Before buying a $2 script and accepting gifting payments through bitcoin became the norm, the MLM underbelly came up with elaborate marketing funnels to justify gifting schemes.

One such scheme was David Wood’s Empower Network, which began as a blog SEO service.

Way back in the day Empower Network affiliates paid each other $25 a month for a replicated website on the Empower Network domain.

The pitch was that everyone blogging on the Empower Network domain would create unstoppable search ranking success.

That worked for a bit, until the domain was penalized and search traffic tanked.

This prompted Kalatu, an attempt to launch a paid alternative to WordPress. With WordPress the world’s number one blogging platform and, more importantly, free to use, Kalatu quickly flopped.

What followed was wave after wave of marketing modules, released at ever increasing price-points. Affiliate recruitment meanwhile continued to dwindle, and with it gifting payments between what was left of the Empower Network affiliate-base.

David Wood himself claims he wasted time releasing “half assed product(s)” he spent “more time selling than making”.

Ultimately Empower Network ran its course and collapsed. Rather spectacularly too, culminating in Wood’s very public breakdown.

Having declared Empower Network bankrupt and taking time off to reconnect with his estranged wife and kids, Wood has since returned to social media.

Now, a revealing post on November 14th provides some behind the scenes insight into Empower Network’s final years.

I used to be so full of shit, and in love with myself and my own self-constructed nonsense.

For example, I’d login to Facebook all through the day, desperately checking how many “likes” my last or next photo would get—as if someone liking my bullshit was that person actually giving me a hug after a cup of coffee together, saying:

“David, I like you.”

Or I’d be at an event, and the truth is I always have believed in people, but really there was a 50/50 mix where I was so desperate to have someone believe in me that I’d look at them hypnotically in the eye and say:

“I believe in you…”

…desperately seeking for them to say:

“I believe in you too, Dave.”

Because I needed their pity and fake love desperately. I needed them puffing me up in my own self-constructed cloud to survive in my imaginary universe I created without any real touch or feeling in it, keeping myself alone and disconnected from everything to maintain my “Prophet” affect to keep my world construct growing and reinforcing itself.

Or I’d be so desperate to turn around declining sales that happened from disrespecting natural business law, that I’d come up with a half assed product and spend more time selling it than making it, pretending it was ok because I was attempting to create enough “value” to justify the income I needed to create so I wouldn’t have to layoff employees again, the majority of whom should have been laid off and replaced or downsized.

It’s hilarious to me looking back now at how fake and bullshit it all was.

Although not all of it made it to press, here at BehindMLM we periodically covered some of Wood’s more bizarre escapades.

On the plus side, Wood appears to have identified the problem of building an MLM opportunity around “make money” as a product.

The make money space on the internet is so full of shit, and full of false-prophets, just like I was. What’s a false prophet?

“They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves…” (that’s even if they don’t know it, like me. I believed my own bullshit.)

We sit around in this stupid space justifying the dumb shit we do and talk around in circles when someone comes up with an objection like “isn’t this like a pyramid scheme?” and rather than saying:

“Yes, I suppose. We should change that and get some customers and make good products that people want to buy…”

We justify the fact that there are no customers because the product and the marketing sucks, the culture sucks, and it’s kept alive by creating an army of broke people spending money.

I’m not talking about good, legitimate Network Marketing here, I’m talking about internet “Make Money” bullshit that has no legitimate products and runs rampant from opportunity to opportunity, wiping out bank accounts with horse-shit empty promises of “Get Rich Quick With No Work Or Paying Attention To Your Customers.”

Empower Network was most certainly that. Through the compensation plan, a good percentage of gifting payments between affiliates were passed up to corporate accounts.

The rest wound up in the accounts of those who recruited the most, with the rest of the Empower Network affiliate-base losing money.

Unfortunately Wood doesn’t address Empower Network affiliate losses in his post.

Instead, he’s apparently focused on his “next venture”.

I’m happy I went through all of this. Building my last company (I’m not going to mention the name anymore) was a great learning experience and it showed me what is both possible, and the level of destruction possible when it’s not done right.

All of that has gotten me ready for my next ventures (there will be many of them, not competing with each other, non-vulture product based companies that make everyone win, and NOT all Network Marketing, and NONE of it with “Get Rich Quick” messaging) and taught me how to build badass shit right.

In a followup post “with Tom McMurrain and 3 others” earlier today, Wood reveals he’s

focused on building the infrastructure to have an exploding team in another company where I’m aligned with their products.

He also states he’s open to being pitched on cryptocurrency opportunities in the meantime;

 I’m open to a relationship with the right person where I would market your Bitcoin offer to my entire 1.5 million person active subscriber list.

I wouldn’t focus on it because I’m building something else, but for a fee (not cheap at all) I would be open to promoting your offer twice per week for 1-2 months to establish a team in your downline. That would be all I currently have time to do.

My list has several hundred thousand active openers of messages and the entire bizopp buyers data, and I should be able to make us both a lot of money.

However:

1) No schemes that are too bizoppey (I won’t ruin my list)

2) You’ll have to show me the products first, and they have to be real products with actual value

3) It will not be cheap

4) You’ll have to understand I’m focused elsewhere and therefore after the promotion is done the management of the team itself will be your job, not mine.

5) No unethical deutsches [sic] will get my business. You know who you are.

I can’t promise I’ll do it either. If I get multiple offers that are at my minimum, not cheap at-all price, I will run an auction to select the winner.

As someone who reviews every MLM opportunity I come across, I can say with certainty I’ve yet to come across a legitimate cryptocurrency MLM opportunity.

To date all of them combine pyramid recruiting with one of the following four fraudulent business models:

  1. bitcoin/altcoin gifting
  2. investment solicited on the promise of a ROI through bitcoin/altcoin mining (unregistered securities, wire fraud)
  3. Ponzi points masquerading as a cryptocurrency or
  4. a public altcoin attached, issued through a company and a ROI paid out when the altcoin is “lent” back to the company (funds received when premined altcoin is offloaded by the company are used to fund ROI payments)

Given this, Wood’s conditions might be a tall ask for the MLM cryptocurrency niche to satisfy.

Oh and in a recently added addendum to the post, it seems not all of Wood’s crazy has been purged.

There is right now a company that is publicly traded with multi-billion dollar investments called “The Internet Of Things” that is owned by Central Bankers, where they have a plan to centralize all world currency and connect your internet, to your bank accounts, to your insurance, to your properties–and implant a trackable microchip that controls your entire economic properties.

That company is scheduled for launch in 2020 (I am not making this up, read about it) and it won’t be very long afterwards until the government runs it’s [sic] typical cycle of scaring the crap out of people through an identity theft fasad [sic] to force them to get the implant through legislation.

This is typically the kind of rhetoric used to justify financial MLM schemes engaged in fraud (of which cryptocurrency is a seemingly unregulated bubble yet to burst).

Although the followup post appears to be in stark contrast to the expletive ridden rhetoric Wood put out a few days ago, here’s hoping he’s nonetheless done ripping people off in shady get rich quick schemes.