Crowd1 attempts to legitimize Ponzi with products
Rather than address securities fraud warnings issued around the globe, Crowd1 is pressing ahead with “but we have products!” pseudo-compliance.
In a corporate blog post dated July 7th, Crowd1 announced partnerships with LifeTRNDS, SAfer and Tribute.
LifeTRNDS is a discount travel booking portal run by Mark Seyforth.
Seyforth last featured on BehindMLM as CEO of Goodlife USA back in 2016. Like LifeTRNDS, Goodlife USA provides access to a discount travel booking portal.
Goodlife USA still has a website up with an Alexa traffic ranking of 2.6 million. For an MLM company, that’s as good as dead.
SAfer markets itself as a personal security mobile app.
SAfer’s website domain was first registered in 2019 but last updated on July 4th, 2020.
HTML elements on the site were uploaded in June 2020, suggesting SAfer’s website was only set up within the last month.
The Wayback Machine’s only snapshot of SAfer’s website is dated July 4th, 2020.
SAfer’s website registration is private, save for the registrant’s country given as New Zealand.
SAfer is developed by Panic Guard, who on their website market a “white label mobile app”.
The obvious conclusion here is Crowd1 white-labeled a third-party security app. They are now disingenuously trying to pass SAfer off as an independent company.
Tribute markets a bunch of fragrances on their website. A pop-up displayed to visitors also pitches them on “how to become a millionaire”.
Tribute’s website domain is registered to Steve Naude, through an address in Lagos, Nigeria.
Further research reveals prior to attaching itself to Crowd1, Tribute was a failed fragrance themed MLM opp.
There are two takeaways from Crowd1’s announcement:
- adding things to Crowd1 doesn’t change the fact it’s a Ponzi scheme; and
- the only reason people signed up to Crowd1 was to participate in said Ponzi scheme.
Nobody joined Crowd1 to purchase discount travel in the midst of a global pandemic. Or to use a white-labeled security app, or to buy fragrances.
They signed up to invest money and collect passive returns. Anything beyond that is wishful thinking after the fact on Crowd1’s behalf.
On the regulatory front it doesn’t matter what you attach to a Ponzi scheme. Fraud is fraud and attempts to legitimize fraud are ignored by regulators.
Unfortunately Crowd1 primarily targets victims in third-world countries, so regulatory action is lagging.
One interesting outcome of Crowd1’s pseudo-compliance is BusinessForHome giving the company its seal of approval.
After BusinessForHome documented a few of the regulatory warnings issued against Crowd1, owner Nuyten claims “corporate management reached out”.
Based on their compliance efforts we have put back Crowd1 in our Business For Home database.
We’re not sure when Crowd1 corporate “reached out” to Ted. What we can tell you is BusinessForHome didn’t cover the South African NCC’s investigation announcement, or Côte d’Ivoire banning Crowd1 for being a scam a few days ago.
Whether Crowd1 “reaching out” to BusinessForHome involved money changing hands was not disclosed.
It’s no secret that Crowd1 recruitment has stalled over the past few months, and so we enter the Ponzi end-game.
In the midst of its collapse and regulatory shutdown, Zeek Rewards added Shopping Daisy, an ecommerce platform.
TelexFree added additional VOIP services. OneCoin added DealShaker, also an ecommerce platform.
None of these pseudo-compliance attempts changed the fact that Zeek Rewards, TelexFree and OneCoin were Ponzi schemes.
With payouts tanking and commissions drying up, renewed promotion on BusinessForHome aside, it will become increasingly harder to pitch Crowd1 to new victims.
I suspect after Crowd1’s latest pseudo-compliance flops, the company will continue struggling to pay returns.
As of July 8th, Ted Nuyten claims Crowd1 is forecasting a billion dollars in investment from six million affiliates by the end of 2020.
Regulatory action has been taken against Crowd1 in Norway, Namibia, Paraguay, the Philippines, Mauritius, Gabon, Vietnam, South Africa (FSCA and NCC) and Côte d’Ivoire.
Crowd1 is operates through Spanish shell companies. The Ponzi scheme is run by Swedish scammers Jonas Erik Werner and Johan Stael Von Holstein.
To date neither Swedish or Spanish authorities have taken any public action against Crowd1 or its executives.
“BUH MUH PRODUCTS!”
What, no vitamins? How about weight-loss shakes? CBD drops? C’mon, CROWD1, show a little more effort.
Not that it would matter; Ponzi is Ponzi, products or no.
As of July 8th, Ted Nuyten claims Crowd1 is forecasting a billion dollars in investment from six million affiliates by the end of 2020.
Ho ho ho ho ho ho
BusinessForHome is known for promoting scams, they built onecoin more or less on their own… Big money is changing changing hands.
When it comes to the latest move from crowd1 this is probably their exit. Push their victims onto someone else and leave with the money stolen.
These guys always have an exit. In 2-3 years time they will do another scam. Not because they need the money but for the thrill of running scams.
Keep in mind that Petteroe have scammed people for more than 10 million euros in the past, still he launch scam after scam…
I took the time to watch a webinar recording with Mark Seyforth about the new partnership with Crowd1. If anyone buys into this they must be stupid (which it seem a lot of people are these days).
First of all Mark is very honest, he explains that their business is delayed because they are not able to get credit card processing in place. They are considering to move forward accepting only crypto.
Even better is it when Mark explain that Crowd1 cannot take card payments as Visa and MasterCard cannot manage the massive growth. Kind of funny when we know that there are millions of card payments every second.
It would be much better is Mark explained that Visa and MasterCard do not accept scam companies as clients – lets hope the worlds banks soon take the same approach, for now they look the other way when companies like Crowd1 launders their millions from crypto into cash….
That Visa and Mastercard wouldn’t be able to cope with the transaction generated by a minnow like Crowd1 (even if its own inflated claims about membership were true, it’d still be a minnow) is indeed hilarious.
That they make such a ridiculous claim shows how low an opinion of the intelligence of their marks people like that have.
But Visa and Mastercard don’t deal with retail companies like Crowd1. They only have contracts with banks and payment processors, who in turn deal with the retail customers.
Payment processors generally are picky about who they take as a customer, most of them for instance won’t accept perfectly legal businesses involved in pornography or gambling.
Many also won’t accept anything MLM-based. Anything that has even a whiff of possibly being a scam about it will find it very hard indeed to find a payment processor.
But banks, and all financial institutions, are subject to the exact same anti-money laundering laws as payment processors. Banks in civilized countries definitely don’t look the other way when money laundering, or any other illegal activity, is taking place.
Not only could that land them in serious hot water with the law when found out, banks also have to worry about their reputation with the general public, and with other banks in other countries, so they tend to err on the side of caution.
For an example, you could look at the trouble OneCoin had in maintaining bank accounts, with accounts for deceitfully named shell companies being closed as soon as the banks found out they actually belonged to OC. That all happened before OC was in formal legal trouble anywhere.
Or look at some of the testimony in the Mark Scott case. Most of his job consisted of hiding the fact that he was moving OC money about from banks. One slip-up (such as inadvertently CC-ing a onecoin.eu address on an email), and the bank kicked them out.
This means that the morons behind Crowd1 has not done there homework at all…
Discount travel booking portal has already been tested in the MLM industri (Ops… Ponzi…) by World Ventures/Dreamtrips – and they have now pretty much dissapeared – so how Crowd1 is supposed to succeed when others have failed will be “quite funny” to follow.
Johan Stael von Holstein who runs this scam was actually one of the first to really capitalize on the internet/html boom in the late nineties here in Scandinavia.
He was one of the founders of Icon Medialab, an internet consulting company founded in 1995.
It was a legitimate business with a turnover up to $150 million (posting massive losses though) and the company was valued in the hundreds of millions. That company made a few people rich, including JsvH.
The company, and many of its competitors, soon more or less disappeared and faded as the internet industry matured and valuations became more sane.
The remains of Icon as a consulting company still exists today but have been bought and sold numerous times.
Since then JsvH has gone from being a visionary to, now, a scammer.
Icon was his one and only real, trading with real customers and delivering real products, business. Everything else he has done since the nineties have been mostly hot air balloons like “a new facebook for wealthy people” and other ventures that never came past the talking phase.
Everyone in the business world in Sweden knows JsvH and he is famous for Icon but also not accomplishng nothing since then.
Icon went bust in grand international expansion plans as they tried to capitalize on the sudden demand of e-commerce without having another solution than throwing loads of HTML hacking consultants at the problem.
Don’t forget Letsbuyit.com that JSvH also launched. An e-commerce platform with co-buying elements.
They launched 1999 with a 1€ Xmas tree offer. I ordered one and was sure it would not be delivered, but on Xmas eve a guy in a pickup pulled up, threw a tree into my yard and took off hastily.
Actually rich or rich on paper, in Icon shares?
He wouldn’t be the only dot-com “millionaire” to lose all his money overnight when the crash hit. If he was still a millionaire it raises the question of why he’s shilling Ponzi scams.
(The other possibility, of course, is that he made a few millions from Icon and then blew it all on fast cars and the like while trying to recreate that fluke.)
The line between between VC-funded dot-com businesses that are supposedly worth millions but never turn a profit, and Ponzi scams, is not that wide.
The difference is that a dot-com unicorn could in theory turn a profit one day, while Ponzi scams are mathematically incapable of it. And how they recruit investors.
Have done few research myself about Crowd1 and their CEO Johan von Holstein and founder Jonas Werner.
I found that around 2010 they started a similar scheme called Spinglo and Synkronice. It was supposed to be revolutionary social marketing platform that was supposedly the next big thing.
The bonus and commission system was exactly what Crowd1 offers now. Von Holstein was the Chief Visionary Officer (CVO) and Jonas Werner the founder.
Please do research these companies Synkronice and Spinglo and see how identical carbon copy it is to Crowd1. Basically it is same shit just different name.
If money is collected from anyone and nothing value for money is given, it’s definitely a scam.
They are working hard in Asia now. The strange part is why some countries are not taking any action against them.
I know Thailand have banned them but Malaysia and Singapore take no action against them. They claim to be doing very well in Singapore now.
In the past, Singapore always announce scams to caution their citizens but surprisingly they did nothing on Crowd1 giving the impression that Singapore government have been bribed. Anyone in Singapore can update?
With perhaps the exception of the Philippine SEC, MLM fraud regulation in Asia is pretty crappy.
Crowd1 is being run from Sweden. European regulators need to make a move, but they’re as useless as most Asian regulators unfortunately.
Is Philippines strict on MLM scam? I know China and Singapore don’t allow MLM scams. In China,even leaders (members) have been arrested at the custom and jailed, Singapore have jailed a MLM Ponzi scheme boss, Thailand announced ban on a few MLM Companies and that is an effective way to educate to people.
CROWD1 is easy to get away from the law because everything is done online without any physical stock involved.
Malaysia have never jailed any MLM scam operator, the most is a fine but actions are always taken only after they stopped operations, more like a show.
Never heard any scam in operation being investigated or charged.
The Philippine SEC tends to be more active of the Asian regulators but that isn’t saying much.
As a whole Asia is pretty crap at MLM regulation.
Mark Seyforth has a new company, CFORTH, marketing fuel tablets and $600 in hotel credits.
I haven’t joined, I’m a Free Member. I could pay a monthly fee and get all the perks, and save money, as I pay them money monthly.
Mark is a smooth talker, and tells you how huge his company will be. I don’t trust the guy, and I didn’t buy into MLM businesses. It’s a rarity anyone comes away be financially stable.
On my radar, thanks.
You’re welcome