An ecommerce training company has responded to a local YouTuber’s allegations of its deceiving wealth programs in an exposé video after taking legal action against him.
LeapVista said yesterday that they will not stand down against haters and will continue to take the necessary legal actions against local YouTuber Rishi Kumar, who has been issued a cease and desist letter earlier this month after debunking its business programs in a video.
“Over the past few weeks we noticed that there was an effort by an individual to tarnish our image and hurt our reputation. We are not going to let online bullies destroy the reputation of our community. We will pursue all due legal processes in our country to protect what we have built,” the firm said in a statement yesterday.
We will stand up to online bullies and abusers.
We are a group of entrepreneurs in our mid-twenties to mid-thirties….
Posted by LeapVista on Sunday, 15 November 2020
The firm said that the YouTuber’s allegations were based on unverified information and that he never got in touch with them to clarify before going on to claim in a video posted last month that the trainers “twist and turn the words” to recruit people in the seminars and its training material can be easily found online.
“His allegations were purely based on hearsay. He never got in touch with us regarding any of the claims to verify and get our point of view before he made his videos,” the firm said.
The firm also told Coconuts today that they have not received any evidence of the allegations made. Kumar has not responded to Coconuts queries as of publication time.
In the 11-minute video that has over 300,000 views, Kumar nitpicks LeapVista’s online advertisements that featured chief trainer Benjamin Tan, who gave tips on how viewers can secure millions of dollars from setting up Amazon businesses in Singapore. The advertisements were seen playing before the start of many videos on several social media platforms in recent months.
Kumar claimed that deceiving tactics are used to lure people in to sign up for such seminars and was backed up by users in the comments who gave negative reviews after paying thousands of dollars attending them.
“They will start showing you all the money-related stuff to hook you in nicely. They will bring up the action-taker class [for participants] to get even more information for two thousand dollars only. They will give people by providing the bare minimum information which by the way can be found on YouTube, literally everything is on YouTube,” he said in the video.
A week after the video was posted, Kumar claimed that the firm requested for a copyright strike on his channel to take down said video and have issued a cease and desist letter weeks later after failing to get the strike approved.
Kumar, who has over 20,000 subscribers on his channel, announced in a video on Thursday that he is going to fight the case and created a crowdfunding campaign to fund the legal fees. The campaign has since been closed and has raised over S$20,000 (US$14,877).
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Kumar was being represented by human rights lawyer Ravi M Ravi from Carson Law Chambers.
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