The Passive Income Dream Is Dead, and Companies Like Click Profit Killed It.

How One Company’s Digital Dream Became a Financial Nightmare for Everyday Americans

It starts with a simple, seductive dream. A dream of freedom. The freedom to quit your day job, to spend more time with your family, to stop worrying about money while you sleep. You see an ad on Google or TikTok.

A charismatic guy, maybe fanning himself with a wad of cash, promises you a key to this life. He calls it a “personal gold mine”. All you have to do is invest.

This was the promise of “Click Profit,” a company that sold the ultimate 21st-century fantasy: a fully automated, “massively profitable” e-commerce store powered by artificial intelligence and stocked with products from brands like Nike and Disney.

For an upfront fee that often exceeded $50,000, Click Profit and its founders promised to build a turnkey business that would generate “insane returns” with zero effort. It was, they claimed, a “safe, secure, and proven to generate wealth” opportunity.

But for hundreds of people who invested their life savings, the dream curdled into a disaster. The high-tech AI? It didn’t exist. The exclusive partnerships with big brands? A complete & total fabrication. The promised riches never materialized. Instead of a gold mine, most customers were left with a mountain of debt, a garage full of junk they couldn’t sell, and the chilling realization that they had been sold a lie.

The Anatomy of a Hustle

At the center of the scheme was a man named Craig Emslie, the co-founder and public face of Click Profit. In slickly produced videos and social media ads, Emslie positioned himself as an e-commerce guru who had cracked the code.

He and his partners—Patrick McGeoghean, Jason Masri, and William Holton—built an elaborate digital facade. Their websites showcased “testimonials” from clients allegedly making hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars. One site boasted an average annual revenue of over $446,000 per store.

They relentlessly hyped their “proprietary” AI, a “super computer” that could supposedly pinpoint the most profitable products to sell on Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok. This, they claimed, was their “competitive advantage”. Add in their “exclusive wholesale licenses” with giants like Colgate and 3M, and it seemed foolproof.

They even offered a “100% guarantee,” promising to generate up to $150,000 in sales or you’d get “every single penny of your investment back”.

It was a potent cocktail of buzzwords and false promises, perfectly tailored for an era of economic anxiety. And people naively bought it.

But behind the curtain, the operation was a sham. The “tier 1 inventory” from name brands never appeared. Instead, customers’ stores were stocked with a random assortment of generic goods: makeup applicators, food storage bags, paper clips.

The promised profits were a mirage. According to an FTC legal complaint filed in March 2025, the reality was devastating. The median Click Profit store earned only about $7,200 in gross sales over its entire lifetime—before Click Profit took its hefty cut. Not a single store came anywhere close to the advertised average. In fact, most of them didn’t last long at all, with the average store fizzling out in under seven months.

The Price of Silence

When the money didn’t roll in, customers naturally got angry. They complained. They posted reviews. They tried to warn others. That’s when Click Profit’s tactics turned from deceptive to downright menacing.

Buried in the fine print of their “nonnegotiable” contract was a gag clause. It prohibited customers from saying anything “disparaging” about the company in any online forum—”regardless of whether such comments could be deemed factually true”.

One man, after investing his life savings and getting nothing in return, posted honest reviews of his experience. He soon received a call from a lawyer hired by Craig Emslie. The attorney threatened to sue the man and take everything he and his wife owned, including their home and their pensions. The threat was so terrifying that the man’s wife “cried herself to sleep for several nights”. Fearing they would lose even more, the man caved and had his reviews taken down. When he then asked the lawyer about a partial refund, he was told Emslie’s response was, “F*** off”.

This was the business model: sell a fantasy, and when it implodes, intimidate your victims into silence so you can keep selling it to the next person in line.

A System Primed for the Grift

It’s easy to dismiss Click Profit as just another bad apple. But that would miss the point entirely. This scheme was a symptom of a system that is perfectly primed for this kind of grift.

The modern economy has created a vast and anxious class of people desperate for a foothold. The promise of “passive income” is intoxicating because the reality of active income—stagnant wages, precarious jobs, and rising costs—is so punishing. Scammers thrive in this environment of desperation, using the language of innovation (“AI,” “automation,” “e-commerce”) to mask old-fashioned deception.

They exploit a regulatory landscape that is often one step behind, allowing them to operate for years before facing any consequences. By the time the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to sue Click Profit and its founders, the company had already allegedly caused “at least millions of dollars” in damages. That’s millions of dollars pulled from the savings accounts, retirement funds, and credit lines of ordinary people.

The Reckoning and the Road Ahead

The FTC’s lawsuit accuses the company and its founders of a laundry list of violations, from making false and unsubstantiated earnings claims to illegally suppressing negative reviews and impersonating major brands.

But will it be enough? Accountability is a long and winding road. The money to reimburse the victims may be gone forever. And for those victims, the financial loss is only part of the story. There’s also the profound sense of betrayal and the erosion of trust.

Preventing the next Click Profit requires a hard look at the systems that allow these schemes to flourish. It means stronger, more proactive regulation of the “business opportunity” industry. It means holding the social media and search engine platforms that profit from these deceptive ads accountable.

And most of all, it requires a healthy dose of public skepticism. The dream of getting rich without lifting a finger is a powerful one. But as the victims of Click Profit learned in the most painful way possible, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the United States Federal Trade Commission’s Complaint for Permanent Injunction, Case 1:25-cv-20973-JB, filed in the Southern District of Florida on March 3, 2025.

Here is the most recent press release on this story from the FTC’s website dated late August 2025: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/08/ftc-case-against-e-commerce-business-opportunity-scheme-its-operators-results-permanent-ban-industry

This here is the press release from March 2025 about the Click Profit scam: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/03/ftc-acts-stop-click-profit-online-business-opportunity-has-cost-consumers-least-14-million