Lyoness using real-estate returns to solicit investment?
Lyoness appear to be gearing up to use passive real-estate returns to encourage shopping unit investment.
The news broke on March 28th, via a webinar featuring CEO Hubert Friedl.
The original webinar is in German. The folks over at BE KonfliktManagement have however kindly provided us a translation rundown.
Lyoness’ real-estate deal was pitched as “the soundest deal the world had ever seen”.
Anyone could join in the earnings from this multi-success company – referring to myWorld – and set up a real-estate empire without investing any of their own money (quote-unquote).
Supposedly Friedl, who looked fabulous in a branded slim rhinestone-studded t-shirt, is developing property in Hanover, Germany.
The project was supposedly managed by the St. Johann-based company myWorld Real Estate GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of London-based myWorld Real Estate Limited.
The project is scheduled for completing in Q4 2021, after which Lyoness will rent out office suites for a combined €220,000 EUR a month.
Supposedly “up to 25%” of profits will be shared with qualified Lyoness affiliates.
Affiliates qualify for a share in passive returns by purchasing M-vouchers.
You advertise the advantages of real estate ownership and “passive income”, but sell shopping vouchers!
Accounting units, shopping units, shopping vouchers, M-vouchers, it’s all the same.
If Lyoness’ property project ever materializes, how much affiliates will have to invest and convince others to invest has yet to be determined.
The primary purpose of this webinar was to advertise “shares in a real-estate project,” touting it as a sensation.
There were no details on the figures or how these “on-top shares” would be distributed to the individual marketers.
In effect, each marketer would have spent money in the form of M-vouchers for the heavily advertised real estate property, once again still buying nothing but vouchers.
It’s certainly interesting to observe, as time goes on, how far Lyoness has strayed from it’s original cashback marketing ruse.
The big irony here is that with a significant percentage of the global population in lockdown, legitimate ecommerce platforms are thriving.
Yet here we have Lyoness hyping up direct investment with planned passive real-estate returns.
Might as well just drop the facade and just embrace securities fraud at this point.
I totally agree.
This started of as a reasonably good idea being a shopping community. They have worked really hard to create a fanciful, confusing, stupidly complex ponzi scheme.
Not really sure why they don’t just come out with it. They have even dumped the merchants they had who funded the rollout in our country.
No longer any doubt. Already illegal in a number of countries I think it is about time for the rest of the world to stand up and say ENOUGH!
How much money does Hubert think he can scam out of this?
Lyoness was never about shopping. It was a AC unit investment scheme from day one.
He’ll get enough suckers to build his little strip mall or whatever, get a bent accountant to declare the entity that is set up to own it as bankrupt, buy it with another shell company for pennies on the dollar and own it free and clear.
He might even be able to do that without breaking any laws, the hard part of that scheme is finding enough really gullible people.
When I first heard about it, the loyalty/discount card part of it immediately reminded me of the FlexKom scam of a few years back.
1. The only retailers that could possibly be interested in such a scheme are small independent shopkeepers (bricks-and-mortar or online), since larger chain retailers either already have their own loyalty card schemes, or use a business model which doesn’t allow for additional discounts.
2. For such people, it makes absolutely no sense to join.
I don’t know if things are much different outside western Europe, but at least here the net profit margins for most small retailers are tiny, not even close to double digits. Even the tiniest of discounts eats up large chuncks of that margin.
Consequently, joining a scheme like Lyoness, or FlexKom, would have to generate huge amounts of extra sales to just compensate for that and break even again, let alone generate more profit.
There is nothing about the schemes that could possibly result in such a massive increase in sales.
Assuming the shopkeeper is interested in going for a lower margin/higher volume model in the first place – most aren’t, since it’s a game they’re bound to lose, faced with much larger competitors.
3. If for some reason a shopkeeper does think that giving discounts is a good way of increasing sales, they have absolutely no need to join a scheme like Lyoness.
It’s to their financial advantage, and to that of the customer getting the discount, to simply give the discount directly.
Yet those shopkeepers are the one and only source of money going into the system, paying for both the discounts the customers supposedly get (in the shape of points of some description rather than actual money), and for the upkeep of the whole Lyoness/Flexkom/whatever company.
Plus, pay for the profits that company’s owners expect. It makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s perfectly obvious that for Lyoness, FlexKom, and similar scams, right from the start it is only ever about the people brought into the MLM/pyramid side of things, with the promise of easily-made riches, and without any real questions asked about where all that money is going to come from.
The shopping/loyalty/cashback part of it is a pretext. The few merchants they do sometimes manage to recruit, for a brief while, are actually people who think they’re going to make lots of money with the MLM side, and who also happen to have a shop.
I agree that must be the basic idea, he’s just trying to use his existing following of gullible idiots to raise cheap financing, financing you never pay back being the cheapest kind of all.
The project appears to be real enough: close-hannover.de. (Not that the existence of that website proves anything, and nothing has been built yet, but it does seem to check out as a genuine building project, including reports of signs having been put up on the plot.
It’s part of the redevelopment of the still mostly empty grounds of the 2000 World Expo. So the land they probably got on the cheap.
⚫️ HUBERT FREIDL’s myWorld Real Estate ‘HANNOVER Germany ”CHICAGO LANE” ‘fairytale’ COLLAPSES – TV NEWS Report UPDATE
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