Micro Shares Review: Russian-based 10 cent micro Ponzi

There is no information on the Micro Shares website indicating who owns or operates the company.

The Micro Shares website domain (“micro-shares.com”) was registered on the 13th of June 2014, however the domain registration is set to private.

Whoever is running Micro Shares is likely based out of Russia, with Alexa currently estimating that 75.8% of all traffic to the Micro Shares website originates out of Russia. Neighboring Ukraine accounts for 8.8%.

Also supporting Micro Shares being run out of Russia are the two available language options on the company website, Russian and English.

As always, if an MLM company is not openly upfront about who is running or owns it, think long and hard about joining and/or handing over any money.

The Micro Shares Product Line

Micro Shares has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market affiliate membership with the company itself.

The Micro Shares Compensation Plan

The Micro Shares compensation plan sees affiliates invest in 10 cent shares, with an advertised 1% a day ROI. ROI payouts appear to be indefinite (“Every day you get 1% of income or more than 365% per year + bonuses”).

Micro Shares claim that ‘tasks must be performed every day‘ by affiliates, otherwise they don’t qualify for a ROI payment for that day.

The nature of these tasks are note disclosed on the Micro Shares website.

Referral commissions are paid out on investments made by recruited affiliates, paid out via a unilevel compensation structure.

A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):

If any of these level 1 affiliates go on to recruit new affiliates of their own, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team.

If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.

Micro Shares cap payable unilevel levels at 50, paying out a percentage of funds invested by affiliates in a unilevel team as follows:

• level 1 (personally recruited affiliates) – 15%
• level 2 – 10%
• level 3 – 5%
• levels 4 to 50 – 0.5%

Joining Micro Shares

Affiliate membership with Micro Shares is free, however affiliates must invest in at least one share if they wish to participate in the income opportunity.

As such the defacto cost of Micro Shares affiliate membership is 10 cents (investment in one share).

Conclusion

Under the guise of getting affiliates to perform pointless tasks, Micro Shares simply shuffle newly invested funds around to pay off existing investors.

This qualifies Micro Shares as a Ponzi scheme.

There is a possibility that the scheme will have its affiliates game an external revenue source in some manner (clicking ads, completing surveys or some such), but this is only going to generate peanuts, with the primary source of ROI payments coming from newly recruited affiliates.

Evidently, not much thought or effort has gone into the Micro Shares website, with most of it looking unfinished (the “webmasters”, “advertisers” and FAQ sections all contain default template information).

Throw in anonymous Russian administration and well, things aren’t looking too good.

As with all Ponzi schemes, once new affiliate investment dries up Micro Shares will find itself unable to meet it daily ROI obligations. Before that happens though, investors are first likely to notice delays with referral commissions being paid out.

Either scenario (daily ROI or referral commissions experiencing problems) would signal the inevitable collapse is just around the corner.