Bidify executive an active Zeek Rewards affiliate?
Back in January 2011 Zeek Rewards launched what was to be the first combination of a MLM investment based hybrid compensation plan with a penny auction front-end.
The amount of revenue generated as affiliates flocked to the company and threw money at it didn’t go unnoticed in the industry and roughly one year later in February 2012 Bidify was launched.
Although a few international players have set up localised versions of the investment compensation hybrid + penny auction model thus far it’s generally agreed the two main contenders in this emerging niche are Zeek Rewards and Bidify.
Zeek Rewards morphed from guaranteeing a 125% ROI to affiliates to paying out a variable 90 day ROI in its current state, whereas Bidify pay out a 120 day ROI and force members to re-invest 20% of their returns.
Similar in nature both Bidify’s and Zeek Rewards’ compensation plans differ enough however to warrant their shared existence in the MLM industry. As for which model prevails, with Bidify having fired up their Bidsson penny auctions barely a week or so ago and Zeek Rewards’ recent plague of payment problems, I’d say the dust is far from settling on that issue.
While we wait for that to happen, it appears that similar business models and the use of penny auctions are not all these two companies share. Turns out that Bidify’s Chief Creative Officer is also an active affiliate in Zeek Rewards.
Frode Jorgensen, Bidify’s Chief Creative Officer (CCO), goes by the Twitter alias of ‘swoopzy’:
I have no idea what the significance of ‘swoopzy’ is nor its meaning to Jorgensen, but it also just happens to be the username of a currently active Diamond level Zeek Rewards affiliate account:
Co-incidence?
Not likely, seeing as Frode Jorgensen was actively promoting the ‘swoopzy’ Zeek Rewards affiliate link on the internet as recently as just last month:
I’m aware that it could be January, but it appears to be an international standard display of the date – that being year/month/day.
Regardless, even if the date is the 5th of January that still begs the question as to why Jorgensen’s Zeek Rewards affiliate account is still active five months later.
I can wholly appreciate members of MLM companies wanting to diversify their income but executive staff? And we’re talking about Bidify’s #1 business rival in the penny auction niche no less.
Ironically, whereas Zeek Rewards don’t seem to mind whether their members actively promote different opportunities while they are with Zeek Rewards, Bidify see things a little differently:
5.3.2 – Sale of Competing Goods or Services
Affiliates must not sell, or attempt to sell, any competing non-Bidify programs or services to Bidify Customers or Affiliates. Any program, product, service, or direct selling opportunity in the same generic categories as the Bidify services are deemed to be competing, regardless of differences in cost, quality or other distinguishing factors.
5.3.3 – Targeting Other Direct Sellers
Should Affiliates engage in solicitation and/or enticement of members of another direct sales company to sell or distribute Bidify services, they bear the risk of being sued by the other direct sales company.
If any lawsuit, arbitration, or mediation is brought against an Affiliate alleging that they engaged in inappropriate recruiting activity of its sales force or Customers, Bidify will not pay any of Affiliate’s defense costs or legal fees, nor will Bidify indemnify the Affiliate for any judgment, award, or settlement.
Whereas most, if not all of Zeek Rewards executives have affiliate positions within the company, it is unknown whether or not Bidify executives also have affiliate positions within Bidify.
General consensus on Diamond affiliate accounts in Zeek Rewards today is that they’re only really beneficial to members with large downlines, indicating that Jorgensen might still be heavily involved in Zeek Rewards despite his executive role in Bidify.
If I was Zeek Reward’s Chief Operating Officer Dawn Wright-Olivares, I might describe the above scenario as an executive manager of Burger King actively trying to recruit franchisees to McDonalds.
Mind you, if everything is fully disclosed and neither Zeek Rewards or Bidify have a problem with Jorgensen’s shared role, it brings up the prickly assumption that Jorgensen most likely has his Zeek Rewards business on autopilot, thus making it a passive income opportunity, something the company strongly denies it offers.
Think about it, Jorgensen can’t actively promote Zeek Rewards (meaning satisfy their daily ad requirement) or at worst he’d be in breach of Bidify’s own rules, or at best be showing a lack of confidence in Bidify if their TOS don’t apply to executives.
Now this might not be the case, but if he was buying Zeek Rewards customers to dump his generated VIP bids onto so he could continue to grow his VIP point balance in Zeek Rewards with, technically he might even get away with not publishing ads. It’s been widely reported by company affiliates that the checking of actual ads being published is less than rigorous.
That of course only leaves the question of why Jorgensen is still an active Diamond affiliate (all membership levels can dump 1000 points on customers now)? One possible explanation is, due to the amount of people he has personally recruited into Zeek Rewards, financially it’s in his best interests to remain a Diamond (Diamond’s earn more per personally recruited affiliate).
Whatever the reason at the end of the day in my opinion you’re still looking at a pretty decent sized conflict of interest between the two opportunities by being an executive of one and affiliate of the other.
Should Bidify executives be actively maintaining Zeek Rewards affiliate accounts considering they are direct competitors in an extremely small and fledgling MLM niche…?
What do you think?
AFAIK, ZeekRewards has a policy in their support and other forums about NOT advertising links to anything else (except stuff they like, obviously).
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But is this really *that* different from Dawn being an affiliate herself?
Keep your colleagues close and your competition closer? Hmm. He is in the matrix, and you can’t do anything about that , and it makes no sense to opt out. As long as his company leaders are aware, and he does not encourage other Bidify members to join Zeek, I don’t see a collusion problem.
It looks like ad was placed May 1 based on the “expiration” of the ad which is 24 hours later.
Cheers for the Jimmy, didn’t click at the time but you’re right.
As for it being the same as Dawn and other Zeek Rewards execs being affiliates, I do think it’s a bit different. Bidify is currently Zeek Rewards #1 competitor.
From Zeek Rewards side, they’ve got exec(s?) from their major competitor working their business. Will Jorgensen make an appearance at Red Carpet events or the upcoming November $1500 a seat ‘ZeekWorld 2012’ event in Tennessee?
Jorgensen is obviously making enough in Zeek Rewards to justify maintaining his membership rather than just cutting loose and concentrating on Bidify.
On Bidify’s end, how are their affiliates supposed to feel knowing that Bidify exec(s?) are still working their businesses over at a major competitor?
Fair enough if the affiliates do it but executive management should be “all in” shouldn’t they?
Finally with Jorgensen only being an affiliate in ZR, I don’t think collusion is on the table.
Here is a Tid Bit for You:
BIDIFY.COM SCAM
BIDIFY UPDATE! YOU TUBE INVESTMENT VIDEO’S GONE = GOOD!
March 2012 update it appears they are trying to clean up their act! A high speed ponzi scam that is run on a high speed penny auction scam.
The owners have gotten off-shore hosting money, clearing, etc. They did this thinking they could dodge the law in all nations and states. I feel sorry for Zeek Rewards, a company who has spent a bundle with MLM lawyers to make this genre legal.
However, there is one slight fact that bidify.com is not pointing out! The originator has been busted in the United States for another scam, PLEXPLAY. Yes, Frode Jorgensen of Norway has run into the U.S. law before!
http://www.asc.state.al.us/Orders/2007/CD-2007-0009.pdf
Oz covered that in the previous article regarding Bidify.
I do read your reports, however the bottom line is people are going to purchase, invest in, and give to who and what they want. After all as a noted super star says “It’s My Money”!
I think our Government is a Ponzi, I don’t hear anyone saying anything about that! Can you do a report and find out for me why I have to pay some members of Congress medical ins, their kids private schools (while mine is in a sub standard public school) a salary for them for the rest of their lives, etc. etc.!
See what you can find out about that. (lol)
You do have interesting reads though!
Until I can buy into the government and reinvest my earnings everyday on the expectation of a 120 day variable ROI, comparing the two is irrelevant.
“But the government is a ponzi” and “all business is a ponzi” are irrelevant arguments commonly brought up by Ponzi believers and are usually marked as spam here. I let this one through because this isn’t a company specific article.
However, if you want to argue the legitimacy of Ponzi schemes then compare apples to apples. First and last warning.
“Social Security is a Ponzi” argument was already soundly defeated by a historian / economist who wrote *the* book on Charles Ponzi himself.
http://amlmskeptic.blogspot.com/2012/05/explaining-why-is-social-security-not.html
I covered that part in another thread about Bidify, but “Fraudy Jorgensen’s life and business adventures” is a topic that is partly outside the scope of this blog. We are focusing on the businesses themselves, more than the people involved in them.
When it comes to the people involved, there’s easy to find some information, but most of it will be unbiased and poorly documented. So I won’t dig very deep into it.
To make a summary, searches on the internet shows a decade or more with involvment in different scams, where none of them have been real businesses, the companies involved acts only as a disguise, the money ends up in offshore banks, unexperienced people ends up losing their money, experienced people who joins early will usually make money.
“A decade of experience” can also be interpreted as a positivie factor. It’s often worse to “do business” with unexperienced people, they are less predictable.
Searchhits in Google can be found on “Frode Jørgensen xxx”, where xxx is one of these schemes (if people want to find information themselves):
Plexpay, T5PC The Five Percent Community, PIPS People In Profits System, WGI World Games Inc, Juugo Inc, AmityFunds, Hatfield Oak International, SNGinvest.
In this case it would be Bidify making the call to allow an employee to be involved in a similar business.
I would say it would be the high road for Zeek to allow an affiliate the freedom to earn a living. There are some companies that want to control their affiliates.
In some cases this could be justifiable if there was a risk of trade secrets being shared.
Glad I’m not on those boards making those rules.
Oz Lighten up! Go buy some bids and see how it all works!
I already know how it works. The whole ‘you don’t get it until you buy bids’ marketing pitch won’t work here.
Stick to pitching to the uneducated lower-class with that nonsense, you’ll undoubtedly have better luck there.
I am wondering how Bidify is making any profit at all. A couple months ago I was told that there were over like 100k founders, yet now I hear the founders pool only holds about under 2k. That does not make sense.
I am even wondering if they making any profit at all, look at the products on bidsson, and the vacation package. Seem like they are losing profit than gaining any. It doesn’t look like it wouold last longer than Zeek.
Not to mention being a company outside the US makes it a lot harder to sue if there is any fraud, such as shill bidders or bots.
Bidsson’s auctions are retail bid sales auctions only. Sample bids could be used, but 25 is the max. It’s safe to assume more so that Zeekler that customers playing have purchased bid packs.
Bidsson is apparently equipped with anti-fraud monitor, from what I heard, and any affiliates that duplicate or create fake accounts abusing the sample bids will get caught…and terminated.
Well, here’s hoping Bidify/Bidsson will not suffer from the mistakes of ZR…
The difference between Bidsson’s and Zeekler’s auction products did stand out to me…that Bidsson has better quality/useful items.
One way I can tell they’re making profit is from the daily leadership bonuses, which is btw better than ZR these past few weeks even in the weekends. I know most disagree with it, but “Frequent Sales Credit” (formerly known as the Mandatory Account) will contribute to the sustainability of the business model.
@vermillion777
There shouldn’t be any need whatsoever to force your affiliates to re-invest earnings back into the company. Unless of course you’re dependent on those earnings and not the auctions.
In that case you’d want to keep as much of those earnings recycling through the company and only then can you say the “Frequest Sales Credit” (more bullshit “terminology compliance” that changes nothing) contributes to sustainability.
Unfortunately if that’s the case, your just paying affiliates with affiliate money and have a Ponzi scheme on your hands, or at best a convoluted cash gifting hybrid via the company itself.
So much for the auctions… nobody forces auction customers to recycle parts of their product back into the system now do they.
@Oz,
There are other ways to see it too. I’m treating this as a business so to me, I’m going to use the FSCs to my advantage and turn it into a tax write off.
FSCs could be used to purchase auction items (among other useful things) directly from Bidsson at retail price (Yes, you could buy it somewhere cheaper I think so too), most of those items could be used creatively towards promoting Bidsson (also office equipment/upgrade), I’ve my own way doing it and it does require sweat equity.
IMO Bidify will be a much simpler income tax filing than ZR because of the FSCs if done right. I can’t say for other affiliates and how they run their business, unfortunately…
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure that you have done anything at all.”
None of which change the fact that Bidify are still forcing members to re-invest their earnings, strongly indicating a reliance on affiliate money to pay out commissions with.
Oh, and good luck with the tax audit.
Ok OZ. I have read much of what you have to say on zeekrewards. And i had the rose coloured glasses on when i signed up, which is not normal for me. So thanks.
What i want to ask is (and i should slap myself for this), can it be possible that zeekrewards does drive more customers to zeek auctions and thus make people bid (real bidders that is) more than they would have normally to get an item at the price they want to pay. And this makes zeekler auctions more profitable.
So its win ,win for zeek and zeekrewards and bad luck for real auction bidders.
Thanks for the well wishes. Best thing to do is be well documented to avoid that burden.
@pete
No doubt the daily spam drives some traffic, but it’s affiliate traffic. This is evidenced by the lack of genuine retail customers affiliates have.
You’re an affiliate, how many genuine retail customers do you have who purchase retail bids on an ongoing basis (and aren’t related to you or friends or just doing it so you earn matching VIP points etc. etc.)?
What little retail customers these spam ads generate is nowhere near enough to pay out the money we’re talking here. 1.5% indefinite daily ROIs on ever-growing point balances. Think about it.
Yes the revenue isn’t guaranteed but when it drops below enough to at least buy enough bids to maintain a point balance over 90 days, who’s going to stick around??? That in itself is an indirect guarantee that members will be able to grow their points by Zeek Rewards paying out enough of a daily ROI for re-purchases. Otherwise the business model falls flat on it’s face.
And despite the marketing rhetoric, people aren’t idiots. Nobody is buying masses of retail bids and paying way above retail because they find it “entertaining” to hemorrhage money.
Go and look at the legit penny auctions and pay particular attention to what actual retail customer bidding behaviour looks like. It looks nothing like the affiliate funded bid inflation garbage that goes on at the MLM penny auctions.
The only true test of whether or not penny auction retail customers would be able to sustain a MLM compensation plan would be to see one spring up without all this Ponzi investment ‘paying affiliates with affiliate money’ crap.
You’re not going to see that though and the answer to the question of ‘why not?’ should in and of itself be glaringly obvious.
@vermillion777
No worries. Although it seems for now you have more pressing concerns to worry about:
Looks like the ‘affiliates creating fake customer accounts’ nonsense is well and alive over at Bidify.
Customers? What customers?
When you pitch someone the option of making 1.5% or so a day return on their investment vs. consistently losing money on the ridiculously slim chance they’ll win a used toothbrush – it’s kinda obvious which they’re going to pick.
Still doesn’t legitimise affiliate money paying affiliates though.
Yes, I do that for my family and friends I won’t deny that because I want to. I also have no problems with getting real customers.
Yes, naturally you create fraudulent customer accounts, the actual owners of which have no intention of ever using, to use the bids you dumped onto them with because you have no problem getting real customers who will purchase bids on a repeat basis out of a genuine interest in Bidsson’s penny auctions.
Makes total sense.
I’ve never created fraudulent customers, I’ve always have their authorizations with signatures to back them up. As for my selected few family and friends that I signed up, they have troubles in the beginning and we are all still learning.
Any customer account created for use by the referring affiliate (or anyone who isn’t the account holder for that matter) is fraudulent. You only created those accounts to dump bids onto and you used your family and friend’s names to register the accounts, admitting they have no interest in the auctions.
Why is it fraud? Because these accounts will be cited as genuine customer accounts, when they are anything but (they wouldn’t exist without the compensation plan as the affiliates wouldn’t have created them).
You can buy customers too, from the same players involved with ASD and other Ponzis, and who are the top Zeek earners.
They took their Ponzi money and created companies to sell you customers and place your ads. PPBlog needs to do a piece on that.
After the whole ZCustomers ‘we sign up customers without their prior knowledge or consent’ nonsense, I don’t consider purchased customers any more legitimate than signing up family and friends who never use the accounts either.
I admit that i pre emptively sign up my family hoping they would eventually pick it up and treat the business seriously…and i did not want them to waste their bids hence i offer to use it for them.
I dont mind doing work for them geting customers too. however, ive only done this for my family so its a different relation than of a customer prospect.
I have them use their sample bids right away since they are only just that, customers. my concern is that in doing cold market i have created several user accounts using my lone tablet and desktop…i will just have to back it up with documenation to prove it when the time comes.
Yeah, fraud. Creating customer and affiliate accounts in other people’s names that are in acutality just used by yourself.
Let’s cut the crap, you wouldn’t be doing anything if it wasn’t contributing directly to increasing your point balance. All this ‘I’m helping them’ rubbish, please. You’ve been reading BehindMLM long enough to know the marketing spiels don’t work here.
At the end of the day you’ve created a bunch of accounts under other people’s names that you yourself are using and nobody else. You’ve done this to increase your overall share in the daily ROI paid out by Bidify and effectively game the system.
And in doing so, you perfectly emphasise the complete lack of retail business that goes on in MLM penny auctions and rather the sole dependance on new affiliate money these investment based compensation plans rely on.
End of story.
Just picking up on this discussion: None of this changes the fact that, legal Ponzi or legit business, when you get into ZR with $XXX amount you will earn $XXXXX in XXX of time!
Who knows how long it will last but why not get in and get out with what you put in and start increasing your bottom line? In the end all we want to do is make money! I think you are doing yourself and your friends/fam an injustice if you don’t explain the obvious risks here!
However, they seem to have found a way to offer a legitimate online income opportunity that has been, from what I understand, government approved! So Oz, if you could let us know what else we are missing, im all ears? Im also going to peruse your other articles 😉
@Skip
As with any Ponzi scheme, someone is going to be left holding the bag. For some people their own bottom line doesn’t justify a ‘f’em, I’ll get paid’ attitude towards life.
Government approved? Oh dear. I hope you’re not running around telling that to your family and friends. The business model makes Zeek Rewards an illegitimate business opportunity, in that it collapses once new and existing members stop investing in VIP bids/points (however they do so).
Nothing else really matters within the context of this discussion.
Translation: Government approved = hasn’t yet been shut down by the feds.
If you had removed the $-sign in parts of your statement, it would become true.
In Zeek you pay real money IN, then you have a system where you generate POINTS, and then you can start to withdraw money if Zeek has money left in their pool — the pool of money coming in from new investors.
So your statement will be more correct like this:
“None of this changes the fact” is misleading, because you are clearly dependant on money coming in from new investors before you can earn any money yourself. You are also dependant on the scheme being able to keep itself alive and not being shut down by authorities. So there are several flaws in your theories.
“when you get into ZR with $XXX amount you will earn XXXXX points in XXX of time, if the scheme is still alive for so long. Then you can start to withdraw money, if they have money coming in from new investors.”
actually when you buy in you buy in with $$ and you earn $$ every day so no, its actually correct with the $ signs. The $$ you earn then get converted to points because you choose to use your $$ earning to repurchase points. Hope that makes sense…
Oz. I appreciate what you are trying to do but it does seem like perhaps you have been burnt badly by an MLM company in the past? Ive had a bad experience with one and I got out before it got messy.
This one is plain and simple HAS passed any test that has been thrown at it though. If it was what you say it is then it wouldn’t be still operating! The simple answer is that NO one knows how many real customers there actually are on the penny auction and thus how much money from the auction is actually distributed. But for now, the method is simple and legal:
you buy bids as VIP points which are distributed. You advertise for the auction, people use bids to buy product, everyone makes money and you are rewarded for advertising for them. The incentive is there for signing people up just like any other legal MLM.
The big question is how much does the Auction actually make and will that sustain affiliate payouts?…. who really knows and until then I have no problem telling people the risks and what it really does!
I would say that Skip’s explanation above is prototypical of what I’ve seen across hundreds of affiliates discussing and recruiting others.
My summary of it without linguistic hedges:
Zeek has paid to date and therefore is not likely an outright scam that will runoff with your money… whether it is sustainable or can meet future legal challenges we don’t know because no one knows the secret profit formula, but it’s paid me and it will pay you to for the foreseeable future.
Here is social proof and check flashing as a form of enticement, even though this is against compliance policy, everyone does it, so wink wink nudge nudge. Every day that you’re not in,you are not earning daily profit share. Sign up today, here are the shady eWallet processors you have to use go sign-up.
@Skip
No, I’ve never had anything to do with a MLM company. Never joined one and never bought anything from a member of one. My objective analysis is purely based on the mechanics of the business model – that’s all that matters. I harbor no illwill towards the MLM industry at all.
Yeah, except that one. Y’know… the one that defines it as a Ponzi scheme with all indication pointing to a lack of retail customers and majority daily ROI payout funded by affiliate money.
Neither advertisements or using bids directly generates revenue. The only source of revenue was that initial investment in points (ultimately what affiliates are investing into, as nobody keeps their VIP bids as bids).
Affiliates are directly rewarded on how much they invest into the scheme and then continously on how much they re-invest of their returns back into the scheme. Bonus investment funds are paid if they convince others to invest and/or create fake customers to channel their funds through via retail bid purchases.
Oh, and they also get paid on the monthly membership fees of the members they recruited.
Compliance glasses off, that’s how the payment in Zeek Rewards works. It has nothing to do with advertising or the use of bids. The only advertising that attracts anyone is affiliate targeted advertising, ‘ZOMG EARN 1.5% A DAY FOR DOING NOTHING!’ and the like.
If you don’t care about the legality of your business, there are PLENTY of income opportunities that yields far faster profits and even LESS risk to your own capital.
Starting your own HYIP comes to mind, or even better, tell friends and relatives you landed exclusive contract to supply organic milk to Disneyland (real scam).
Sorry, but that’s just claiming “lack of proof is counter-proof”. That’s a fallacy.
If you consider that a valid test, I’d suggest a remedial course in critical thinking ASAP.
I think Oz has some very logical arguments here.
The fact that you can put in this any amount of money you want and get a daily average of 1.4% -no matter what- to that money is insane on its own.
Even if they really make that much money out of retail customers so they can pay-off, they can’t just give 1.4% to any amount of money.
If we are 1.000.000 people who put 100$ in this, we gotta get 1.4% each. Then zeek has to give us 1.400.000$ alltogether. Let’s assume that’s an amount that Zeekler can make through retail customers(lol!). How about we decide though to put 10.000$ each?
Then we have an amount of 10000000000 x 1.4% = 140.000.000$!!!
Retail Customers hasn’t changed. Their bids hasn’t changed. Advertisement hasn’t changed. The only thing change is the amount of money Zeek has to give us.
And this is just a simple example of how this system is a scam. There are at least 10 different ways i can think of that this system would collapse in the next few months.
For example, how about if the number of affiliates totally outreaches the number of retail customers? They can’t afford giving 1.4%.
The bottom line is that the whole system pays its old affiliates from the money new affiliates put in the system.
Its a pyramid scheme that as long as its gonna last some people will make good money. There’s no doubt about that. But that doesn’t change the fact that its a pyramid scheme and any moment it would collapse and some friends etc of yours will lose their money.
It might last 2 more weeks or maybe months, i don’t know. I’m just talking about how the system works.
The official line from Zeek is that the daily advertising the affiliates are doing is bringing in massive numbers of customers, and each new ad placed every day supposedly brings in that many more.
The business model is based on infinite growth, and as I’ve said before even if Zeek weren’t a ponzi, it would have to collapse sooner or later, probably sooner.
We all know that there are only a limited number of people who will want to buy bids to play on a penny auction, and many of them will be bidding on competing sites.
Zeek busted the 18th of august 2012… so Joe Mama you where pretty right… and i got my money into zeek on the 30st of july… guess who was greedy…