Leo Shimizu and Prizebook Scam Uncovered!
Posted on 05. Jun, 2009 by $haz in Leo Shimizu, Leo Shimizu and Free Lunch Room, Prizebook
Today we uncover the Prizebook scam that Leo Shimizu tried hard to distance himself from, but as history shows, I won’t let that happen to my favorite Asian scammer!
Lets get one thing straight, Leo Shimizu has always been the owner of PrizeBook. Although they try to deny their ties to Prizebook on July 6th, 2007 (click here to see that), there is enough evidence dating back to the day that Prizebook opened proving that Leo Shimizu has always owned Prizebook.
The first piece of evidence showing that Leo Shimizu has always been the owner of Prizebook is this article from SpinWeb dated July 14th, 2006 (click here to see the article or see the screen shot):
“Prizebook is rewarding its users not only with great prizes but with an enjoyable, hassle-free experience in obtaining them,” said Leo Shimizu, CEO of Prizebook. “We have set the bar high for our competitors and will continue to do so in the future.”
The second piece of evidence showing that Leo Shimizu has always been the owner of Prizebook is this blog post at Anything4Free.com (click here to see that) dated October 23, 2006:
We have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to interview the CEO of Prizebook, Leo Shimizu, and ask him some questions we thought the community would like to know the answers to.
The third piece of evidence showing that Leo Shimizu has always been the owner of Prizebook is this awesome youtube video of Leo Shimizu and what many think is his pet dog Gladiator talking to ShinyMedia about Prizebook and the iPhone. If you don’t know which one Leo Shimizu is, he’s the short cute Asian kid, the same one that looks exactly like the owner of Free Lunch Room in this post (dated June 29,2007).
The fourth piece of evidence showing that Leo Shimizu has always been the owner of Prizebook is me telling you to use your damn common sense. Prizebook has always been in the Proven Legit section of Free Lunch Room ever since it opened, even though Prizebook has scammed many users. As you can see from the first link I showed you Gladiator tries to deny the claim that the Free Lunch Room owners also own Prizebook on July 6th 2007, but if you look at the dates of my other evidence they are clearly before July 6th, 2007. Last I checked Leo Shimizu owns Free Lunch Room, and Leo Shimizu also owns Prizebook according to the evidence up top.
Prizebook is not some big corporation or some big company. Prizebook is a two man operation and there is no CEO or anything of that sort. Just Leo Shimizu and Gladiator.
So you might be wondering, “why would Leo Shimizu and Gladiator lie to distance themselves from Prizebook when they actually do own it?”
That’s because Prizebook had scammed many, many users back in the day and there is enough evidence to prove that. Leo Shimizu tried to say that he had no ties to Prizebook, but later claimed that he “took it over” late 2007. Why would anyone want to “take over” a website that has a bad history and has scammed many users?
If you were smart/unlazy enough, all you would have to do is google “Prizebook Scam” and you will find an abundant amount of information on it. But ok fine, I’ll just help you out a little in this post.
The first scam that happened was Prizebook’s Plasma TV Promotion around September of 2006. Now there is too much damn information about this so I’m going to try to condense it. All of this information is located on this post at FreeiPodGuide, actually there is a lot of information on FIPG if you just search “Prizebook.”
Basically, Leo Shimizu (owner of Prizebook) ran some ridiculous promotion where they would hand out 50 Plasma HDTVs back when they were about $2000 a pop) to the person with the most referrals/points in every state. On top of that, they would fly down to that persons house and personally give it to them. Now use common sense here, ($2000 x 50) + (travel expenses x 50) and add the variable that Prizebook was a very new company. It turns out to be a lot more expensive than a new network (Prizebook was new at the time) could handle.
So they started off with a bullshit promotion that many people did not believe would come through in the end according to the ridiculous expenses, but people still tried to compete in this promotion.
Prizebook had a leaderboard which showed who had the most points for the HDTV, and everyone who was competing saw their names on the board in their respectable positions. Well, out of no where, some bullshit names started appearing on the leaderboard to overtake the top positions. Leo Shimizu put FAKE members in place of the REAL members and tried to convince people they were real people.
One of the real winners of the promotion was “johnjimjones” at FIPG. If you checked out this post and other Prizebook posts at FIPG, you will notice that “johnjimjones” talks highly of Prizebook and always backs them up. You might be wondering why he would back up such a scam network. Well, that’s because “johnjimjones” is actually Gladiator from Free Lunch Room.
So Gladiator from Free Lunch Room was actually one of the winners of the Prizebook Plasma Promotion. This is a big deal because Gladiator worked (still works) for Prizebook. Leo Shimizu made one of his employees win his own promotion.
There were a few other real winners of the promotion (egyptianruin was a winner), but there sure as hell weren’t 50 winners, I doubt there were even 5 winners. So Leo Shimizu screwed over many people in this promotion, I don’t even think he paid them out either because of the 2nd scam that I will talk about starting in 3…2…1…
The second scam that happened was when Prizebook didn’t pay out any of their current users and claimed to transfer ownership to another owner, which obviously was Leo Shimizu transferring ownership of Prizebook to himself (that’s me being sarcastic, Leo Shimizu never transferred ownership and always has owned Prizebook dammit!). There are many posts about this across Google, but one stuck out to me clearly which I will share with you. This incident came from CashJuke.com(link - screen shot) from “FreeCashPro.com”:
PrizeBook at PrizeBook.com left a bunch of us loyal members in the lurch months ago refusing to pay members what was owed ($35 – me personally) while stating that they were closing the site in favor of a new interface. They stated that members owed money would be able to transfer credit to the new site interface. They welcomed new members for weeks (milking it) while the rest of us old members were fuming mad on their forum (they quickly deleted each post and banned the members that were owed! – al the while not responding to support tickets!) Then the site went AWOL (error 404 not found) for the last 3 or 4 months.
A few days ago, on a whim, I typed in the URL again and BOOM – there’s the new site (same design and logo as the old one.)
I submitted a support ticket:
QUOTE:
” I was a member of the old PrizeBook and I haven’t been paid! At the time you disappeared I was owed over $30, had tons of referrals, and I never received any satisfaction for it. Please advise. I run a network of several very popular GPT review and referral sites and I would like to confidently begin referring members back to PrizeBook but there is the unfinished business… “On 08/17/08, 04:06 AM EDT, Anthony wrote: (admin)
QUOTE:
” We don’t have any connection with the old Prizebook site since it was transferred ownership and a new system. “Yea, right :angry: Nice shell game fellas. DO NOT TRUST THIS SITE !
If you need a second opinion just Google “PrizeBook Scam”
Anyone else get screwed by PrizeBook here?
If you are wondering who “Anthony” is, it’s Leo’s dogs name. Yeah Gladiator’s real name is “Anthony.”I love how he tries to act like the owners of Prizebook have actually changed in the support ticket, when all the evidence I showed here proves that Leo Shimizu has always owned Prizebook! Even when the ownership changed, they did not bother paying out the current pending orders, instead they erased the database so there was no record and claimed that it was the past owners problem, not theirs.
Like I said, there are many instances (like this and this one) around the web which you can google for to prove what I’m trying to say. Most of you Free Lunch Room members who are so loyal to Leo Shimizu and Anthony (Gladiator) should do that in your spare time since traffic there is tanking. I know it takes a lot to convince you die hard Leo fans that he is a huge scammer.
Ask yourself as you read this loyal Leo Shimizu fans, do you believe his fraudulent tactics are justified? What makes FreeForAllManKind any different than Prizebook? One minute they’ll be paying you out, next minute they will be running away with your money. Don’t be surprised if Leo Shimizu doesn’t open up more freebie websites under different names to fool you. He’ll even deny that they aren’t his when they really are.
There is way too much information about the Prizebook scam but I tried to sum it all out for my readers, I couldn’t post everything here. Honestly, just use Google and you will dig up tons of information about Leo Shimizu and Prizebook. Do comment below and share with everyone what I left out and if you had any personal experience with Prizebook.
Until next time!
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Plasma Tv Scam
05. Jun, 2009
here is some info you didnt post about the “Plasma TV promo”
The real scam or weird stuff happened about 5 minutes before the promotion ended.
About that time they had all users refreshing the leader board constantly and his servers couldn’t handle the strain. So for the last 5-10 minutes of the promotion the leader board was down. When it finally reopened, 42 of the old leader shad been knocked down by new leaders who hadn’t even been on the board before.
Now initially everyone screamed scam and leo claimed they were all people pending MCRs. So it seemed plausible at first………….
Unfortunately for Leo at the time his custom script allowed users to view each others profiles and see the email they registered with. Well guess what?
Out of the 42 new leaders, every single one had a gmail account that hadnt even been registered.
Also all the accounts had only initials for the last name, I guess he couldnt think of 42 last names.
In the end he did have 8 winners that were verified forum members or friends of forum members. The final check issued was for $800 a far cry from the $2000 promised.
$haz
08. Jun, 2009
Thanks for that info, I knew there were some important things I was forgetting.
J
05. Jun, 2009
btw, johnjimjones proves himself to be Gladiator in a couple of posts where he mentions either being at Purdue or being in West Lafeyette.
I wouldn’t put it past them to go edit some of their posts though.
JJJ was also the first person to EVER mention Prizebook, and Leo claimed that he did not work for the site. Funny that he won the contest…
Leo’s official story about the A4F interview and the contest is that he was only “CEO” at the time so he didn’t run the day to day and wasn’t responsible for anything that might have happened. This is of course after he finally admitted to owning it all along, after previously denying it a thousand times on FLR. He also used to deny, on FLR, of even being Leo Shimizu… Not sure if those posts are still around.
J
05. Jun, 2009
lol, also, i was skimming the fipg thread and as was mentioned in the first comment, the winners had invalid gmail email accounts. ok, now also, the site required you to confirm your email address before you could do offers. but you can’t confirm your account if the email address is fake. yet they had offer credits obviously. JJJ’s explination? all of the users signed up with real email accounts, did their offers to take the lead, then edited their profiles to fake email addresses…. lol, classic.
schizerbone
08. Jun, 2009
yeah, the stuff in the comments was more important than anything in the blog entry. Like I said, the dude stole a lot of people’s money and morons like Lucky will justify it by saying she made money using a criminal’s site. She probably thinks “floodgates” is a code word for sex. It’s not happening Lucky…get over it.
$haz
08. Jun, 2009
Yeah I wasn’t too informed about what exactly happened so I tried to dig up as much as I could. But thankfully users have submitted other important information to help me out.
Leslie, The Freebie Guy
09. Jun, 2009
I’m glad this information is out there. We can’t believe Leo’s words.
EarnGiftsFree Admin
09. Jun, 2009
Beyond Reasonable Doubt
Virus
10. Jun, 2009
I’ve just been waiting on the sidelines for this one, but I like seeing big conglomerates fall.
In Awe
20. Jun, 2009
Hey $haz, I just have to say you have my sincere gratitude for opening up the eyes of so many, I just love your dedication to bringing out the truth! I think someone else on here said you missed your calling, you should have been a private investigator, lol, seriously though thanks for digging up all this on Leo and his BS. You know though what goes around comes around and he did do himself in, his forum is dead and will never rise again no matter what he keeps telling his last few loyal followers.
jdlaverde
30. Jun, 2009
Thank you for posting all this information. There is so much out there that so many just do not know!
Please keep sharing all the information you have as I know people need to have their eyes opened.
$haz
01. Jul, 2009
I report, you decide
panther
02. Sep, 2009
As a fairly new trader (just starting to put up threads), I wanted to thank you for putting out this info. I don’t want to try to get in on a site that might scam me or people I refer.