MyCenterBid baffled by affiliate hesitation
At the heart of the MLM penny auction niche is the idea that retail customers buying bids and participating in auctions provides the bulk of revenue.
Take away this core concept and ultimately, regardless of what specific compensation plan a company deploys, all you’re left with is affiliate money being used to pay affiliates.
Unfortunately after mounting regulatory shutdowns, business closures and outright collapses, if the industry has learnt anything since Zeek Rewards emerged it’s that retail sales are virtually non-existent in an MLM penny auction business.
Revenue-sharing, profit-sharing, retail volume orientated compensation plans, sales, sample bid models, luxury auctions, bargain auctions… it doesn’t seem to matter what MLM penny auction companies throw at the niche, there just isn’t any retail in it.
No stranger to a lack of retail is MyCenterBid, formerly Bidify. After abandoning their (virtual) US operations Bidify fled to Europe where it has relaunched as MyCenterBid.
On the affiliate side of things backoffices and what not went live last week, with the CenterBid penny auction projected to go live on Friday, July 19th.
Aware that acknowledging the majority of their revenue comes from affiliates, typically an MLM penny auction company goes to great lengths to perpetuate the retail bid sales myth.
Not MyCenterBid though, in a rather curious update sent out to affiliates the company is demanding to know why its affiliates are ‘waiting to take action when the auctions are live‘, practically ordering them to pump money into the company and “take action” now.
In the MyCenterBid update, sent out July 10th, the “MyCenterBid Team” wrote
DO NOT FALL IN THE WAITING TRAP
We hear people say that they will be waiting to take action when the auctions are live.
Why? We’ve said before – why not use this time to learn how everything works and start creating momentum? It’s almost like being in prelaunch where everybody has a huge advantage..
There is also over 400,000 FSC/Loyalty Credits in people’s accounts. The same rule applies here. Buy your monthly maintenance and PV immediately, and teach everybody else to do the same.
We recommend everyone to have a minimum of 100PV at all times. That will generate Sales Points and possible commission cycles in the Dual Team system. Remember all un-cycled Sale Points are banked for 6 months.
You can also purchase marketing bids which you can share with your customers.
Make sure you take action NOW regardless of fully understanding the compensation plan or not.
It all starts with your Dual Team, generate your momentum there and all other parts of the plan falls into place like a gigantic monetary puzzle. Focus on this part only, that’s what’s going to generate your payouts throughout the whole system.
There is a lot of new information to read and digest, DO IT NOW! Don’t wait.
NOW is the time you should take action.
With no auctions, any revenue MyCenterBid generate now is going to originate from its affiliates. Thus it’s not surprising that the company urges affiliates to “focus only” on the “Dual Team” (binary).
As noted in the BehindMLM MyCenterBid review,
the general idea seems to be sign up as an affiliate, self-qualify for commissions via a bid purchase, create a customer and bid on an auction and then earn on the bid pack purchases of affiliates you recruit.
MyCenterBid pay out a commission everytime 300 volume points are generated by a downline in an affiliate’s binary.
One of the ways these volume points are generated is when an affiliate purchases a CenterBid bid pack, which is currently what the company is strongly encouraging affiliates to do.
If CenterBid were pioneering the penny auction niche and nobody in the industry had ever seen anything like it before, they might have reason to ponder why their affiliates are evidently hesitant to throw their money at them.
Given MyCenterBid’s long drawn out history as Bidify however, including no less than five compensation plan revisions and the complete flop that the Bidsson penny auctions were, do they really need to ask?
Even if you’re just taking money from affiliates and ultimately shuffling around to pay commissions, you still need to keep up the appearance of penny auction activity. Well, you do if you expect to have a hope in hell today of convincing people to put up their money.
Between the collapses, shutdowns and voluntary abandoning of companies altogether, the MLM penny auction niche landscape is vastly different to the investor honeypot Bidify pre-launched into back in early 2012.
A point that seems entirely lost on the MyCenterBid management team.
If I might be so bold as to make a prediction, given the tone of the notice MyCenterBid have put out and the inability for the MLM penny auction niche to produce any viable retail activity, all they’re gearing up for is yet another affiliate-funded outing that is going to end in tears.
Footnote: The entire MyCenterBid update referenced in this article can be read over at the MyCenterBid News website.
Well, guess they are honest about their motives now, aren’t they? Jump in! Never mind the sharks! Jump! Jump!
I wonder what they do with all the money they steal? You’d think after they’ve stolen millions, they could retire on a beach somewhere, and yet they come up with more of these schemes. Are they spending it all on hookers and blow?
I don’t think the former bidify management is involved in terrorism or anything like that, so it’s odd. What would they need all of this money for? I wonder if it’s just them being really, really greedy or if they spend it all on mansions, ferraris and submarines.
You can almost admire their boldness in that they still continue in spite of how an ex-member of their management called them all crooks and claimed their entire operation was a fraud. I guess we aren’t supposed to remember that happened, huh?
Also, “revenue share.” Haha. For an auction site with no auctions. If business was doing so well, what did they need to “re-brand” for? That email was like watching someone frustratedly press buttons on a TV remote with no batteries in it, wondering why it’s not changing the channel.
People should “take action” and not get involved.
What difference does the compensation plan make if its all just camouflage anyway.
On the Bidify website , oooops I mean’t Mycenterbid, the Management Team claims
Fraudy, oooops again, Frode Jorgensen is in charge of marketing and compliance. Go figure, a scammer in charge of marketing and compliance.
I still see the names of many of the old bidify scammers involved, but there seem to be no mention this time of Linda Helin.
This should be a fun scam to follow closely and hopefully this will help unsuspecting folks from joining yet another bidify mycenterbid scam.
I don’t quite get it, Mycenterbid states they have over 100,000 customers world wide but their are no products to bid on?
And another question:
When Bidify closed shop suddenly, did they end up taking everyone’s money also? And what about all the auctions that people had won, did they end up shipping these items out?
I don’t believe Bidify was a success. It had 1100 or 1200 “founding members” paying €1,000 each = €1.2 million. A part of it was probably paid out in commissions?
Then they recruited maybe 5,000 or 10,000 members in the 4 or 5 months before Zeek’s shutdown, mostly networkers familiar with the model = people who expect to get paid regularly and handsomely from recruitment, but who don’t invest too much money themselves.
Bidify simply didn’t have that “magical formula” in place. It spent a lot of money rewarding different people, but that didn’t attract many new investors in itself. It kept some of the old investors happy.
Bidify simply wasn’t very attractive. “Ordinary investors” joined ZeekRewards rather than Bidify.
No idea what happened with the auctions (I don’t think anyone was bidding to be honest. There was that whole bidding bot saga with Albert Liske).
As for money, some of it is tied in up Towah and the rest is tied up in Ponzi points/bids, as the update states there’s thousands of points just sitting there within the company.
I’ve had the idea that Bidify and Towah are in bed together propositioned to me many times, but I’ve never actually seen anything concrete enough to confirm it.
Plausible deniability (in case the downlines hunt you down)
Both of Towah and Bidify are liars. My money have been stuck in Towah since 22th October last year. Still have no ideas of how to get it out.
E-Wallets are not bank accounts, they don’t contain any money. Your money (or maybe virtual payouts) are stuck in Bidify itself.
The normal logic goes like this:
E-Wallets are “pockets” inside a company’s payment processor account. They will only contain “unfulfilled transactions” (“balance”). The real “balance” (money) is in the company’s main account, not in the e-Wallets.
A better description will be to describe e-Wallets as a software program …
* keeping records of people’s “internal transactions” inside a main account (between company and users).
* keeping records of people’s “external transactions” to and from external accounts, typically people’s own bank accounts.
They are simply software showing “numbers on a screen”. If you pay money in from an external bank account, the software will adjust your e-Wallet balance, but the transaction of money will end up in another account.
If you want to withdraw money from your e-Wallet, the software will check if there’s money available in the other account (typically: the company’s account). If that account is empty, the software will refuse to accept any transactions. If it contains enough money, the software will pay out money from it to your external account, and reduce your e-Wallet balance.
RUN,RUN FAR AWAY FROM THESE ASSHOLES. THEY TAKE YOUR MONEY AND YOU GET NOTHING BACK. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PUTTING YOUR MONEY IN THEIR SYSTEM.
It seems that I will never get my money back if it is really stuck in Bidify.Bidify is gone and mycenterbid is another bullshit.
Kiss my money goodbye.
As soon as it became Clear that convicted criminal Frode Jørgensen (2 1/2 years prison sentence for establishing and operating the PlexPay ponzi/pyramid) was behind this scheme, the members’ loss of money was a foregone conclusion.
Gotta love CenterBid’s promise of penny auctions on July 19th. The day’s now half over (but in Europe it’ll be the 20th in just a few hours), and still no auctions.
Just posted my previous comment on 19th July, 1:13 pm, MST. For some reason the date stamp’s the 20th at 4:13 am.
Even if they get bids going, if it is anything like they did with Bidsson, be prepared for more shill bidding, won products not getting shipped, overly inflated shipping fees, Hacker attacks and money freezes.
These people are well known scammers, keep your money in your pockets.
@Keira
Timezones.
(An update from CenterBid, which arrived in this morning’s email):
I believe the above “update” is pretty old, MyCenterBid put both the auction and affiliate websites online yesterday.
I received this particular email at 5:30 am this morning, but thanks to Oz, also see that MyCenterBid is now online. Thank you for the update.
CRAZY, same old scam different name! I also see the name JJsGang bidding, as said the same old scammers Linda Helin and gang is at it again. Good luck on this one you will need it.
But their CEO is a very successful vacuum salesman, so this has to be legit.
But I thouught they moved out of the US and weren’t going to allow US citizens to participate. Not a peep anywhere on their website saying US citizens not accepted.
I guess they believe the myth if you are offshore from the US you can’t be reached out and touched by the US Authorities. Guess they forgot about Liberty Reserve.
This has to be one of the top 5 jokes of the year.
Larus Palmi Magnusson
Organisation MyCenterBid Ltd.
Diagorou 2, Era House
7-12 floors
1097 Nicosia
Other
Cyprus
+35.48928857
Still hosted by BlackLotus Communications in the USA, using the same US based phone number as Bidify and does not specify it doesn’t accept US citizens.
Hardly qualifies as being “OFFSHORE” does it ???
The Bidify / Towah affair has reached Norwegian mainstream media:
Today, the major newspaper Dagbladet has an article (in Norwegian) on the the rift between Bidify and Towah: http://www.dagbladet.no/2013/08/23/nyheter/utenriks/pyramider/bedrageri/28838318/
It is mentioned that the two ‘pyramid kings’ Frode Jørgensen (of PlexPay, 2 1/2 years prison sentence) and Tor Anders Petterøe (formerly of the World Games Incorporated pyramid scheme) found together, with Jørgensen running Bidify and Petterøe’s Towah handling payments for Bidify.
The article states that more than 6 million euro are missing, but it is not clear if this is ‘real’ money, or if this includes promised Ponzi profits.
It is also said that 4.4 million euro is owed from Towah to Bidify, and around 2 million euro owed from Towah to Bidify members, but as there appears to be much disagreement between Bidify and Towah, it is unclear which of the parties claim this.
It is claimed by Petterøe that a substantial amount of Bidify-related money is frozen by Chinese banks, due to suspicion of pyramid scheme activities. The name of these Chinese bank(s) is not stated.
The article states that Towah handles payments for around 15 MLM / pyramid scheme Companies, among them Unaico, run by Norwegian pyramidsters Rune Evensen and Jarle Thorsen.
According to the article, Bidify is threatening legal action against Towah. Petterøe has responded that this would bring both companies down.
The Bidify / Towah affair came to the attention of Dagbladet when a Norwegian company in the Towah conglomerate, Towah Norway AS, went bankrupt. Apparently, a lot of wage money had not been paid to the employees, who refused to accept a reduced payout settlement.
However, other Towah Companies are still operating, including the British company Towah Members Club Ltd.
I still have 3100EUR locked in Towah. They said they money will be frozen 540 days by the bank.
If Towah bankrupt,how can i get my money?