__ It all started with a hot email pitch for a miraculous product. Wired turned detective to find the truth. __
The message had all the hallmarks of a Net come-on, the text crawling down the screen like a snake:
ANNOUNCING: THE WORLD'S FIRST LINE OF PERSONAL SATELLITE TRACKING DEVICES!!
These are worn as a bracelet by a child or carried in pocket or purse by an adult.
Now You can INSTANTLY LOCATE missing loved ones or personal property such as an automobile, even your favorite pet.
THE PROBLEM OF MISSING, LOST, or ABDUCTED CHILDREN HAS BEEN SOLVED!
CRIMINALS BEWARE!!!
Granted, it lacked the instant attraction of email with subject lines like "Non-Surgical Liposuction," "$7 Investment Nets Thousands $$$$," or "SEXUALLY ATTRACT WOMEN EASILY!" But this spam message intrigued me, because it concerned a device that will cause a sensation if it ever hits the market. Tracking devices using Global Positioning System satellites have been developed for luxury cars and boats, but no one has produced anything as advanced as what this spam described, a personal "kid-tracking" device small enough to wear as a bracelet.
For such a gizmo to work, several technological breakthroughs would be required. One problem is that a satellite tracker will need both a GPS receiver and a radio transceiver, and it's difficult to shrink both components into a neat, reliable package. The receiver calculates the user's location from the 24 government GPS satellites hovering 12,551 miles above the earth, while the transceiver sends the location to someone on the ground via cellular network. Though GPS works all over the world, cellular networks cover only certain countries and regions. Most cell networks in the US are equipped for voice and aren't optimized for sending data, such as latitude and longitude readings. Sufficient battery power is another hurdle, as is the difficulty of receiving satellite signals while indoors - GPS requires line of sight to the sky.
Several companies are working to overcome these obstacles, so far with limited success. SiRF, a 4-year-old outfit based in Santa Clara,California, has raised investment capital from Nokia, Acer, and Yamaha to develop software that will help the GPS chips embedded in cell phones and other devices overcome reception problems. A SiRF rival, SnapTrack, makes software for the embedded DSP chips in cell phones and promises greater accuracy by homing in on the GPS satellites' exact locations. And the Goeken Group in Chicago is working on the Guardian II, a pocket-sized unit that offers wearers a personal panic button. Goeken claims the unit can direct police to within 30 feet of your outdoor location.
Furthest along in creating a compact tracker for kids is an Anderson, South Carolina-based startup called Protect Me Toys. The company has built a 1.5-pound tracker unit that fits in the bottom of a child's backpack. The hardware has already been tested by police in mock kidnappings, but it has weak spots. Its wearer can be traced only in places where there is cell phone service, and reception remains hampered by GPS's line-of-sight limitations.
Given the potential value of a small GPS tracker, and the significant obstacles to building one, the spam about a bracelet-sized unit was hard to ignore. There were two possible explanations, each fascinating in its own way. Either the company behind this email had pulled off an unheralded technological miracle, or ... it hadn't, in which case something very curious was going on. Whichever was true, I decided I had to know.
Feeling a bit like a rube clutching a lottery ticket, I begin my quest in July of 1998, when I dial the 800 number listed in the email. A man answers, and he's soon telling me about a host of satellite tracking products the company, GlobalTrak, is releasing, with names like KarTrak, ExecuTrak, SeniorTrak, PetTrak, and KidTrak.
Sensing my interest, the man says he'll pass my name on to the company president in California. An hour later I get a call from an improbably deep-voiced person who identifies himself simply as "Mr. Benson." He tells me that his company's first satellite tracking product, SeniorTrak, will be ready to ship within 30 days. KidTrak, a satellite-enabled bracelet that can give a child's exact location to a parent, is slated for release in November or December of 1998.
"How does the device wirelessly send data to a command center?" I ask.
"That's proprietary," Benson says.
I say it's well known that GPS devices don't work well indoors. How will KidTrak find a kid lost in a mall or spirited off in a van?
"That's proprietary," repeats my basso profundo friend.
I ask him to FedEx me a unit. "We've had to be careful," he says cagily, rejecting my request. "A lot of people would like to know how this technology works." He says a salesman will come to my office in a few days.
After a week of virtual contact with GlobalTrak, I finally see a face behind the spam. Daniel Holmes, GlobalTrak's rep, is a stout, bearded guy in his mid-30s, wearing a cheap-looking suit and carrying a smooth black plastic case about the size of a child's lunchbox, with a power switch and a single blue LED on the side. It's supposed to illustrate how KidTrak would work, even though it's a lot bigger than the compact bracelet promised in the email. "KidTrak is something that Mr. Benson has worked on for several years," says Holmes. (Apparently, everyone calls him "Mr. Benson.") "I didn't believe it when I first heard about it, but he gave me a full demonstration right before my eyes."
But just as Holmes is about to give me the same demo, he declares that the rechargeable batteries in the tracker demo unit are out of juice. I grab a battery recharger from my desk, and he gamely tries to plug it in, but the connectors are all wrong. Holmes looks like a disappointed kid, and I sort of feel sorry for him. I've seen plenty of demo disasters from even high-profile companies: prototypes of pocket PDAs suddenly glow red and fry up; product managers struggle to force plastic parts back onto LCD projectors. When you look at beta product on a regular basis, you learn to give the rep the benefit of the doubt.
"One important factor in any tracking device is finding a way to save battery power," Holmes explains. "But I really can't say too much more about it." GlobalTrak, he confides, recently suffered an intellectual-property leak supposedly caused by a former employee, and the boss is taking no chances.
As Holmes packs up to leave, he mentions that he'd been a systems engineer in Silicon Valley years ago. He likes GlobalTrak because it doesn't have a big PR force, instead using word-of-mouth to reach people. I tell him that I first heard about KidTrak through a junk email.
"Me too!" he says, his face glowing with genuine enthusiasm.
Holmes' visit leaves me with more questions than answers. It's clear that GlobalTrak's representatives aren't going to be very forthcoming about their products. I decide to skirt the company's execs and do a little digging on my own.
I crawl onto the Web, and to my surprise I find about a dozen GlobalTrak sites, typically run by people who joined the organization as regional licensees. The most impressive site is www.kidtrak.com, which features snappy press releases, animated GIFs of product prototypes, a photo of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (who's said to be "particularly interested" in GlobalTrak), and an audio track featuring the voice of actor Geoffrey Holder, the "Uncola" guy from the old 7-Up commercials. The InterNIC database shows "Benson, E." as the administrative and billing contact for kidtrak.com, and a sister site lists a "Benson, Mister." No first name is given.
I fire up the promotional video Holmes left me, the only physical evidence I have that the company even exists. Over the next few days, I watch it a dozen times in search of clues, like Oliver Stone poring over the Zapruder film. The video opens in a banquet hall at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt, and Mayor Willie Brown is there. He walks up to the podium and says he wants to check out GPS as a possible solution for the city's troubled public-transportation system. He's interested in GlobalTrak, especially its personal-security features.
"What we've been told about GlobalTrak obviously would be of great assistance in giving [San Franciscans] the level of security and confidence that they may need," Brown says. A doughy MC announces that the mayor and a few people from the audience will shortly witness a live demonstration.
Cut to the demo. A few assorted characters are seen getting into a long white limousine outside the Hyatt. Mayor Brown is encouraged to come along, but he looks apprehensive and doesn't follow. A wiry guy with a mustache stands on the sidewalk outside the hotel, brandishing a KidTrak bracelet and fielding questions from local TV crews. One reporter suggests that the device - which is about the size of a doughnut - looks too big for a kid to wear.
"Let me tell you something, OK?" the man with the mustache says pointedly. "Our objective is not to break records through miniaturization. My purpose and my involvement in this venture is to help save some lives! Sure, we'll get smaller. Eventually you won't even be able to see it at all."
Then he, too, climbs into the white limo.
Cut to a clip of the car pulling into a parking lot near the airport. The same man gets out and walks to a pay phone at the edge of the lot. "Hi. How are you? Good. Benson speaking," he says. "We need to get a fix on our location."
So this is Mr. Benson. He listens, nods. Then he hands the phone to a witness, who confirms that the announced location jibes with the street signs. Benson and the witness dive back into the limo, and it speeds away.
Elsewhere on the video, Denise Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson and director of a nonprofit for battered women, endorses BodyGuard, another GlobalTrak product. "We are very happy to give our support to the new GlobalTrak International line of personal satellite tracking devices," Denise Brown says. Then Geoffrey Holder appears, talking about the tragedy of lost children and how he thinks KidTrak is going to help. (For a while, Holder's voice was also heard on the 1-800-KID-TRAK line.)
All told, the video is an odd mixture of unproved claims and shameless schmaltz. I'm still no closer to finding out if GlobalTrak is a boon to humankind, a sham, or something in between.
My doubts are put to the test in the weeks ahead, as the GlobalTrak promotional machine cranks into high gear. The company sends out announcements through Business Wire, an archive of press releases; places ads in USA Today's "Business Opportunities" classifieds; commissions industrial-design sketches of the KidTrak prototype; licenses a kid-friendly cartoon character called the Dream Dragon; and assembles a team of salespeople to distribute the ground-breaking product as soon as the development stage is complete.
But what catches my attention is something GlobalTrak doesn't want publicized - word of a dispute the company has going with Paradigm, a small Toronto-based operation that's developing lunchbox-sized GPS devices for law enforcement. According to a Paradigm press release I run across, the company was in negotiations with GlobalTrak on a joint venture but broke off talks after discovering that "GlobalTrak and its president, Mr. Eric Benson, were being investigated by the Orange County fraud department."
I phone Paradigm president David Kerzner, who repeats the press release's fraud charge and tells me a bizarre tale. "When I met Benson, he wanted to buy a thousand units, and he sent me a purchase order - we're talking about a million-dollar order here," Kerzner begins. "I was all excited. So I flew with a colleague to Washington, DC, and we met Benson. He was real secretive when he pulled out these huge schematic drawings. Later, my colleague said that the schematics didn't remotely relate to what he was talking about. The picture he used for the bracelet looked like Geordi's visor from Star Trek."
"So I wrote him this scathing letter saying, look, you're misrepresenting the technology, you're misrepresenting the whole concept, it'll never fit inside a bracelet."
After hanging up, I have to marvel at Benson's chutzpah. I'm beginning to see him as the author of a performance-art piece that serves as a parable for the high tech industry. After all, the Valley is full of respectable folks who hyped an idea long and hard before they had a product or even proof of concept. Michael Wolff wrote in Burn Rate about how he sucked millions out of CMP to build NetGuide, which even he suspected would never get off the ground. (Benson, in fact, chose to launch KidTrak at the Laguna Niguel Ritz Hotel, the same venue Wolff describes in his book as a premier tech meeting ground.) And almost every day, press releases float from office to office with compelling ideas but no practical plan for making them happen. Benson, I was learning, had mastered not simply the vocabulary of Silicon Valley but also one of its truisms: Selling a fantastic product is fine. But so is selling a fantastic product that doesn't quite exist yet.
I had peeled away enough layers of the spam to know that there was probably something wrong here. Now it was time to go all the way. Benson had been saying that I should come to Southern California to see the products myself, and I decide to take him up on his offer.
Negotiating the endless voicemail tree through 1-800-KID-TRAK makes the company seem vast. I'm first asked to dial 1 for the western region, then 4 for the building number, and finally 104 for the marketing department. After a long wait, Benson himself comes on the line. "Heeeey, guy. What's going on?" he says. When I tell him that I want to meet, he seems enthusiastic. "Sounds good! I'll be in design meetings around Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles the early part of next week. Why don't you call me Monday when you get here, and we can nail down the specific logic."
When I arrive in Southern California, Benson says he's too busy and that we should get together the following day. In the meantime, I track down the company's headquarters in Laguna Niguel, a meticulously neat suburb an hour from LA. Its wide boulevards stretch from the Pacific Coast Highway to lush palm groves inland and then spill off to suburban developments dotted with identical houses. The roads around here are named after various types of oil lamps used by 19th-century trade ships - Crystal Lantern, Silver Lantern, Copper Lantern, Blue Lantern. The GlobalTrak street address has a "lantern" appellation, too, but it leads to a Mail Boxes Etc.
The next day, Benson keeps brushing me off, telling me that traffic or other meetings are holding him up. I don't mention the Paradigm press release's reference to a fraud investigation. Benson's unflagging ebullience ("Good, good! Happy days!") rattles me. At one point, I lock myself out of my car and have to sit on the curb while a gas-station attendant fishes around with a slim jim and lets me back in.
Then the cell phone purrs at my hip; it's Benson, saying he'll be at L'Angolo Ristorante on Melrose Avenue. "I'm looking forward to finally meeting you," I say.
"Good news!" he says. "See you soon!"
Italian disco music is the soundtrack for our long-awaited meeting. At a table in back, I meet two men - Benson and the doughy man I recognize from the corporate video. Benson, wearing a tan suit, greets me warmly and introduces his colleague as Gerald Kostecka, a GlobalTrak vice president. Benson gets right down to business, pulling a few prototypes out of an aluminum briefcase and arranging them on the table. "KidTrak is slated for a November 1 release," he says. "Just in time for Christmas. We should have all the products available by the end of the year."
I recognize the large black box from Holmes' visit. I pick it up, feel its heft. It's not hollow. "Did GlobalTrak make that?" I say.
Benson bristles. "Yes. Of course. Where do you think we got it?" A silent moment passes. I move to safer ground, asking about the social implications of the technology.
"When it comes to personal protection," Benson begins, "when it comes to our children, our families, our loved ones, our sisters, our daughters, our wives - there is no replacement, you know, for those sorts of things. And then once you get beyond solving the social problems, the other applications are just unlimited." Then, abruptly, Benson announces he's going to call the command center.
"Now, this demo unit does not have any of our proprietary software algorithms in it, for security purposes," he tells me as he punches in the number. "Yes, it's ... uhhh ... D604," he says into the cell phone. "1C604. I need you to give me a fix on our last location.
"They just gave us a fix," he says, beaming. "The command center is in a location I can't tell you about for security reasons. It's manned 24 hours a day by trained emergency-response professionals.
"Now, aren't you going to ask me about the demonstration I just performed?" he scolds. "I just got on the phone, and they told us we were off Melrose Avenue. It looked like you weren't paying attention."
"No ... it looked like it went off very well," I reply. I ask him how many people are in the company.
"A few hundred," he says. "Let me tell you something. Running a business is exhausting, a real crash-course education. But it's a necessary evil when it comes to launching a product for John and Jane Q. Public."
"Do you have patents?"
"Our patents are pending ... all over the planet," he says, taking a sip of his drink. "We've got patents, and we've got support from a lot of good, strong, quality people. The company's in a perfect position."
"Where do you see GlobalTrak in five years?"
"By that time, we'll have taken a serious bite out of the problem of missing children," Benson says. "Crime won't be the way it is today. But just because a product exists doesn't mean everyone and their Great-Uncle Joe is going to buy one. The most important thing is to send the message that these products do exist, that you never know who has one. The KidTrak product is like Russian roulette for the abductors - you never know which child is protected."
I ask Benson about his background. "I started my first company when I was 16," he says. "I didn't have a pot to pee in. I didn't even have a window to throw that pee out of. What I had was a strong idea - and I needed a little coin behind me. I was only looking for $8,000. I asked my family. Nobody believed me. 'Get your butt back to school and get your degree in psychology,' they told me.
"I said, 'I'm going to start this business and make a go of it.' An attorney was selling furniture cheap. I turned my apartment into an office. A few years later the company was able to do $1.2 million. By the time I was 22, the company was flying. What that taught me was, it doesn't matter how much coin you have starting out - it's about drive, commitment, endurance, diligence, perseverance, and risk. You have to be willing to put your cojones on the table and willing to get 'em cut off. Some cases you win, and then you win big. In other cases you lose."
Benson pauses, then changes the subject. "So what time's your flight?" he asks.
"It was actually at 7," I say. "I think I might stay the night here in Marina del Rey. I'm kind of hiding out from my wife." We share a laugh.
"I moved to Laguna Niguel 10 years ago - from the East Coast," says Benson. "I got out of the car and thought I'd died and gone to paradise. And I married this girl and everything was just La-La Land. My first marriage was to a woman in the television business. It wound up on a TV tabloid show. Literally."
"How did you get Geoffrey Holder involved with GlobalTrak?" I ask.
"Celebrities come out for these types of things," he replies. "We're planning a $1,000-per-plate dinner right now. And we've got a lot of celebs in the local Tinseltown playground."
While we're talking, a 40ish guy walks in and quietly sits down with us. Benson pulls a promotional kit and video from the aluminum case and offers them to him. "Excuse me for a minute," says Benson. "I'm going to talk to Bill, and then I'll come back for round two." He mimes a boxing gesture.
When Benson returns, I broach the subject of Paradigm and the fraud claim in Orange County. I'd been holding this question as my trump card, but Benson is anything but rattled. The way he tells it, Paradigm is on the run from him. "We initiated the investigation when we suspected an employee was stealing GlobalTrak's intellectual property," he says, not missing a beat. "We met with Paradigm to discuss manufacturing a demo unit. But let's leave the fighting to the attorneys. Let's you and I have a great relationship now and into the future. Let's just keep it positive."
By now, I'm wondering if KidTrak will ever see the light of day, but I also become curious about another side of the story: the investors. How "positive" are they feeling about Benson? As it turns out, quite a few licensees welcome the chance to talk. I speak with 10 former investors over the next six months. Many still have GlobalTrak Web sites or remnants of sites, but everyone I speak to has broken ties with Benson. They feel burned by a company that asked them to pay $695 for a regional sales license and a demo unit and had them recruit friends and family for more investments, and yet failed to deliver the KidTrak bracelet. Still, they generally take the loss as a difficult but by no means fatal lesson about the pitfalls of Net investing. The bulk of these would-be entrepreneurs are computer newbies who saw GlobalTrak as a way to help people while getting a chance to jump on the high tech bandwagon.
"Benson said we would begin to sell the product around March or April '98, and then I flew down to the Ritz for the big press conference," says Tammy Slater-Kendrick of St. Louis, Missouri. After sending her money to GlobalTrak, she quickly was designated GlobalTrak's "vice president of the central region."
"We were pretty excited, even though the unit was much bigger than something that can be worn by a child," she continues. "Afterward, Benson drove us in a limo to a restaurant. He tried to be impressive, but I noticed he didn't pick up the bill."
By the time Slater-Kendrick received a demo unit, she was so skeptical of GlobalTrak's operation that she didn't bother to try the device: "Benson never actually said he had a product in hand, but he always said he would have it in a few weeks. I think he does have some technology; he was just dishonest about it."
Ted Archer, a GlobalTrak licensee from Birmingham, Alabama, agrees. "I think it's a great idea, but I don't think Benson has the money to bring it to market," he says. "All he has is a box about the size of my red Bible, the good one I bring to church. I never received what was promised."
Archer is still a bit peeved about the incident, but he's able to chuckle. "Let me tell you a weird one. After months of not hearing from him and wondering what's going on, I came home around Christmas, and here's this basket on the front porch from GlobalTrak. Well, after everything that happened, I end up with $695 worth of fruit."
Like me, Ann Darling first heard about GlobalTrak through spam. "I was relatively new to the Internet," says the Fort Walton Beach, Florida, resident. "It's a hard lesson. Benson asked me to fax a copy of the check, and the bizarre thing was that someone managed to electronically withdraw the money before it got there in the mail. I received a demo unit, but it didn't work, and I sent it back. Benson got very angry with me when I called to ask for a refund."
GlobalTrak's stable of celebrity spokespeople, like the investors, turn out to be well-meaning people attracted by the promise of an amazing product. Denise Brown heard an ad on the radio about KidTrak and called the company to see whether she could buy a unit. "I truly wanted to have one of those bracelets," she says. Brown endorsed the product at Benson's request, but after fielding numerous phone calls from investigators and disgruntled licensees, she stopped working with him.
When I call Geoffrey Holder, I discover he's furious. Through his agent, Holder says he was outraged at being misled about GlobalTrak, and he feels like he was duped into doing voice work for the company. As for San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, his press office tells me he doesn't endorse the company and was only at the Hyatt conference to see the latest satellite gadgets.
Even Daniel Holmes, the sales rep who visited my office, and Gerald Kostecka, Benson's sidekick, are out of the game by the time I talk to them again, months after we first met. Holmes won't elaborate on why he left: He sends me an email saying that he's signed a nondisclosure agreement and can't say anything about GlobalTrak. Later, I bump into Kostecka at Comdex, where he tells me the company was getting too commercial for his tastes and moving away from consumer applications. I ask him whether he believes Benson really has a personal tracking device.
"Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I'm sure they're going to do it," he says. "We were all ready to rock and roll, but it's going to take a bit longer."
None of the former licensees I talk to plans to sue Benson; some say it would be too much effort to recover $695. But law enforcement officials, I suspect, might hold a different view.
For a while, the Orange County Sheriff Department's Fraud Unit stayed hot on Benson's trail. Investigator Janet Strong says she began looking into Benson's company in December 1997. Eventually, though, she passed the case along to Postal Service investigators, because her supervisor deemed Benson's activities a federal, rather than county, matter. "I had 25 complaints," she says, "but most were out of state."
Postal officials confirm an ongoing investigation into GlobalTrak but decline to provide further details. "Our review of GlobalTrak is in the early stages, so we can't say whether the product is legitimate or not," says Postal Inspector Aaron Ward, the supervisor assigned to the case.
If Benson is in trouble with the law, it may not be the first time. During Strong's investigation, she conducted a warrant search and turned up a long list of past charges filed against one "Eric R. Benson" in Philadelphia. An official in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office says that an Eric R. Benson with the same birthdate as GlobalTrak's founder - January 5, 1964 - has a string of convictions and probations stretching back to 1983. Eric R. Benson received two years' probation for unauthorized use of an automobile, two years for recklessly endangering another person, one year for theft of services, two years for simple assault, and three years for undescribed "terroristic threats." In 1990, the same person was arrested in Philadelphia and charged with 28 counts of fraud - including mail fraud, wire fraud, and misuse of a federal agency's name - in a scheme in which 31 video retailers were allegedly cheated. None of the charges stuck, though: After a two-week trial, Benson was acquitted on all counts.
Is GlobalTrak's Eric Benson the same person as Philadelphia's Eric R. Benson? Benson dances around the question: "There are probably a thousand Eric Bensons," he says. "I'm not going to answer that because it is irrelevant to the launching of the product." But some law enforcement sources are convinced the two are the same. At my request, an official in Philadelphia - who spoke on the condition of anonymity - compared Eric Benson's image from the GlobalTrak marketing videotape with a file picture of their Eric R. Benson. "Yep, that's the same guy," the official said. But the official was unable to provide more concrete proof, such as corroborating Social Security numbers or fingerprints.
In the end, it's impossible to be sure about this, but the fact remains that GlobalTrak's Benson has left many unhappy people in his wake. A marketing manager for a large communications company - who asked not to be identified - tells me that he's looking to get paid for the GPS chip set he says he loaned to Benson. A former credit and collection manager at the America Office Center in Irvine, California, says Benson vacated one of its buildings owing $7,400 in rent.
But as far as Benson's recruiting efforts for GlobalTrak are concerned, it's hard to say whether he's broken any laws. At its heart, GlobalTrak appears to be a fairly typical network marketing operation. New recruits are asked to pony up $695 to become GlobalTrak regional licensees. In return, they're promised a 20 percent commission on all sales. For referring another regional licensee to the company, they receive a 10 percent increase in their commission. Anyone that they recruit, in turn, earns the original licensee an additional 5 percent.
The tantalizing carrot of any network marketing membership is the prospect of developing many levels beneath you. If the recruits of your recruits begin recruiting other people, and you're getting a cut of all sales down the line, the organization starts to look like a gigantic pyramid with you sitting like a pharaoh at the top.
But the law makes a distinction between a legitimate network marketing company and a pyramid scheme, according to Betsy Broder, the Federal Trade Commission's assistant director in the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
"In a legitimate network marketing organization, the bulk of the income is from the sale of a bona fide product to the public," says Broder. "In a pyramid scheme, revenues come from recruiting new members, who pay a fee to be part of the organization." Her office prosecutes pyramid schemes based on unrealistic projections of the amount of money participants could make.
But Benson has not made any claims about potential earnings: GlobalTrak earnings are based solely on the sales of a product, not on the activity of recruiting itself. It's just that the product isn't available yet. And compared with other network marketing execs, Benson is conservative in his claims. As licensee Ted Archer says, "I used to tape the conference calls to listen to later, and I've got a stack of about 20 tapes. After this all fell through, I went back to see if he said anything definite about a product. I never was able to catch him. He's very good at splitting hairs."
Despite my best efforts, I can't completely unravel Benson's original spam to get to the full truth. Although it's clear Benson isn't everything he's claimed, I can't say that he won't one day ship KidTrak to customers.
Once Benson got word that I'd called the 7-Up man's agent, he was mad as a hornet. When I talk to Benson, he says he won't let any of his people deal with me again. It seems like a good time for me to broach some delicate questions. "A lot of former licensees feel like they didn't get what they paid for," I say.
"That's not true at all," he says, surprised. "What are they paying for? A license to sell products in the future, and that's exactly what they got."
"But if they can't sell products, they're out of a lot of money," I point out.
"You talk like they're not getting full disclosure," Benson says. "People choose to get involved before the product is available. If you do not want to sell our product, do not pay a licensing fee. We don't twist anyone's arm. We make it clear that the product is in the development stage. That's out there."
After that, I don't talk to Benson for a while, though I do spend a lot of time thinking about him - with a mix of awe, disapproval, and warped admiration. A decade ago, Eric Benson was just another small-timer trying to eke out a living. Since then, he has reinvented himself as an Internet entrepreneur, complete with sales force and Web sites. Along the way, he's learned to seize on the tantalizing promise of high tech and dangle it in front of anyone looking for the Next Big Thing. And with almost breathtaking nimbleness, he's managed to avoid lawsuits and the long arm of the law.
Is this what they mean when they say the Net is a realm of limitless opportunity?
As it turns out, Benson and I cross paths once more. I see discussion threads on the Web about a new product called MobilTrak, which claims to use GPS technology to track assets in a ship's cargo containers. I smile, recognizing Benson's calling card. If anything, I have to admire his cojones. When I call the 1-800-KID-TRAK number, Benson himself picks up.
"Hey, Bobby boy, how ya doing?" he asks.
"I've got some concerns."
"Oh, do you?"
"Is GlobalTrak still operating?"
"Of course. Not only are we operating, we're doing phenomenal."
"Has KidTrak shipped yet?"
"Yes. Why don't you come out and see it? We're glad to have you down if you'd like to come out and take a look."
"Can you put me in touch with someone who's used a KidTrak product?"
"Why, so you can bother them with your trivial negativity? Forget about anybody that you can call over the phone. Because, you see, you're the type of guy that twists people's words around."
"There's an Eric R. Benson with your birthday who was convicted in Philadelphia."
"That's interesting, because I don't know why that is. What other questions do you have?"
"Can you hook me up with someone on the phone?"
He ignores that. The deep voice rumbles, and the voice through the phone sounds like a preacher shouting from the pulpit. "Guess what we're shipping?" he says. "This month? Huh? I'll tell you: The world's first line of personal satellite tracking devices!"
