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Report: #1125327

Complaint Review: First Class Vacations / Firefly Travel Corp - BOCA RATON Florida

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  • Reported By: Paul Taylor — Boca Raton Florida
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  • First Class Vacations / Firefly Travel Corp 1515 SOUTH FEDERAL HIGHWAY BOCA RATON, Florida USA

CRUISE FIREFLY / FIRST CLASS VACATIONS INC JEFFERY DAVID NAHOM BOCA RATON Florida

*Author of original report: CRUISE FIREFLY; RECANTATION, FIRST CLASS VACATIONS INC; RECANTATION, JEFF NAHOM; RECANTATION

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EDITOR’S COMMENT:  Ripoff Report strongly believes in the First Amendment, especially when consumers are truthfully warning other consumers about potential frauds, scams, rip-offs or the like by shady individuals or businesses.  Ripoff Report is by consumers, for consumers…and we want to keep it that way!  Unfortunately this Report was posted and, upon additional information, appears to have been primarily for the purpose of bullying or harassment.  In many instances Ripoff Report will reach out to the author of the Report to obtain further information.  In other instances, enough information is provided to Ripoff Report to warrant redactions without reaching out to the author.  Ripoff Report is working to combat tactics that are perceived to be cyberharassment, cyberstalking, cyberbullying and/or what is generally considered a “revenge post” as we do not condone such behavior. 

This company is a member of our Corporate Advocacy Program, and has been for several years. This company has handled all their complaints with success and has had no complaints in awhile. We are proud to have them members of our Corporate Advocacy Program.

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NOW TO THE EDITORIALLY REDACTED POSTING(S):

(((REDACTED)))  

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 02/21/2014 01:39 AM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/report/first-class-vacations-firefly/boca-raton-florida-cruise-1125327. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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REBUTTALS & REPLIES:
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#1 Author of original report

CRUISE FIREFLY; RECANTATION, FIRST CLASS VACATIONS INC; RECANTATION, JEFF NAHOM; RECANTATION

AUTHOR: Paul Taylor - ()

POSTED: Monday, March 10, 2014

 

TO BE APPENDED TO WWW.RIPOFFREPORT.COM

~

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/CRUISE-FIREFLY-FIRST-CLASS-VACATIONS-INC-/BOCA-RATON-Florida-33432/CRUISE-FIREFLY-FIRST-CLASS-VACATIONS-INC-JEFFERY-DAVID-NAHOM-MY-CONSIDERED-OPINION--1125327

 

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

RECANTATION - March 10, 2014

THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS AND DECLARATIONS REPRESENT A TRUTHFUL RECANTATION OF THE ORIGINAL POSTING OF RIPOFFREPORT.COM FILE;

This complaint was based upon an unpaid consultancy invoice

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/CRUISE-FIREFLY-FIRST-CLASS-VACATIONS-INC-/BOCA-RATON-Florida-33432/CRUISE-FIREFLY-FIRST-CLASS-VACATIONS-INC-JEFFERY-DAVID-NAHOM-MY-CONSIDERED-OPINION--1125327

 

CRUISE FIREFLY / FIRST CLASS VACATIONS INC JEFFERY DAVID NAHOM MY CONSIDERED OPINION - THE OWNER IS INSANE BOCA RATON Florida 

I don’t think I have ever met a more psychotic and unstable individual as the purported owner of this small Cruise Coupon business - Jeffery David Nahom. Jeffery and equally disturbing older brother; Richard Jacob Nahom run the epitome of a dodgy Boca Raton boiler room. I can honestly say that in all my years assisting and consulting for businesses and entrepreneurs in Britain, Europe, NYC, California, Texas and South Florida Jeff Nahom will be the one I will remember as the worst possible example for numerous reasons, a few of which I have outlined below. Jeff’s annoying business is to sell cruise coupons to the unwilling public for about $600-$700.

 Recantation; From information provided to me by the Company, I Paul Taylor do hereby recant and hereby declare that while my observations and opinion of Jeffery David Nahom and Richard Jacob Nahom are inappropriate for any public forum. In fact my opinions are detrimental to both gentlemen and may have proven detrimental to their business practices as well as potentially damaging to the overall enterprise as a whole. Therefore, in light of a settlement of accounts due, and a mutual cease and desist of negative acts taken here by both myself and Mr. J. Nahom (to be itemized below),

I declare the following recantation to be wholly true.   

 No one wants to actually voluntarily buy such a product, so like many other products that really have no tangible or intrinsic need, this product is pitched by call center sales people. (I’ll get to these poor folk in a few paragraphs).

 

  1. Recantation;

    First Class Vacations Inc., and Firefly Travel Corp (aka) Cruise Firefly provide a valuable and highly sought after ‘low-priced’ alternative for a specific class of Customer seeking access to cruise vacations at highly discounted prices. Often such products are sold via Call Centers who seek to maximize the business opportunity at considerable investment and risk, while providing year-round employment for dozens of South Florida job seekers who work in telephonic call centers, as well as skilled administration, clerical, management and executive staff. 

     

    Crazy Jeffery, First Class Vacations Inc., and a partially paid for acquisition called Firefly Travel Corp aka Cruise Firefly had recently moved from a dingy 3rd floor suite at the grand 1515 South Federal Highway building in Boca Raton to a large 2nd floor corner suite vacated by a fixed income brokerage house.

     

  2.  

     

    Recantation;

    First Class Vacations Inc., and Firefly Travel Corp (aka) Cruise Firefly occupy a newly leased 10,000 sq feet call center. The prior suite (309) had become over populated as the Company had grown to the point where evidently it required larger commercial space.

     

    Jeffery’s ambitious plans for expansion were beyond simple pro forma’s – Jeff believes he is running the next Fortune 500 Company and has no problem repeating this numerous times a day ad nauseam. To that end, Jeff was trying to raise investment cash from anyone (at any cost), and I mean anyone! When I originally saw about 7 or 8 people cold calling the entire country, purporting to be doing a phone survey for CNBC polling (a non-existent entity & nothing to do with the real CNBC) I should have known that Jeff and his cohorts were deep in their denial. These Tele-slaves were making a meagre $300.00 a week creating wooden leads and while I knew their task would be fruitless I decided I would try to assist or at the very minimum consult (for hire) to see if I could help a fellow Jew and cabbala red string wearing local businessman and get him nearer to raising investment cash from my book of clients.

     

            3)

    Recantation;

    From information gleaned from the Company, Mr. Nahom is a highly ambitious entrepreneur that dreams of growing his business. It is disrespectful and inhumane to judge an ambitious entrepreneur simply by his words. Mr. Nahom believes in his ability to manage a medium to large scale business, therefore it is inappropriate and egregious for anyone, including myself to publically publish my opinions of his ambition even if they differ with my experience and seasoning. Therefore, it is in appropriate of me to judge his attempts to raise capital from investors, even if I believe them flawed or misguided. It is possible that Mr. Nahom lacks certain experience that comes from decades of working with both companies and investors on a variety of public and private offerings.  

     

    I was shown a well worked business plan from a pretty hired consultant that had also created the Company’s historical Profit /Loss, Balance Sheets and Cash flow, as well as the next Fortune 500 Company pro forma’s or future projections. Not very much of Crazy Jeff’s numbers made sense. In particular there was a stunning and brazen miscalculation of Gross Revenues. In accounting terms this is called incorrect Revenue Recognition. The simplicity of the error spoke volumes about crazy Jeff’s business practices, but initially I gave Jeff the benefit of the doubt; simply put the Company was pretending to book approximately $3.8m (Y E 2012), $4.1m (YE 2013) in Gross Revenues for Net Profits of $375,000 (YE 2012) and about $500,000 (YE 2013). I guess this was to impress investors; however it also hid the fact that a myriad of un-booked, self-serving expenses had been occurring – Crazy Jeff and Nutty Ricky had been simply helping themselves! I learned from several parties in the firm that both regularly gamble and often used their corporate bank account ATM cards while at the local Isle’s Casino in Fort Lauderdale. The mystery’s deepened with a spider’s web of bank accounts that no one quite understood, and movements of monies between the bank accounts that defied any logic or rationale. Nutty Ricky actually had a degree in accounting which made the whole prospect somewhat more suspicious.   

     

    4)

    Recantation;

    Mr. Nahom hired a handful of consultant(s) to assist in raising debt financing of circa $2,500,000. To enable such a capital raise, Mr. Nahom had first employed a business consultant to create a full Business Plan to both describe and detail the Company’s history, its foundation and its historical financials. During the creation of the Business Plan it became necessary to produce a historical set of financial reports namely; Cash flow, Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss statements. Mr. Nahom is not personally skilled in the art of GAAP accounting; therefore he relied entirely on the skills brought to him by business consultant (s). The Company had been a Sub S corporation, which allowed the Director to take direct advantage of certain tax treatments recognized by the IRS as standard methods of accounting.

    As a consultant, I explained that while the Company persisted in its formative Sub S chapter status, the director(s) were able to use the businesses cash flow and expenses method to their distinct advantage. Upon converting the Company to a C corporation certain habits would require moderation as previous expensing would no longer be appropriate.

    In my experience Debt investors are less interested in ‘a company’s story’ and usually concentrate more on a borrower’s ability to pay regular interest and safely repay the principle at maturity. Therefore, a level of transparency is necessary to achieve debt financing.       

     

    In reality, Jeff’s business had Gross Revenues of about $1.6m (YE 2012) & $1.7m (YE 2013) for a Net Income of about $218,000 (YE 2012) & $247,000 (YE 2013).  In his most psychotic moments, Jeffery David Nahom and his irrationally over exuberant and bankrupt right hand man; Jeffery Vanderpol had cajoled the pretty paid business plan consultant to break with traditional accounting math and include other people’s revenues to pump up Jeff’s numbers!  (These were actually monies paid by Jeff’s customers directly to their respective cruise lines for their vacations, none of it ever belonged to Jeff’s business with the exception of a small commission element).

     

    5)

    Recantation;

    Upon due diligence, the Consultant(s) who provided Mr. Nahom with spreadsheets of the historical financials had employed certain non-GAAP accounting methods which without a background in accounting may have appeared acceptable to him. The effect of using non-GAAP accounting produced a historical financial picture that confused and obfuscated the transparency required to raise $2,500,000.  

     

     

    Even this blatant snafu in the historical accounting pales in comparison to the Future Projections of Crazy Jeff’s Next Fortune 500 Company. With 10,000 Square feet to fill – Jeffery Nahom & equally delusional Jeffery Vanderpol imagined and fantasized that they could recruit, train, manage and maintain a 300 person Call Center of Tele-slaves in three shifts of 100 heads per day. These new Tele-slaves would be recruited at about 25 new additions per month and in true Hotel California style - none would ever leave! (A 0% attrition rate is akin to Moses parting the Red Sea and therefore historically impossible). These projections take on a fantasy level usually reserved for young children watching Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons. Having convinced themselves that their planning was uncontestably correct these two pathological putze’s mentally masticated that by (YE) 2014 the Company would do Gross sales of $57,000,000 with Net Profit of $7,000,000. Hilarious as YE 2014 sounds, in 2015 the Company then projected Gross sales of $214,000,000 with Net Profits of $32,000,000! If they could just find a schmuck to invest a couple of million bucks.    

     

    6)

    Recantation;

    In business, pro forma financial statements are prepared in advance of a planned transaction, such as a merger, an acquisition, a new capital investment, or a change in capital structure such as incurrence of new debt or issuance of equity. The pro forma models the anticipated results of the transaction, with particular emphasis on the projected cash flows, net revenues and (for taxable entities) taxes. Consequently, pro forma statements summarize the projected future status of a company, based on its current financial statements. Lenders and investors often require such statements to structure or confirm compliance with debt covenants such as debt service reserve coverage and debt to equity ratios.  The construction of pro forma statements is based upon detailed financial projections and the historical relationships between different income statements and balance sheet accounts.

    A set of accurate current financials serve as the foundation on which the pro forma should be built. Alongside pro forma statements, actual statements from previous periods will often be shown for easier comparison and analysis. The current and historical financials are used as a starting point to which adjustments are made to reflect the financial transactions forecast for the time covered by the pro forma. Before putting together a pro forma income statement, it is important to have complete sales and other income forecasts as well as complete projections of costs, salaries and benefits, operating expenses, interest expense, etc.

    As a growing call center employing about eight fulltime sales people, Mr. Nahom may have been led to believe that recruiting, training, managing and growing his business may have been simple in today’s lackluster employment markets. One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make when building a pro forma model is mathematically modeling from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. Mr. Nahom’s calculations of hiring approximately 900 people to net approximately 300 people within a 12 month period with a weekly training class of 18 people in order to retain 6 agents was within the calculated rate of attrition of 25 agents monthly.

     

    Mr. Nahom agreed to revise the Pro Forma, although Mr. Nahom still believed that these numbers were still attainable and thought it would better suit the company to outperform the Pro Forma so he decided to delay the proposed second and third shifts.

     

    It took five weeks (Late Dec 2013 – Early Jan 2014)  of my personal (unpaid consultancy) time to calm this irrational psychosis down and explain the impossibility of the task crazy Jeff had set himself, meanwhile blissfully denying any issues - Jeffery Vanderpol went on paid vacation. 

     

    7)

    Recantation;

    I was not given an opportunity to examine the formula’s used to construct the pro formas until early in January 2014. When I discovered the recruiting model included three individual shifts per day( where only one day time shift had ever been historically employed at the Company) it became quite clear that the pro forma had been prepared with somewhat wishful thinking rather than based on actuality. By scrapping the proposed 2nd and 3rd shifts and including the missing attrition rate, the pro forma’s became believable within reason. These alterations were made with great tension ensuing between myself and the two Consultants whose previous work was being corrected.         

     

     

    In mid-January, I, along with the pretty business consultant met with a local CPA to confirm our suspicions with regard to Jeff’s (Next) Fortune 500 Company. Indeed the accounting would require a great deal of reworking to get to the point where a CPA could release a Compilation report, at least for YE 2012 and YE 2013. This was when the s**t hit the fan. Nutty Jeff’s company had been a sub S corp - but now, to raise money and take in Investors of one type or another  (and dream about eventually going public in an IPO) the Company needed to be converted to a C corp. It’s really a tax treatment change. However, the net effect is that all the unremitted expenses and erroneous borrowings that Crazy Jeff and even nuttier brother Richard had done over the past two years become untaxed income.

    The bookkeepers and the cute business plan consultant began booking the Nahom brothers mystery 2012 / 2013 expenses converting it too their personal income in 2014. More insanity brewed as Crazy Jeff couldn’t (or wouldn’t) remember (or honor) the deals that he had made with numerous Cruise Vacation sales personal or the tele slaves. The majority of these sales people (7 – 8 of them) were working on a 1099 independent consultancy basis along with 6 - 7 1099 independent consultancy Fronter’s (the previous CNBC Polling tele-slaves) were now making leads for the sales people after failing miserably to produce any accredited investor leads of any value. Psycho Jeff’s twitching, snorting and facial twisting took on new proportions as the Next Fortune 500 Company began to look more like a cruise turd circling a shipwreck’s toilet bowl. Jeff’s expenses mounted as his insanity and instability fought with his daily denial. I thought at one point his twitching eyes were sending desperate Morse code to the entire Norwegian fleet at sea.

     

                    8)

    Recantation; Not withstanding recantations # 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7; Mr. Nahom did not believethat the company’s books required overhauling. Yet, several people working at the Company and one Consultant were required to spend weeks poring over Quickbooks files reclassifying accounts. Mr Nahom was very proud of the company’s historical sales figures but knew the books and his prior accounting firm were not reporting to the level of standard necessary to raise capital or go public and therefore instructed his consultant to find a top notch accounting firm to get the books in order and to apply GAAP accounting methods.  At no time was Mr Nahom aware of any misrepresentations, errors or omissions in the financial reporting of the company. My observations and published comments are disrespectful and inappropriate, but they reflected my impatience as it became more and more obvious that Mr. Nahom may have been aware of the previous mess in the Company’s books but had been helpless to do anything to cure the issues before they were apparent to all.         

     

    In early February, Nutty Jeff began telling people that if I didn’t personally bring investment dollars to the table my consultancy would be over. It took me exactly 4 seconds to make my exit decision. Psycho Jeff still owes me about $9000.00 so he called the Boca Raton police and filed a nonsense report alleging  I had stolen data from his servers, to which Jeff got a responding Boca Raton police report – to remove me and my good name from anything to do with his nonsense cruise coupon business.

     

    9)

    Recantation; By the first week of February the situation had become untenable. Once again my comments are inappropriate. However, I was lead to believe that the CPA firm hired to perform a compilation of the prior 24 months were merely a week away from delivering the Compilation report, and there were now two potential investors that were willing to finance the Company. I was given information on February 7th that Mr. Nahom had verbalized that If I was unable to bring fresh investment cash to the Company immediately then our relationship was over. Acting impatiently and at the end of my tether, I elected to remove myself from the unbearable stress of being around the situation any longer. I had an argumentative confrontation with Mr. Nahom, attended also by Andrew Smith and Jeffery Vanderpol. I was expected to produce investment prior to the Company’s compilation which was in my opinion too risky for my personal funds and out of the question for any debt investors that were in my book. I packed and left the company. There was no official agreement or contract. Two days later I received an email from Mr. Nahom who stated that I should invoice him for my work completed. I supplied him and invoice for my consultation rate and discounted it for monies paid to me during my short stay at First Class Vacations Inc.,    

     

    Several days later I received a call from a Boca Raton police officer who was acting on a report that I had stolen data from the Company by connecting a hard drive to the Company’s servers. This was false. I filed a police report that Mr. Nahom was using my name and home address in the Company’s previously filed Reg D (506c) filing and that I wanted my name and address removed from SEC exposure with regards the Company and its capital raising efforts.   

     

    The morale of this tale - If you work with or for Psycho Jeffery Nahom in any capacity at all, he will likely change your deal like you change your underwear. I caution the litigious – that this is all solely the opinion of the Author after my observations of the aforementioned business and characters; not withstanding or limiting the nature of the ongoing offenses that this Company commits on a fairly regular basis by invading thousands of telephone lines with utter cruise promotion drivel designed only for the most naïve of cruisers.  

    10)

     

    Recantation; Not withstanding recantations 1-9, I believe Mr. Nahom is an ambitious entrepreneur, with an aggressive and somewhat innocent view of how complex it is to raise funds and grow a small business into a large concern. In hindsight there were many things that went wrong that didn’t really need to. However, I was not in a position to alter the circumstances or offer sufficient changes in the Company quickly enough to rescue any part of the situation to get to a speedier resolution or raise sufficient capital to avoid the eventual outcome. I know the pressures involved in running a business and would have resolved to handle many of the issues differently if I had been made aware of them at the appropriate time.   Mr Nahom has been in business for almost 10 years, is a pillar of the community and has many loyal employees who have been with the firm for many years.

     

    THIS RECANTATION WILL BE APPENDED BY THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR TO THE POST

    Submitted:  Fri, February 21, 2014

    Updated:  Fri, March 10, 2014

    Reported By: Paul Taylor — Boca Raton Florida

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