On her LinkedIn profile Forbes Riley describes herself as an

award-Winning TV host, Author, Motivational Speaker, Entrepreneur, One of the World’s Leading Health & Wellness experts (National Fitness Hall of Fame inductee).

The “about” blurb continues to celebrate Riley’s career achievements;

Forbes was voted the “Top 20 Most inspiring People on Television” through her roles as a sought-after spokesperson, broadcast journalist and Success/Results Coach to celebrities, sales teams & CEOs.

As a motivational keynote speaker – she’s affectionally [sic] called “The Female Tony Robbins.”

Forbes Riley has created a trusted brand name for herself.

Promoting GSPartners as a Brand Ambassador is Riley’s latest gig.

You won’t find this position advertised on any of Riley’s social medial channels though.

There’s a good reason for this.

GSPartners is a Ponzi scheme.

Forbes Riley is a US citizen based out of Los Angeles, California.

GSPartners is a fork of the failed Karatbars International crypto Ponzi scheme.

GSPartners’ owner Josip Heit is the architect of Karatbars’ foray into cryptocurrency fraud.

Following a failed Karatbars token launch, Heit split from Karatbars and founded his own clone scheme, GSPartners.

GSPartners’ Ponzi token is G999. G999 was created using an off the shelf scamcoin script.

The majority of GSPartners’ top promoters and executives followed Heit over from Karatbars.

GSPartners’ business model is simple: invest in tokens (G999 or XLT), others invest, token value goes up, you cash out subsequently invested funds.

On the MLM side of the business affiliate promoters, like Forbes Riley, are paid to recruit new retail and affiliate investors.

If you want a full run-down of the business, BehindMLM published its GSPartners review in February 2021.

GSPartner’s business model is not what this article is about. But it’s important to have an understanding of the business model to appreciate Riley’s marketing efforts.

First and foremost I want to address Riley’s role as a GSPartners Brand Ambassador.

Nowhere in any of the marketing material does Riley disclose compensation paid to her by GSPartners for being a Brand Ambassador.

The screenshot above is from one of Riley’s marketing videos we’ll get into. It’s the only time Riley visually discloses she’s a a GSPartners Brand Ambassador.

The series of videos featuring Riley we’re covering today began appearing on YouTube earlier this month.

The first video is “The #G999 Project Offering with Forbes Riley”, uploaded to the “Mrs. RGTG & The AdnohR Connection presents” YouTube channel.

Footage in the video is taken from GSPartners’ promotional webinars hosted by Riley and her associates; John Johnson, “Crypto Steve”, Ann Kesselman, Steve Carter, Anthony Boyd and Michael El Dalcoe – all US based promoters of GSPartners.

Riley states the purpose of this first video is to “welcome you to this platform”.

[0:24] They flew me over to Dubai to help launch this company. And what I saw was amazing.

Riley is referring to GSPartners’ recent shindig in Dubai, the MLM scam capital of the world.

The purpose of the event was to launch GSPartners’ XLT token. XLT was created (likely using the same G999 script), because G999’s public trading value had tanked.

Following several setbacks, the XLT launch isn’t going so well.

Riley was hired by GSPartners to co-host the event. She doesn’t disclose compensation received for this in her marketing video.

As for launching GSPartners, that’s not remotely true. Josip Heit launched GSPartners in late 2020.

Riley’s pitch for G999 investment is the typical “Missed out on bitcoin? We’re gonna be the next bitcoin!” spiel.

[2:24] If you’re like me, maybe you didn’t jump on that bitcoin wagon when you probably should have.

[2:46] Do you know that a hundred dollar investment, that bitcoin is now about thirty thousand dollars a coin but it hit sixty thousand?

Yeah, that digital currency coin made a lot of millionaires.

Riley briefly touches on the MLM opportunity;

[1:23] You can buy coins, you can invest in things. You can even invite your friends and make referral money.

I love this. I’m having a blast. I’ve got about two hundred and fifty of my closest friends in there – and people all over this company are friends of mine.

[3:14] So if you say, “I wanna be a partner.” It’s forty nine dollars. I know, it’s a pretty good investment.

Riley claims to have recruited her two eighteen year old kids into GSPartners at the $999 investment package.

She goes on to Riley claims Heit recently announced a $20 million dollar GSPartners recruitment incentive. Whether that’s actual money or worthless G999/XLT tokens is unclear.

And then we get to GSPartners G999 package investment.

[3:51] (GSPartners’) packages have all kind of bonuses to them. There’s a package as low price as a hundred and ninety nine dollars – all the way up to like, twelve thousand dollars.

And each package has things that it unlocks, and the higher the package the bigger you get.

So I’m somewhere in the middle package. Uh I’ve got a lot of friends who did the biggest package.

Their philosophy is you always want the biggest package in this time because you get the biggest benefits.

[5:56] What that unlocks, is when you refer your friends, you get 18% of whatever they do on the platform.

For some strange reason Riley denies GSPartners is “network marketing”;

[6:02] Now you might say “Ooh, that’s network marketing.”

No, it’s actually referral marketing. It’s different.

If you go to your bank by the way, same thing exists. I don’t think you realize that. But if you refer a friend to your bank they’ll give you five hundred bucks.

Riley equates GSPartners’ MLM compensation plan and commissions structure with a single-level referral commission a bank might pay out.

This is false equivalence because single-level referral commissions are not the same as a multilevel compensation plan.

And I’m certainly not aware of any bank in the US operating as an MLM company.

Moving on, Riley gets into the specifics of why those she recruits should invest in G999.

[6:56] This coin, it’s called G999, it is backed by real-estate, backed by telecom and backed by a lot of other things – so it’s called a utility coin.

It has a value to it.

Now right not the coin trades at about a penny. They have very clear ideas (that) this coin will go to a dollar.

Doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? Well it does when you start investing in the coin and you buy a million of them.

And then you add two zeroes to that so you invested for ten thousand and now you’ve got a hundred thousand.

Seems like a pretty good investment, huh?

The second thing you can do is you can just buy the coin, which will go up on its own, but then you park it in the bank.

And it gets interest and it pays you interest every day.

It’s kinda crazy. Well that’s like old style banking. And it will pay five to eight to twelve percent (when you) keep the coin in their bank.

I want you to explore this opportunity.

Another thing that’s happening right now is this building that’s called the Movenpick.

For reference, Movenpick’s parent company Accor Group has publicly stated GSPartners is not authorized to sell their property.

In July Accor Group told us they’d sent GSPartners’ developer a cease and desist over unauthorized use of their Movenpick trademark.

[8:20] Now if you could own a piece of that real-estate, would you?

If you knew that when they rented it out they’d pay you some money? When they had a party there they’d pay you some money?

So right now … you can get in at phase one to buy (XLT) coin, or to buy a piece of this tokenized real-estate.

Then that will go to phase two and by the time it’s finished and it launches, you will have doubled your money.

Riley finishes up by comparing GSPartners to Amazon, despite the latter having nothing to do with MLM crypto Ponzi coins.

The other video I want to touch on is titled “#G999 Training with Forbes Riley and Crypto Steve pt. 2.” It was uploaded to YouTube on August 18th, 2021.

The first thing Riley does in this video is dismiss criticism of GSPartners as “fake news”.

[3:28] To be really clear, “Oh I heard something really bad about somebody involved in this.”

To which I say y’know it’s pretty funny. There’s a couple of articles out there, a couple of web pages, saying Forbes Riley is a scam and Spin Gym is a piece of junk.

And I’m like, y’know I guess that is the definition of fake news.

The rest of the video covers recruitment of G999/XLT investors.

At the time of publication Alexa ranks the US as the largest source of traffic to GSPartners’ website.

This equates to GSPartners’ being primarily promoted in the US, by promoters like Forbes Riley.

Why does this matter?

GSPartners’ G999/XLT token investment scheme constitutes an investment contract.

You sign up with GSPartners, you invest in G999/XLT, others invest, the value goes up and you cash out.

On top of that you have the staking investment scheme, where you park invested tokens with GSPartners on the promise of, in Riley’s own words, “five to eight to twelve percent”.

Investment contracts constitute securities offerings in the US. Neither GSPartners, Josip Heit, Forbes Riley, Michael Dalfoe or any other US GSPartners promoter is registered with the SEC.

I’ve put Dalfoe in this group as he’s at the top of US recruitment of GSPartners investors.

Technically every US promoter of GSPartners should be registered with the SEC.

Registration with the SEC by GSPartners is not only legally required, accompanying audited financial reports are the only way consumers can verify claims such as, again to quote Forbes Riley, “G999 … is backed by real-estate, backed by telecom and backed by a lot of other things”.

BehindMLM maintains the only reason MLM company’s willfully choose to commit securities fraud, is because they’re operating as Ponzi schemes.

Furthermore, the SEC has explicitly urged caution with respect to celebrity endorsements.

Celebrity endorsement does not mean that an investment is legitimate or that it is appropriate for all investors.

Celebrities, like anyone else, can be lured into participating (even unknowingly) in a fraudulent scheme.

Forbes Riley’s endorsement of GSPartners as a Brand Ambassador reminds me of Steven Seagal and Bitcoiin.

That didn’t end well for Seagal.

Here you not only have Forbes Riley not disclosing payment she may or may not receive as a GSPartners Brand Ambassador, she’s also hosting promotional events and has personally recruited “about two hundred and fifty” investors.

That’s a much deeper involvement in Riley’s MLM crypto Ponzi of choice than Seagal had with Bitcoiin.

 

Update 22nd August 2021 – While there’s nothing on her social media channels, there are four GSPartners promo videos on Riley’s YouTube channel.

 

Update 11th May 2024 – This article originally provided links to cited YouTube footage Forbes Riley at the GSPartners Dubai marketing event.

In late April 2024 the three cited videos were “removed by the uploader” off of YouTube. References to the videos remain but as such I’ve now disabled the previously accessible links.