A payment vendor says LifeSurge workers solicited reviews

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 20:50

   and we follow it to another lifelong Christian who has personally worked with LifeSurge by the name of Brad Logan. My name is Brad Logan. I am the owner of a company providing merchant services and chargeback protection called Court Compass. So Brad Logan is the co-founder and COO of a company called Court Compass. And what Court Compass actually does, the merchant services that they provide, has to do with those portable credit card machines that we mentioned before.

2. 21:21

   Yes. They are actually the ones providing these machines. In this case, it is Clover Machines, and they started doing this in 2024. So, in the one-day event when they were saying, hey, like, why don't you sign up for these impact classes? These were the machines that were running people's credit cards, correct? Correct. And so, I'm delighted to now. be able to share my knowledge of credit card transaction processing with everybody.

3. 21:47

   But basically, to simplify it, Court Compass does a lot. But yeah, they approve the transactions. They coordinate the transfer of the money, the funds, from a customer and their credit card to LifeSurg itself. Right. And in order for Court Compass to make their money, they take 3% of every transaction that they do with LifeSurg. Which is apparently standard in the world of credit cards. But it takes us now to the spring of 2024, because Brad Logan says he is backstage, in person, in Dallas, working at what turned out to be a pair of events headlined by Life Surge's biggest star, Tim Tebow, who helped them sell out Fellowship Church.

4. 22:27

   I already had met Tim Tebow in the past, but he was at that two-day. A lot of the standard crew that you'll see on their website was there. And I witnessed a lot of things that made me start scratching my head. But with all the dollars that were on the table, and we were literally just providing a service, I didn't think too much of some of the things I saw. And then throughout the day, the temporary workers that are brought into these one-day events, they have usually a great big room with food.

5. 23:02

   There are teams of LifeSource employees that are there. And during the downtime when transactions are not being taken, I'm watching these people have the temporary workers go to the website and fill out positive reviews for a life search. The workers themselves were doing that? This was temporary workers in the break room. So that's not normal, but it's really weighting their Trustpilot scores. So just to be clear, Brad Logan is the first person who has come forward to say that they witnessed employees explicitly instructing the temporary workers working for LifeSurge to fill out positive reviews on the internet like Google reviews and Trustpilot stuff themselves. Back in 2024, we are looking to further corroborate this.

6. 24:01

   We have not yet. We've also gone to LifeSearch for comment, and despite exchanging emails with us and Mother Jones over two days through their PR firm, they did not offer a response to any of our detailed list of questions in time to meet our deadline. But they did say, amid complaints about said deadline, quote, we have little confidence that our responses will be represented fairly or accurately, end quote. But what we have been told is how much LifeSurge relies on those reviews online. They've brought it up like three times in the statement that they sent to us about how their reviews show what an upstanding and popular company they are. Yes. And in fact, according to our reporting now, which you can see in this photo we're going to show on our YouTube channel, the staff lanyards worn by Life Surge employees, they have a QR code on the back

7. 24:55

   and they present these to attendees in person because when you scan that QR code, that takes you to a place where you can just do a review of Life Surge in front of the employee on the spot, which is to say that the review as an instrument is a priority. And yet also not the most suspicious thing that Brad Logan says he's experienced because what he goes on to say is that Court compass his company they bought 170 of these clover credit card machine terminal things each of which cost 400 bucks thereabouts and all that was to be reimbursed by life surge when brad apparently kept asking to be reimbursed life surge instead offered him and court compass the chance to make even more money with them in fact they offered him the chance, apparently, to do the same job of processing these transactions, but

8. 25:47

   at the next phase of the life surge pipeline. Which, of course, is those impact classes, those three-day classes that you pay $97 and you attend, and then you are offered the opportunity to buy these packages of financial education for tens of thousands of dollars. Yes, where you can learn for that low price of your entire nest egg, in some cases, how to trade stocks or invest in real estate and all that stuff.

9. 26:12

   I'd be 170 terminals at $400 a terminal. So it's not nothing. It's a chunk of change. Coupled with the fact that we were promised on the trade account, the numbers that come to mind were $75,000 a month, and that would have been my profit. The real estate account was closer to $60,000 a month in profit. And so look, that's just a lot of numbers, but just to break it down as simply as I can, And Cord Compass, originally, the whole deal was take 3% on the standard impact class signups for $97.

10. 26:50

    But as Brad is now going back to LifeSurg and saying, but what about all the other money you owe me for like the terminals? They're saying, we have a better deal actually for you. This could be a percentage of millions of dollars a month. That was the hook for them on us was, look, the $97 ticket, we might make $3,000 or $4,000 a month on those $97 tickets. When you promise me the percentage on $8 million, $10 million a month, that's when 3% of that ballpark would, I pay a little bit of fees out of that 3%, and the rest goes to us.

11. 27:31

    And so what does Brad Logan do? What he says is that he proceeded to attend himself a three-day impact class in Atlanta. This is in the fall of 2024.