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SEC Shuts Down Zeekrewards.com And Zeekler.com After Declaring Company A Ponzi Scheme

By Brett Forman: Subscribe to Brett's RSS feed | August 18, 2012 3:10 AM GMT

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(Photo: REUTERS / Jonathan Ernst)<br>The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina alleging that Rex Venture Group LLC, d/b/a Zeekrewards.com, and its principal, Paul R. Burks, conducted a fraudulent Ponzi scheme that raised $600 million from about 1 million investors.

(Photo: REUTERS / Jonathan Ernst)
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina alleging that Rex Venture Group LLC, d/b/a Zeekrewards.com, and its principal, Paul R. Burks, conducted a fraudulent Ponzi scheme that raised $600 million from about 1 million investors.

Zeekrewards.com was shut down by the Securities and Exchange Commission after the regulating agency declared it a $600 million Ponzi scheme, according to reports.

The alleged scam took money from more than a million customers, the Wall Street Journal reported, and the SEC claimed that the pyramid scheme was on the verge of collapse.

The company was described as a "penny auction website" that went by the names Zeekler.com and Zeek Rewards, according to Myfox8.com, and its headquarters was shut down in Lexington, N.C., after the U.S. Secret Service, the North Carolina Attorney General's office, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating the company's CEO.

According to reports, there were more than 20,000 inquiries filed against the company in the past month, with most of those occurring in the past few weeks.

The SEC said it shut down the Ponzi scheme and froze its assets with an emergency court order, Reuters reported, and Paul Burks, the CEO of the company, settled with the SEC, without admitting any wrongdoing and agreeing to cooperate with a receiver.

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According to Reuters, ZeekRewards.com was created in 2011 as a "private, invitation only, affiliate advertising division" of Zeekler.com, a penny auction website.

The SEC claims that ZeekRewards collected more than $160 million from customers and created a false impression of "extreme profitability."

"ZeekRewards misused the power of the Internet and lured investors by making them believe they were getting an opportunity to cash in on the next big thing," said Stephen Cohen, an SEC enforcement director, Reuters reported.

The company encouraged investors to reinvest money back into the company. However, if investors cashed out at the rate at which they were doing so before the SEC shut it down, instead of reinvesting their money back into the company, it would have quickly become insolvent. The company was about to reach that point, according to reports.

This article is copyrighted by International Business Times, the business news leader