Brabus Ventures (BrabusVentures.com), owned by embattled CEO Ben Behrouzi and parent company of ePerks.com, LeapFish and DotNextInc has updated it’s website and added new “Values” and “Culture” pages to combat the barrage of negative publicity their business practices have earned them. There is only one problem: the pages are STOLEN virtually verbatim from Chevron.com and Mervyns.com. Oh, the irony, in stealing “Values” and “Culture” pages.
This is no surprise, CEO Ben Behrouzi and his companies have a proven track record of engaging in unethical behavior and marketing and his latest debacle of adding “copyright infringement” to his resume are par for the course. This is a time that one would think, as CEO, he should be apologizing to the victims of his harassment and focusing on his failed startup, iHype.com which one of his employees humorously defended as a “soft launch” when it failed to launch as announced on June 2nd.
BrabusVentures.com Steals Culture Page from Mervyns.com
(Click Thumbnail Below For Full Size Image)
Screenshot of Original Mervyns.com Page / Screenshot of Offending BrabusVentures.com Page
BrabusVentures.com Steals Values Page from Chevron.com
(Click Thumbnail Below For Full Size Image)
Screenshot of Original Chevron.com Page / Screenshot of Offending BrabusVentures.com Page
Dissasemble. I really want to make this story go away, but it’s the gift that keeps on giving. I REALLY want to write some positive stories here.
While it is fairly common for content to be recycled on real estate and mortgage websites (especially privacy pages, legal pages, glossaries and even basic content that define general concepts) it is never ok for a CEO or Founder to steal a Mission Statement, Values Statement, or Definition of Company Culture. Never. Ever.
These are the documents that define the moral, ethical and business code of your company and are the basis for the culture that is created through the actions and leadership of company founders and management. These are to be created with care, sensitivity and purpose. Without positive core beliefs, philosophies and morals, one is truly lost.
UPDATE: BrabusVentures.com has been abandoned due to bad press with no redirect or mention to the new site at Dotnextinc.com.
Unless of course you have no idea of a what a mission statement is or what values are.
Come on. This just gets better every time I read about it. It’s like TMZ for real estate. Is ePerks even a real company? It’s starting to sound like one guy in his Mamma’s basement. After reading the Dennis Pease piece on how another employee threatened him and called him names when he said he did not want to do business with ePerks – I just can’t believe that one company can have so many mentally/ethically unbalanced people with anger issues that do not know when to censor themselves in emails or phone calls? Between the threatening “Compliance Director/Broker of Record/President/Part Time Attorney/Mental Midget” and Ben himself, I can’t see how this company got this far. I already felt like we ought to enter them in the Business Special Olympics. Now you add some copyright infringement into the mix (from Fortune 500′s no less) and you really have the Complete Retards Guide to Doing Business on the Internet. Where are the attorneys and the very needed PR firm? If they really have millions of dollars, where the heck are the real professionals – you know the ones with the diplomas that have those 3 easy to read letters M.B.A. on them?