BidXcel bites the dust
In what can only be described as yet another blow to the MLM penny auction niche, BidXcel quietly closed their doors last week.
Launched in late 2012, the company’s website (“bidxcel.com”) and penny auction (“xcelbids.com”) were pulled offline a few days ago with no official explanation provided regarding the closure.
Both websites currently announce to visitors that they will be ‘will be unavailable until further notice‘:
CEO Andrew Bracken is nowhere to be found and it doesn’t appear as if the “privately held” ownership are going to make an announcement anytime soon either.
Typically when an MLM penny auction goes bust, there’s a bit of drama surrounding the collapse but noteably with BidXcel things have been rather quiet.
Possibly indicative of a lack of interest in the opportunity (research reveals traffic statistics have been in steady decline for a few months now), I haven’t myself been able to dig up anything concrete on why BidXcel shut down.
An MLM company’s affiliates are usually the loudest to complain when one goes bust but even then there hasn’t been much chatter.
Faraday Hosseinipour put out a recruitment video claiming ‘signs have been on the wall for the last few weeks‘ and that ‘management made lots of mistakes that made things frustrating for distributors‘.
Shortly after the collapse, Rick Moore (“bidxcelaustralia.com”) wrote
I have spent 50 minutes on the phone to employees of the company today and they appear to be in the dark as much as us on why the company has suspended operations.
I can make assumptions based on my knowledge of issues with their software but it would only be assumptions and not facts, so it would be remiss of me to publish it at this stage.
At the time of publication no update has been posted.
Perhaps most interesting of what little information has been made public however, is this little snippet from Troy Nihart on Facebook:
Jan 19 in Las Vegas, Andrew Bracken stood at craps table with me and told me he had to get out if (sic) the US. He was in the process of opening an online gambling MLM as well.
He advised me if I were to join anything like a penny auction I should form a corporation offshore as well as an offshore bank account.
Whether or not US authorities are the reason BidXcel was abruptly shutdown is unclear. When I first reviewed BidXcel I noted they appeared to be operating out of the US state of Colorado, so intervention by the US authorities is certainly a possibility.
Or of course Bracken and his friends could have simply cut their losses and pulled a runner on the company’s affiliates.
Either way, for what remains of the MLM penny auction niche, the closure of BidXcel is not welcome news.
BidXcel did away with the whole giving away sample bids farce but the compensation plan did still leave the opportunity for affiliates to simply invest money into the scheme via dummy customer accounts they’d created in order to generate revenue-sharing profit points open.
Given that the BidXcel website dwarfed their penny auction site, this is most likely what most affiliates focused on, despite affiliates having the option to earn commissions via the sale of bids to genuine retail customers.
Unfortunately with any point based affiliate funded business model (which is effectively a Ponzi scheme), sooner or later the liabilities owed exceed new investor money coming into the business.
Given the lack of apparent momentum behind BidXcel it’s unlikely it collapsed due to liabilities though. If I had to guess, I’d say in the wake of the Zeek Rewards aftermath it just never really took off and Bracken and friends simply decided to pull the plug.
More on the BidXcel collapse if it surfaces but I wouldn’t be holding my breath.
Hosseni (i.e. Hosseinipour) claimed to have earned 6-figures from BidXCel. Hmmm…
Faraday’s claims are just marketing BS. She’s making up numbers for marketing purposes, so people can believe she’s marketing a success rather than a failure.
“5,000 people in my group from 200 countries” is plain BS. You CAN find more countries and territories in the world, but if you find most of them in your downline then they’re fake accounts.
THE REALITY?
She has 107 subscribers on Youtube. None of her videos have had more than 1,250 views (the ones I checked), most of them have 50-200 views or 400-600 views (2 different types of videos, 2 different types of viewers).
Her last 2 videos were uploaded 4 days ago, “Why BidXcel failed” is the most popular of them with 456 views (up 74 views in 2 days), “Leaf International” (her next project) has 34 view (up 8 views in 2 days).
Her failures are more than 10 times more popular among her audiences than her next project, based on the number of views for her last 2 videos. 🙂
She seems to be someone regularly jumping from one failed project to the next, a couple of times per year, trying to drag an unstable downline with her to new projects.
Sounds like a typical “faker until s/he become maker” 😀 Fake the success until they make it.
Wikipedia is listing 242 populated territories in the world, but that includes overseas territoriries too, e.g. Pitcairn with 48 inhabitants in 4 families.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
Number of sovereign states = 190 + 16 (16 disputed) = 206
Number of UN members = 193
Number of sovereign states, recognized by at least ONE other sovereign state = 203
She can of course have meant “in 200 counties” rather than “countries”, but that sounds rather stupid. “5,000 members in 200 different counties around the World, most of them in the U.S. of A.”. 🙂
Wow I think bidify is also going to collapse. Without official updates about 40 days.
That scumbag Frode is also couldn’t be found now. Damn it.
All the penny auction in MLM are scams.
Bidxcel variance from zeek.
1. No expiration of points (problem – if profit sharing model, the denominator grows faster than numerator. Diminishing payout results. Confidence goes away. Reduction in revenue. Numerator goes down. Result, rapid collapse)
2. Bonus pools vs. directly proportional payout ala zeek. (interesting, as this could be deemed less overtly a security)
3. Bottom line – new money in, pays commitment to seasoned money. PONZI
FYI. Bracken is looking to start online gambling MLM from offshore. Hmm, gambling + ponzi (can someone find me a hooker tranny dwarf to complete the party)