Valiant, Then Lunar, Then Ecom Genie: One Man's Serially Rebranded E-Commerce Scheme

A federal court has temporarily shut down an online business-opportunity scheme the Federal Trade Commission alleges has taken more than $12 million from consumers with false promises of guaranteed passive income from e-commerce stores on Amazon and Walmart's marketplaces.DOCUMENTED

The FTC's complaint alleges the companies involved — most recently operating as Ecom Genie and Profitable Automation — have been controlled the entire time by one person, Steven Mayer, across three successive rebrands dating back to 2019.DOCUMENTED

Three names, one operator

According to the complaint, in 2020, when the scheme was operating under the name Valiant, the company and its owner, Steven Mayer, faced numerous complaints and lawsuits from consumers who had lost thousands of dollars to the business opportunity.DOCUMENTED In 2022, with Valiant widely labeled a scam by consumers and already in litigation, the company reorganized under the name Lunar.DOCUMENTED Although the public face of Lunar was a man known as Boba Milic, Mayer effectively ran the company "behind the scenes," as he later described it himself, and Lunar continued making similarly inflated income claims to those Valiant had made.DOCUMENTED

When Lunar faced its own round of consumer complaints and lawsuits, the company disappeared in 2023 and Mayer turned to pitching another e-commerce scheme under the name Ecom Genie, featuring claims similar to both Valiant and Lunar.DOCUMENTED In one promotional video cited in the complaint, the company presented someone as a satisfied client who had "done over $1.2 million in sales so far in the last five months and growing monthly," with "profits now around $22,000 per month" — but that supposed client was, in reality, an Ecom Genie employee.DOCUMENTED

A parallel brand funneling money to the same source

According to the complaint, the scheme also operates under the name Profitable Automation, which makes nearly identical pitches to Ecom Genie's and funnels the vast majority of its income into Ecom Genie's own bank accounts.DOCUMENTED That structure allowed the operation to present itself to prospective customers as more than one company competing in the market, while functionally consolidating the proceeds under Mayer's control regardless of which brand a given consumer signed up through.REVIEWED

The promises and the reality

In online marketing and in claims made directly to consumers going back as far as 2019, the scheme's operators claimed consumers could generate sales of "$100K+ per month" and that their businesses could become "million-dollar" operations.DOCUMENTED Consumers were charged tens of thousands of dollars to open their online stores, at times cashing in savings and retirement accounts, only to find they made no money at all and lost their entire initial investment, according to the complaint.DOCUMENTED

"At a time when consumers are increasingly looking online for opportunities to supplement their income, this scheme made grand promises of guaranteed passive income," said the FTC's Director of Consumer Protection. "Instead, the scheme's operators took millions of dollars, lined their own pockets, and left consumers with debt and stress."

The missing disclosures

The FTC's complaint charges that in every iteration of the scheme, Mayer and the companies he controlled deceived consumers and also failed to provide the disclosures required under the FTC's Business Opportunity Rule — disclosures that would have made clear the nature of Mayer's previous iterations of the scheme and given prospective purchasers real transparency about whether the scheme's earnings claims were actually viable.DOCUMENTED Had those disclosures been made, a consumer researching Ecom Genie would have learned about its predecessors' history of consumer complaints and litigation before ever signing up.REVIEWED

How the case was ultimately resolved

As a result of the FTC's October 2024 complaint, a federal court issued an order temporarily halting the scheme.DOCUMENTED Mayer and his company Ecom Genie Consulting were later ordered, under a settlement, to turn over cash, real estate interests, and personal property to be used for consumer redress, alongside a nearly $14 million monetary judgment partially suspended based on the defendants' inability to pay the full amount.DOCUMENTED Separately, other defendants tied to the Profitable Automation and Lunar Capital Ventures brands secured their own settlements resolving the FTC's claims against them.REVIEWED

Why serial rebranding is difficult for regulators to track

Each time Mayer's operation changed names — from Valiant to Lunar to Ecom Genie — it also effectively reset its public reputation, since online searches for the new brand name would surface little or nothing about the prior version's history of complaints and litigation.REVIEWED Placing a different public-facing frontman, such as the individual known as Boba Milic during the Lunar era, in front of the operation added a further layer of separation between Mayer's own name and the company's marketing, making it harder for a prospective customer doing a basic background check to connect the new venture to its predecessors.REVIEWED The FTC's complaint explicitly traces that lineage across all three names specifically to defeat this kind of reputation-laundering, treating the Business Opportunity Rule's disclosure requirements as designed for exactly this scenario — requiring disclosure of a company's or its principal's prior business history precisely so that a rebrand cannot conceal a documented pattern of past failures.REVIEWED

Prospective buyers evaluating any e-commerce business-opportunity pitch can search for a company's officers and any predecessor brand names before paying — a step that, in this case, would have surfaced years of public complaints tied to Valiant and Lunar well before Ecom Genie's marketing ever reached a new customer. The FTC's Business Opportunity Rule exists precisely to make that kind of history available to prospective buyers directly, through required disclosures, rather than leaving it to each individual consumer to uncover independently.REVIEWED

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