Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
President Trump juiced the political-merchandising market with MAGA hats, foam border-wall bricks, and other tchotchkes that his fans happily purchased to show their support.
But outside of the campaign, the demand for Trump paraphernalia has provided significant business opportunities for some internet entrepreneurs who’ve been milking digital revenue streams for years.
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We traced a network of such merchandisers to a single Texas man who previously made millions from online businesses that appear to be pyramid schemes, eBay marketing courses, and dropshipping businesses—before declaring for bankruptcy protection and seeing a six-figure federal judgment leveled against him. It’s a case study in how some internet salesmen are seeking to get rich off rockstar-level fandom for the nation’s chief executive.
The websites and Facebook pages managed by Houston-area businessman Larry Scott Rogers hit plenty of Trumpian notes, with names such as Keep Merica Great, Build the Wall, Prime Patriot, Confederate Action, Behind the Blue, and Liberalism Is Cancer. Most of them do little but market merchandise promoting causes such as Trump, the military, police, and the Confederacy.
PAY DIRT counted at least 10 politically themed Facebook pages that Rogers runs, which boast more than 2.2 million members combined. The reach of their ads is far larger.
In the two years that they’ve been up and running, the businesses behind those pages and the websites they promote have racked up a host of consumer complaints from the Better Business Bureau and similar services from former customers who say their credit cards were repeatedly charged without their permission.
“This company is a complete scam,” one customer wrote in 2017, “and I am having to jump thru hoops with my credit card company to cancel any future orders because I can’t make contact with this company.”
Rogers administers his websites and social-media pages through two companies, Jaar Legacy Holdings and Vision Marketing International. And he frequently brags to his Facebook friends about the significant reach of their posts and ads. From Feb. 19, 2016, to March 26, 2017, Rogers spent more than $1.9 million on Facebook ads, according to a screenshot of his advertiser dashboard posted on his Facebook page. The ads reached nearly 40 million people and drove nearly 3.5 million visits to his websites.
It’s not clear whether those ads promoted Rogers’ recent merchandising ventures. Before getting on the Trump paraphernalia bandwagon, he ran a host of other websites devoted to separate business ventures, including a multilevel marketing company, Vitel Wireless, that sold phones and cellphone service packages through a structure resembling a pyramid scheme.
Those businesses produced significant returns for Rogers. In court documents filed in early 2016, he said he’d earned pre-tax income of $500,000 in 2014 and $2 million in 2015.
But Rogers appears to have built a lifestyle even that income couldn’t sustain. During legal proceedings in March 2015, a Texas court listed Rogers’ “net resources” as just $24,250. The following year, Rogers filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, disclosing between $50,000 and $100,000 of assets and between $500,000 and $1 million in liabilities.
In his bankruptcy filing in March 2016, Rogers said he was party to an “ongoing” lawsuit by a former lender to his Vitel Wireless company. In fact, that lawsuit had been resolved a month earlier, when a federal judge ordered Rogers and a business associate to repay nearly $300,000.
The financial troubles continued into 2017, when Rogers was ordered to pay an additional $6,000, plus attorney’s fees, as part of another lawsuit in a Texas court. And late last year, Rogers’ landlord filed suit against him, claiming he owed $4,900 in unpaid rent. That case was later dismissed when the landlord declined to pursue the case.
It was into those apparent financial troubles that Rogers’ new, Trump-themed business ventures were born. He did not respond to numerous requests for comment on this report about his businesses, background, and the litany of claims that his new merchandising ventures have scammed customers.
With the considerable reach that Rogers’ social-media pages and websites enjoy, they’ve moved beyond merchandising sales and have begun selling their own ads on social media. Rogers, who goes by his middle name Scott, even appears to be in the online pornography business. One of the litany of domains he’s purchased in the last few years, ScottyTooHotty.com (NSFW), redirects to a Snapchat and Instagram porn model’s subscription page.
That adult classified site advertises a woman. But in a post on Rogers’ Facebook page a day before his birthday in 2016, a friend commented, “Happy Birthday Scottie Too Hottie!”
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