Few days back, we had blogged about OurPlanet.com - A UK based travel site which promises few lucky travelers a trip of a lifetime. Recently, we received a comment on the post from a guy called Filipe who calls himself a serial entrepreneur. He observed that the company was a scam. A guy named Ryan Flynn is behind this and he’s tried several other companies with similar idea to scam people.

Well that’s not all. He has also blogged about it on his blog and that’s not all, he also screwed TechCrunch for blogging about the company. This is what he has written:

TechCrunch Fooled By OurPlanet -
TechCrunch wrote an article about OurPlanet (I’m not going to link to these guys because it’s a waste of time - trust me on this one!) on June 9. Too bad I didn’t see it until yesterday.

Well, basically, they reviewed this new “travel site” that claims to be a “trip advisor, hostel world and lonely planet, rolled into one, but better” in 3-6 months… Right now, the “website” is a wordpress subdomain (eek) and the ourplanet.com is taken anyway…

So, the story behind OurPlanet is that they will select “30 lucky people” to travel around the world to build their “brand.” Sounds good, uh? Well, the guy behind this is Ryan Flynn. He contacted me (YowTRIP) in March about doing a partnership with Travellers 2.0 (the name he used to use before OurPlanet).

The fact that he didn’t have a website raised a red flag. So, I Googled him and found out that it’s not the first “company” he started like that. There are quite a few blogs about him… from people who believed his BS.

Here’s one: http://thinklab.typepad.com/think_lab/2006/05/one_island_2_sc.html. And here are some of his companies: living legends -> white orchid / traveller 2.0 -> ourplanet

It still blows my mind that TechCrunch fell for this guy. Well, on TC’s defense, he’s been changing names lately, so they couldn’t really look him up… But come on!

Here’s TC’s worst article ever: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/09/ourplanet-has-a-world-class-ego/ and my comments are at the bottom. By the way: Ryan = Sam, Chris, JC (Jesus?) in the comments. JC (aka Ryan) claims “Ryan” doesn’t exist… here’s a video submitted to them… “Hey Ryan…” (This is priceless) That’s not all. When I logged on to TechCrunch’s post, I saw a huge number of discussions going on since Filipe commented there. Some of the conversations are as follows:

And much more, which can be read here.

Further, Felipe has also pointed out that the YouTube profile by OurPlanet reflects their nationality as an Australian while the site claims to be of UK.

The question that still arises on my mind is: Are these conversations true or just a marketing gimmick? As I haven’t seen a single reply by Jason the author of the post on it yet.

• http://tinyurl.com/5ytpc4

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