participating in this discussion in my own name. I'm easy to find. Feel free to find me and question my credibility.
 

transient

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It's not like that. Contracted writers (I'm one of them) got paid what was due us but we're no longer contracted with the company and have no expectation of being contracted anytime in the near future. If reviews are being inflated, I promise you it's not by us. To suggest that writers are being paid to leave good reviews is patently false. Note that unlike many people here, including you, I'm transparently participating in this discussion in my own name. I'm easy to find. Feel free to find me and question my credibility.

I mean you certainly can't speak for what all writers are doing. No more than I can speak for what any writer is actually doing. I made it clear my post was just conjecture. There was a misunderstanding anyway as I was trying to talk about the posts on this thread that got edited once the people got paid. At least one has been edited. As to glassdoor, a slew of positive reviews got posted a while ago which bumped the negative reviews off the front page. Can I prove who wrote those reviews? No but the timing is interesting. It's good that you behave with integrity. Not everyone does. I certainly try to.
 
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Tiffany Clark

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I mean you certainly can't speak for what all writers are doing. No more than I can speak for what any writer is actually doing. I made it clear my post was just conjecture. There was a misunderstanding anyway as I was trying to talk about the posts on this thread that got edited once the people got paid. At least one has been edited. As to glassdoor, a slew of positive reviews got posted a while ago which bumped the negative reviews off the front page. Can I prove who wrote those reviews? No but the timing is interesting. It's good that you behave with integrity. Not everyone does. I certainly try to.

I can absolutely speak for all writers on this, which is what I was referring to: no writers are getting paid to post reviews on Glassdoor. Period. The company is over.
 

MakMac

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I can absolutely speak for all writers on this, which is what I was referring to: no writers are getting paid to post reviews on Glassdoor. Period. The company is over.

The Company is OVER -- is news. Ken Courtright is claiming just a temporary work around situation.
 

Bekit

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Tiffany Clark

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Google is a wonderful tool. I suggest you guys go play with it and see what you find. Try a few search terms like "income store" and SEC and receivership.
 

Merging Left

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This is what you get from incomestore.com now... looks like game over to me.

29504
 

ISWhistleblower

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Dec 14, 2019
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Company is in done. everyone was told not to come back.
I confirm. Besides that, the Securities and Exchange Commission - SEC raided our offices and took the books and computers for investigation.
 
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MakMac

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Jun 19, 2019
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SEC site doesn't list any mention of litigation

But a buddy sent this gem.

Which was a link to a video message from Ken Courtright to Site Owners.

With the IncomeStore.com already offline, this web based video will disappear too in a matter of time. And its better to see sweet blah blah nothings in the cold light of black and white text. So for posterity here is a transcription of the video message:


“Hello Site Partners -- many of which include my friends, my family and even my parents."

"As you know from Friday’s letter, Income Store is in a very tight spot. Prior to David Kelly coming aboard, decisions were made that hindsight now shows would be made differently. For these decisions, I am terribly sorry. And I terribly regret having to ask you for 4 months forbearance especially the week before Christmas.”

"As President and CEO at the time, I take full responsibility. As recent as last Monday, we had opportunities in place to avoid that letter going out. As a week long discussion was under way to sell 10 - 40 % of Income Store to a well known company. Clearly those plans fell through."

"This short video is to provide some answers as to what happened. Some insight into the plan forward and reassurance that -- unless forced to -- a restructuring / bankruptcy is not in our future."

"To start, as many of you know, from 2012 to 2016, we battled Google algorithms and were in a constant dance of 2 steps forward and 1 step back. In addition, as many have received one, if we failed on a site we have always replaced it with another. In 2016, we made a hard charge at Facebook-driven assets as they were providing us traffic and revenue the likes of which we had never seen before. As witnessed on our case study videos, some of these assets were earning hundreds of thousands of thousands of dollars per month. Many of you are intimately aware that a year or so ago we had an immediate seven figure monthly loss when the government mandated Facebook to turn off their paywalls due to selling everyone's data through the paywalls. This kick in the teeth by Facebook drove us to seek a platform that had no algorithms, no paywalls and no review system."

The only platform offering no algorithms, no paywalls, and no review systems is that of e-commerce with the leading platform being Shopify. As I shared on our Christmas state of the union last year, our first 22 Shopify stores launched the first week of January. I showed that they went from $21,000 per week to $100,000 per week in the final week of March. This new growth model showed growth opportunities 15 percent better than our Facebook driven assets. We proceeded to build and buy what is now 422 Shopify stores.

David came in and added multiple artificial intelligence driven hubs to cross reference store inventories in the model like Amazon. I greatly underestimated the cost to build, market and manage the digital stores. This past summer I created a fund-raising packet that was passed 4 months on to one David Kelly. David shared that as much as you needed cash you moreover need leadership that understands scale. As all your current models are based on one off builds.

David shared that if I could commit to raising funds, he would come aboard and consolidate, automate and streamline all operations in under a year. The changes David has made so far are immeasurable. In the 4 months David has been aboard, he has successfully consolidated, automated and streamlined a portion of every division in Income Store. David has lived up to his end of the arrangement. I have not lived up to mine.

Outside of receiving a few merchant cash advances, I was routinely receiving bad news from traditional lenders. We recently hired a fundraising manager. He shared with us the reason no traditional bank was interested was their underwriting laws regarding our multiple MCA loans.

He shared that there is a type of lender that only lends to companies that restructure. He showed that if we restructured our MCA loans and found a way to receive a periodic forbearance from our site owners, our funding opportunities would change dramatically. On Wednesday I left New York with our MCA loans completely restructured. Last Friday and again yesterday, we unfortunately had to send out the letter requesting 4 months forebearance on payments to site partners.Because of the quick response from many site partners, as of this morning we have good news from multiple funding options.

With the understanding that none of the 4 options is exciting, if we can urge each of our site partners to pick one of the four options, we can go forward with our plan of monetizing all 422 ecommerce stores, growing our legacy portfolio aggressively, and most importantly cross-marketing all assets to maximize the 10s of millions of visitors we receive each month.

So if I am hard to reach, please forgive me. And please pardon me, as I and the team are working tirelessly around the clock to recapitalize your websites and this company to remedy all issues. I’d like to state again, we are making every effort possible to avoid bankruptcy. If we are forced to go that route it has been shared with us our plan will get approved but site partners might not see anything for years.

I urge each partner, recognizing that none of the options are desirable, to please choose whatever option is most bearable as we can’t choose our go forward plan until we see how a majority of the responses come in. At this time, we are doing everything we can to start payments as soon as possible. I will never forget your patience and cooperation. To our future success. Thanks in advance for working with us.

Your friend Ken.


I'll let the communication "stand" on its own reserving my comments for another post.
 

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