If you want to get a sense of Jesse Willms at his absolute peak—the wealth, the lifestyle, the aura of swaggering invincibility—then the weekend of November 12, 2010, is where we want to begin. That Friday afternoon, resplendent in a lustrous violet button-down, Willms packed half a dozen friends into a private plane on a frosty Edmonton, Alberta, tarmac and jetted off to Las Vegas. En route, Willms uncorked a bottle of Dom Pérignon and passed it around so everyone could take a swig. Then came the shooters: for the men, Jack Daniel’s; for the women—three leggy brunettes and a statuesque blonde—Smirnoff with Red Bull. Soon enough, off came Willms’s shirt, as often happened on festive occasions. After landing in Las Vegas, the group piled into a titanic silver limo and made for the Encore, where they checked into an $8,000-a-night, 5,829-square-foot duplex suite—a favorite haunt of Prince Harry. For the next two days, Willms and his entourage danced atop nightclub tables, shopped at Tiffany, went for thrill rides, and caught an Usher concert, all before flying back to Alberta in time for work on Monday morning.
Of course, for an ascendant young tycoon like Willms, a flashy weekend in Vegas hardly registered as a noteworthy event. In those days, Willms spent quite a few of his off hours celebrating in grand style—carousing at the Playboy Mansion, racing Formula One cars—and with good reason. At only 22, without even a high-school diploma to his name, Willms had forged himself into a veritable e-commerce titan, with footholds in online auctions, health products, data services, and more. His company Just Think Media may have been the most successful Internet venture no one had ever heard of: in 2009, with just 20 employees, it earned more than $100 million in revenue. Few entrepreneurs, past or present, have ever built such a lucrative company so young. Not even Mark Zuckerberg could match the achievement; in 2006, the year he turned 22, Facebook reportedly grossed just $48 million. Basking in the neon radiance of Vegas, his eyes steely and sure, Willms looked like a triumphant mogul poised for greater triumphs yet.
But though this trip was routine by Willms’s standards, anyone familiar with his affairs likely would have been amazed that he had the nerve to take it at all. Even as he and his friends struck cocky poses and fanned stacks of cash at each other’s cameras, Willms knew that he was the subject of an exhaustive investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. And what this investigation would determine, essentially, was whether Willms, the white-hot e-commerce whiz, was actually one of the most egregious scammers in the history of the Internet.
In May 2011, after a year-and-a-half-long investigation that tracked his cash streams all the way to England and Cyprus, the FTC filed a sprawling lawsuit against Willms. The agency’s allegations were enough to drive an icy spike of fear into the heart of anyone who has ever typed in a credit-card number online: between 2007 and 2011, the lawsuit claimed, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print. In just a few months, Willms’s companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones.
If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)
On Web sites small and large, from backwater message boards to reputable news outlets, these sorts of ads have been appearing for years—long enough that most of us have learned to see them as the background static of the Internet. Because the work-at-home schemes and mango-based colon cleansers they peddle are so obviously fishy, the companies that promote them are seldom spectacularly profitable. Willms, on the other hand, used these same channels to capture 4 million paying customers and nearly half a billion dollars in sales, all at an age when many people are spending their work hours upselling the Never Ending Pasta Bowl at Olive Garden. “There are others doing similar things,” Ben Edelman, a Harvard Business School professor and an expert in online-advertising fraud, told me. “But Willms was doing it on a remarkable scale, by all indications as large as anyone—maybe the largest.”
Thus, simply accusing Willms of being a scammer does him a disservice; what he accomplished elicits something close to awe, even among his critics. “Jesse ran what was effectively a phantom empire scattered all over the world,” one of the many lawyers who have been involved in litigation against Willms told me. “His genius was that he was able to make it all function, and make it all look like a legitimate enterprise.”
