Travel and Cash Review: Travel niche Ponzi pyramid hybrid
Travel and Cash (not to be confused with My Travel & Cash from 2012), went into prelaunch last month and claim to be registered in Belize.
The company doesn’t actually have a physical presence there however, with the Travel and Cash website stating
The owners and management have operated a number of international businesses operating remotely in many different parts of the world.
Our in house IT and web development team are based in India and Australia. Our management team are located in India, Malaysia, Thailand and Croatia.
Identified as co-founders of the company on the Travel and Cash website are Kingsley Ennis (President) and Michael Faust (Chief Visionary Officer).
Ennis appears to have gotten involved in MLM as an affiliate with Yoli, another MLM company operating in health and nutrition niche.
Here he is being awkward on stage in 2012 (at what believe is a Yoli event).
Just two months ago in a BusinessForHome article covering Yoli’s expansion into Canada, Ennis (right), credited as a Yoli Founding Triple Diamond Executive affiliate, had this to say:
When the Company announced; the Yoli products will be available in Canada from 27th March 2015 everyone was so excited!
It’s so so exciting to be at the beginning where millions of new people can now join in our mission of health and freedom. The sky is truly the limit…!
No idea what happened there, but Travel and Cash went into prelaunch in April.
Whether or not Ennis is still a Yoli affiliate is unclear.
Michael Faust meanwhile was involved in something called “Holidays and Cash” back in 2009.
Michael Faust, the International Sales Director of HolidaysandCash, a multinational network marketing company headquatered in Nigeria is set to formerly launch the current fastest growing and most rewarding online marketing product in Nigeria ith the course of this week and next week.
Holidays and Cash saw affiliates pay $240 and get paid to recruit other affiliates who did the same.
In 2010 Faust (right) launched “Lekker International”, another travel-based MLM opportunity.
In 2013 Faust was promoting Wenyard, a Ponzi scheme launched that same year.
In response to BehindMLM identifying Wenyard as a Ponzi scheme in late 2013, Faust replied:
Are (you) saying that the 20,000 people who joined Wenyard the last 5 weeks are all gullible, unintelligent, naive and can in no way make an informed decision yet the owners of this site and others making negative remarks are more informed?
It just may be that NOW is NOT the right time for YOU to join but 20,000 people growing at almost 800 a day ARE choosing to get involved and they don’t need misleading posts and websites to sway them.
Wenyard went on to run out of new affiliate funds and collapse less than a year later.
Read on for a full review of the Travel and Cash MLM business opportunity.
The Travel and Cash Product Line
Travel and Cash has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market affiliate membership to the company itself.
Travel and Cash affiliate membership provides access to a third-party travel booking engine, the name of which the company does not disclose.
To prevent competitors learning of who our providers are we have chosen not to disclose the identity of the wholesale travel provider.
The Travel and Cash Compensation Plan
The Travel and Cash compensation plan sees affiliates paid to recruit new affiliates.
Direct Recruitment Commissions
Travel and Cash affiliates are directly paid to recruit new affiliates.
Commissions are paid out using a 1-up style compensation structure, which sees an affiliate pass up most of the first recruitment commission they generate to the affiliate who recruited them.
In turn, any affiliates they recruit must also pass up their first recruitment commission.
How much of a recruitment commission is paid out depends on how much an affiliate spent on their own membership, and how much a newly recruited affiliate is spending:
- Club – not disclosed
- Premium – not disclosed
- Elite – keep $50 and pass up $200 on first sale, keep $250 for every other Elite affiliate recruited thereafter
Note that I wasn’t able to find commission amounts offered at the Club and Premium levels. The Travel and Cash compensation plan documentation only features Elite commissions.
A Matching Bonus is paid on the direct recruitment commissions paid to personally recruited affiliates, payable down five levels of recruitment as follows:
- Club membership and two recruited affiliates = 20% bonus down one level of recruitment
- Premium membership, two recruited affiliates and a total downline of ten affiliates = 20% bonus down two levels of recruitment
- Premium membership, two recruited affiliates and a total downline of twenty affiliates = 20% bonus down three levels of recruitment
- Elite membership, two recruited affiliates and a total downline of fifty affiliates = 20% bonus down four levels of recruitment
- Elite membership, two recruited affiliates and a total downline of one hundred affiliates = 20% bonus down five levels of recruitment
Straight-line Commissions
Travel and Cash’s straight-line commissions revolve around the acquisition of “tokens” and their placing into a series of queues.
Tokens are obtained when an affiliate signs up, with how many tokens are issued depending on how much is spent on Travel and Cash affiliate membership:
- Club – 1 token
- Premium – 2 tokens
- Elite – 7 tokens
Travel and Cash operate seven queue systems, with each paying out a commission to the position at the top of the queue once a specified amount of new token are added to each queue.
Note that Travel and Cash affiliates can “accelerate” their positions through the queues via direct and indirect recruitment.
Depending on how much money newly recruited affiliates spend on their membership, a position is able to jump up fifteen places in a queue at a time.
How much of a commission is paid out and how many new positions are required in each of the seven queues are as follows:
- Queue 1 (requires six new positions to be added) – $100 travel voucher
- Queue 2 (requires three new positions to be added) – $25
- Queue 3 (requires three new positions to be added) – $50
- Queue 4 (requires three new positions to be added) – $100
- Queue 5 (requires three new positions to be added) – $500
- Queue 6 (requires three new positions to be added) – $1000
- Queue 7 (requires three new positions to be added) – $2000
The total payout per each token that makes its way through all seven queues is $3775.
Note that Elite tokens bypass the first queue and are automatically placed in the second queue.
Straight-line Matching Bonus
Travel and Cash pay a Matching Bonus on the straight-line queue earnings of personally recruited affiliates.
How much of a Matching Bonus is paid out is determined by how much an affiliate spent on their own membership, as well as their overall recruiting efforts:
- Club affiliates who recruit two affiliates are paid a 25% Matching Bonus
- Premium affiliates who recruit two affiliates are paid a 50% Matching Bonus
- Elite affiliates who recruit two affiliates are paid a 100% Matching Bonus
Recruitment Bonus
Each month Travel and Cash set aside 2% of global sales volume. This pool of funds is then shared equally among the company’s top 20 recruiters.
A founding member recruitment bonus is also available, with Travel and Cash advertising that the top 20 recruiters will be paid a share of another 2% pool in December 2015.
This second pool is 2% of the Travel and Cash company-wide sales generated between April and November 2015.
Joining Travel and Cash
Affiliate membership with Travel and Cash is available at three price-points:
- Club – $200
- Premium – $500 plus $400 annual renewal fee
- Elite – $1500 plus $550 annual renewal fee
The primary difference between these affiliate membership levels is income potential through the Travel and Cash income opportunity.
Conclusion
As per the Travel and Cash FAQ;
Do I make money from the sale of travel?
No.
Like pretty much every other travel-niche MLM opportunity out there, Travel and Cash has nothing to do with travel.
Instead, Travel and Cash affiliates are paid only to recruit new affiliates.
Commissions in Travel and Cash are paid out through a combination pyramid Ponzi hybrid compensation plan.
The straight-line commissions function as a seven-tier Ponzi investment scheme, seeing affiliates deposit up to $1500 on the promise of an advertised $3775 per position (token) invested in.
The more money spent on Travel and Cash affiliate membership, the more positions an affiliate gets.
Advertised ROIs in each queue are subject to new affiliate investment, with a fixed number of new investment amount required at least level before a cumulative ROI is paid out.
With nothing being marketed or sold to retail customers, all that’s happening here is newly invested funds are being shuffled around to pay off earlier affiliate investors.
The direct recruitment commissions meanwhile is just straight-up pyramid scheme territory.
You sign up, recruit new affiliates and get paid.
Get those affiliates to recruit and you in turn earn a residual income via the recruiting efforts of those you initially recruited into the scheme.
Interwoven within these two core components of the Travel and Cash compensation plan, is a strong “pay to play” element.
So much so that in multiple instances Travel and Cash don’t even bother to provide commission payouts at the Club and Premier affiliate levels.
Instead everything is geared towards marketing the Elite ($1500) membership, with this maximizing income potential though the Travel and Cash Compensation Plan.
Examples of this at play are Elite token positions bypassing the first straight-line queue altogether (exposing the worthlessness of the voucher offered in the process) and scaled matching bonus percentages and levels tied only to Elite membership.
There’s also pay to play going on in the Founding member promotion running:
Increase your chance of being a prize winner by up to 30 times when you choose the Elite membership pack.
As with all Ponzi pyramid hybrids, once recruitment of new affiliates stop no new funds enter the system.
This results in the straight-line queues stalling and recruitment commissions not getting paid.
At that point anyone who hasn’t recruited enough new affiliates into the scheme loses out, with this mathematically guaranteed to be the majority of participants.
What happens then?
Is there a refund policy?
Travel and Cash does not offer refunds.
You lose your money and Travel and Cash collapses.
After the first bit I really just skimmed this, after a while they turn out to be materially the same. But a few things I did notice and want to comment on…
SO, you’re a marketing genius, and you started an online program Headquartered in Nigeria. Good move there Sparky, I mean, none of those other companies from Nigeria ever turned out to be scams.
Ding ding ding!!! we have a winner! Your whole industry depends upon exactly that!
That means that when you find out the name of the fig leaf travel discount program they use, you’ll realize that it can be had for free.
So you’re either going to wonder why would anyone pay for it more than once (even if it wasn’t nearly as big a scam as the investment) or be reassured that it’s just exactly what it is, something to tell the straights is a “real product” but you know is just a cover, and that the real reason you pay your money is the chance to share in the theft from later investors who buy into this kind of thing.
Wenyard was a flop. The virtual stock trading program failed shortly after launch, the first time enough people tried to sell those virtual shares. But it continued for 6 months after that, trying to correct the problems, before they finally gave up in September 2014.
Michael Faust seems to believe that if he convinces himself about something (e.g. 20,000 members), then other people will be affected too and believe the same.
Wenyard had some “coupons” or something specifically designed for Africa (memberships / recruitment).
Read a lot like TVI Express ad copy too…
I don’t have the exact wording, but it’s something like “to earn while you sleep, you need to sponsor two people, and teach each of them to sponsor two more people.”