Email marketing firm smacked by the SEC

Yes, the SEC. Really.
Apparently the email marketing firm mUrgent, which provides services to the restaurant and hospitality industry also had a side business. According to the complaint filed by the SEC last month, they had an entire boiler room set up to sell shares for their non-existent IPO.
I’d never heard of this firm before, so I did a little digging. First step, check out their website.

Screen Shot of the mUrgent Website
mUrgent website
Overall, it looks like a fairly standard email marketing website. Pretty splash page, appropriate links, it even shares the names of the management team. So what is this with the SEC filing a complaint against the company? I kept doing some digging, and discovered that the principals behind mUrgent have a rather storied past.
In 2000, they were cited for violating securities laws in the State of Wisconsin. This also points out they were cited in 1996 and 1999 in Kansas and Pennsylvania respectively.
An ex-employee outed them on Scamchecker.
And they have their own page on entrepreneurs.about.com discussing how they’re an example of what not to do.
They are not the only email marketers out there that have been involved in scams, only the latest ones. But still, if you’d asked me to look a their email services page I would not have picked out that they were any different from any of the other hundreds of email marketing companies out there.

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