In today’s WrestleTalk News, major controversy surrounding GFW’s latest venture, Balls Mahoney passes away and WWE announces a new batch of signings…
Our top story today is the major online reaction many fans and wrestling news outlets have had towards Global Force Wrestling’s controversial latest endeavor.
First, before we start, let me give you a bit of background on Global Force Wrestling, because it’s quite a confusing story.
The promotion was first founded by Jeff Jarrett back in 2014. At the time, Jarrett was still a minority investor in TNA and the idea was that Global Force would be a worldwide coalition of different promotions all coming together under one banner.
Back then, Jarrett announced “strategic partnerships” with a number of promotions from all over the world, including New Japan Pro-Wrestling, AAA and even WrestleTalk’s own New Generation Wrestling – which you can watch every Saturday on its channel. Cheap plug, I know.
GFW would then go on to promote New Japan’s Wrestle Kingdom 9 show in January, 2015 and would even help to get the show on pay-per-view in the United States.
Since then, we’ve heard that GFW were filming a TV series called Amped, and that they were in talks with a number of networks about broadcasting it. However, at this point, no television deals have been announced.
Instead, they’ve now announced something else. Here comes the weird.
Over the weekend, if you were to go to the GFW website, you would see a pop up advert for Global Force Gold.
If you click that ad, a video starts playing of Jeff Jarrett asking you to watch another video explaining how we can join Team Jarrett. You’ll even get a free personalized Jeff Jarrett 8×10 for your trouble.
That other video, though, is a promotion for Karatbars, a German company who – according to their website – is a “bank-independent trading houses [sic] for merchandise and precious metals, especially Gold bullion in form of a card in small denominations.”
This is where things unfortunately get a bit sinister. Ethan Vanderbuilt – an Internet ‘scam buster’ has criticized Karatbars as being a “Ponzi scheme.” He says it’s a pyramid scheme that lures people in under the guise of investing in gold, but actually sells small amounts of gold at an incredibly high price and encourages members to recruit new people to gain more benefits.
As you can likely imagine, many of the world’s top wrestling websites and journalists have been scathing over all this, and the controversy only seems to be increasing as more of them dig deeper into what Global Force Gold is really all about.
To see for ourselves, we thought it would only be fair to look at this from all possible sides of the story. So, I’ve signed up for Global Force Gold and I’m currently expecting a call from one of their team. I’ll let you know what happens as soon as they do.
Unless I suddenly become very rich, in which case: Wrestlemania 33 ringside.
To hear about today’s other top stores – including the sad passing of ECW original Balls Mahoney and the WWE’s latest intake of new talent for the Performance Centre – watch the WrestleTalk News above.
