I am sharing with you the following story that I received today about an inventor's experience with a fraudulent invention marketing company.
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I believe the reason that so many people get "sucked" in is because not only do they believe in their invention, but most of the time they are very desperate also. Meaning, they have put a lot of money into it and really need for it to pay off now.
My husband and I came in contact with a couple of these firms recently. They do tell you everything you want to hear and really play up your invention and get you very excited about it.
This all started from a letter that we got in the mail. They wanted around $12,000.00 to market this for us. We are a company that has been in business now for 10 years.
We manufacture and sell earthmoving equipment. We have in excess of $100,000.00 invested. We sell or rent about 10 units a year. Not enough to really keep it going and had decided to let it go recently.
That's when we got the letter in the mail. This person got us very hyped up again and we were ready to let them do what we had just not been successful at.
We had just not been able to market this successfully. We did trade shows, took out ads in magazines, had brochures made, a demonstration video, you name it, we had done it.
It is a good product, very different from others on the market, its just expensive to manufacture and each unit sells for thousands of dollars. Its hard to compete with the large companies who have a "big" name.
The next day after getting so excited, I started looking on the internet and found so much negative info about these companies and warning signs everywhere.
I called my husband and told him that I did not feel comfortable about this and he agreed with me based on what I was telling him. When the company called me back, I was armed with a lot of questions that they could not, or would not give me answers.
I called off the agreement before giving them any money.
So, I now have two companies interested. One of them is an international very large farm equipment company and the other is smaller.
The smaller one is ready to start manufacturing in less that 6 months from now. We are in the process of drawing up a contract with the smaller company now with our lawyer.
The larger company has some very strange wording in a form that they asked us to sign. It says something like that we agree to a "paid up, royalty-free, worldwide licensing agreement in perpetuity".
Our lawyer has contacted them about this and have asked them to re-write this. It took me awhile to get this girl from this company to leave me alone. She was calling my home sometimes 3 or 4 times a day to get me to reconsider.
I knew then that I had made the right decision by not giving them all of that money. Money that our company had, but it still would have hurt to have given it up to con artists. The sad thing is when people who don't have it give it to them.
But, honestly, I just don't see how anyone could give them a dime after doing just one google search.
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