There is a lot that is very sketchy about Kourtland Kardashian (as he calls himself; his real name appears to be Kourtland Wissler). He has over 5 times the followers of Tim Sykes on Twitter (438,000 versus 84,000) despite his website CenterlineTrades.com being registered only in 2015 while Tim has been blogging / selling his services for 7 years and has been on TV numerous times. This makes me think that Kourtland bought followers in order to appear more popular than he is. Kourtland has also been accused of plagiarizing someone else’s work and then selling that material on Udemy.
@KourtlandK Please remove my pricing course that you’re selling on Udemy without my permission. Thanks.
— Nick Kolenda (@NickKolenda) June 8, 2015
@NickKolenda Is this your course on http://t.co/pDIqh1F8IR? https://t.co/0vaUiSh8LS — Electric Automation (@eAutomation) June 6, 2015
Kourtland also makes some pretty implausible claims, such as turning $4000 into $25 million:
or being called “the best technical analyst in wall street [sic] history” by Forbes (this is from his Udemy page):
(Update 2016-6-16: I blocked the profile images in the two screenshots above (from Twitter and Udemy) — even though I believe they were clearly fair use — because I received a DMCA takedown request from Kourtland Wissler. So if you want to know what he looks like, you’ll have to see Kourtland Wissler’s mugshot.)
Kourtland has two other courses on Udemy besides the allegedly plagiarized course. His courses are generally positively reviewed but the tone of the positive reviews and the distribution of scores of the reviews (all the positive reviews are 5 stars and mention no negatives) makes me think that most if not all of the positive reviews are fake. Here are all the reviews of one course:
And here are the most recent reviews and the distribution of reviews on his other trading course (which appears to be identical to the first one):
While the large number of glowing 5-star reviews on his Udemy courses makes me think that they are fake, he also has some testimonials on his website. I have no proof that those testimonials are fake but the images for most of them are taken from random places on the internet — only one of the testimonial photos appears to come from an actual person that is said to have written the testimonial.
The first testimonial is from “Doug Smith” aka smiling black guy with nice teeth:
Take a look at the reverse image search results on Google below: it appears Doug Smith also goes by the name of Brian Smith and is a satisfied patient of many dentists.
In fact, Doug Smith is a stock photo:
Is there a real Doug Smith who wrote that testimonial? Maybe. But if he is real, why post a stock photo?
The second testimonial is from Rafe Jamison, aka hot guy with dog:
As with Doug Smith, it turns out that the photo is not of the testimonial writer but rather a photo of a model taken from The Daily Telegraph:Again, this is not proof that the testimonial is fake but it doesn’t inspire confidence.
The third testimonial, from Perry R, actually appears to have a photo of Perry R, who exists on LinkedIn at least:
The fourth testimonial, from Sarah Kemp, appears to be another stock photo:
The fifth testimonial, from Scotty Arlie, SEO Guru at Bright Street, not only appears to show a photo that appears many other places on the internet but also purports to be written by an SEO (search engine optimization) expert that cannot be found via Google search. So if he is an actual SEO Guru he must be the most incompetent one in the world.
Below are the results of my Google searches for “Scotty Arlie” and ‘”Bright Street” SEO’:
From these searches, I conclude with high confidence that Scotty Arlie is not an SEO guru. And if the description of his job and company are false then I can conclude with moderately high confidence that he doesn’t exist and that the testimonial is therefore fake.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with any parties mentioned above. Some of the information in this post was first mentioned online by a now-suspended Twitter user known as @IRSReporter; I will not link to his account because he posts lots of misleading things as well as occasionally interesting information. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.