Nui restructures, pseudo-compliance and responding to cease & desist
Seemingly in response to Texas’ cease and desist, Nui has announced it is restructuring its affiliate offering.
We haven’t heard much from CEO Darren Olayan after he claimed securities regulation didn’t exist a few weeks ago.
Thus is was left to “Keystone Leaders” Jim Paré and Casey Combden to front affiliates.
First topic of business on the webinar was the Texas securities fraud cease and desist.
Combden claimed Nui corporate “knew this was going to happen”, implying to affiliates that there is nothing to worry about.
BehindMLM sounded the Nui unregistered securities alarm bell as far back as November 2017.
If Nui corporate knew then they were offering unregistered securities, as Combden claims, why they didn’t do anything about it is a mystery.
Combden of course is no stranger to unregistered securities.
For his part in promotion of the USI-Tech Ponzi scheme, Combden received his own cease and desist from the Ontario Securities Commission back in February.
Getting back to Texas, Combden states
Nui is responding appropriately and doing so in the right manner.
Jones Day attorney Mark Rasmussen is displayed on-screen while Paré and Combden address the cease and desist, implying that he is working on it on Nui’s behalf.
Nui also announced a new compensation plan and affiliate signup options.
A slide for the $6700 “Executive” options states affiliates who chose it are “all in… ready to mine”.
Jim Paré states the reason for the compensation changes is because
the number one thing for us is being compliant throughout the entire United States.
What happened in the last couple of days is we took what we were projecting to do in six months and jammed it into this week.
Part of that compliance appears to be pretending affiliates are somehow active in receiving Mintage Mining returns, by bundling an Ant Router with Pro ($1150), Elite ($2650) and Executive ($6700) membership.
Nui affiliates will receive the Ant Router upon payment of a $500 Mintage Mining fee.
Ant Router (model R1-LTC) is available from Bitmain for $30 USD.
Moving people into a piece of hardware means they’re actually active in this.
This is us moving into the highest level of compliance.
Ant Routers are standalone mining rigs that provide 1.29 MH/s for Litecoin mining or “any Scrypt-based coin on any pool”.
The problem, as far as securities compliance goes, is that this has nothing to do with Mintage Mining passive ROI payments.
The notion that affiliates mining separately to their passive Mintage Mining contracts, somehow making their Mintage Mining contracts active instead of passive, is absurd.
Regardless of what they do or don’t do with their Ant Router, Nui affiliates will still receive a three-year passive ROI on funds invested into Mintage Mining.
This is precisely what the Texas cease and desist pinged Nui for.
Anything the Ant Router generates is fine. Anything derived passively through Mintage Mining is still a security.
Neither Nui, Mintage Mining or Darren Olayan are registered to offer securities anywhere in the US.
Speaking of Mintage Mining, Paré and Combden also revealed as of August 3rd, Mintage Mining commissions will be paid in bitcoin.
Previously earned commissions were issued in credits, which had to be reinvested into new mining contracts.
Existing Nui affiliates who have invested in Mintage Mining will receive bitcoin for the remainder of their three-year ROI contract.
Based on a July 11th issue date, Nui has until August 11th to challenge the Texas cease and desist.
Having obtained a copy of Nui’s compensation plan dated July 25th, BehindMLM will be publishing an updated Nui review tomorrow.
Update 1st August 2018 – Updated Nui review is up.
There is so much, so seriously stupid on that webinar, that it’s hard to know how much of it that Nui/Mintage actually believe.
From the time they launched they’ve been sputtering stupid about “compliance” with the core message being “trust us, we’re doing it right.” Yet a bit over two weeks after the C&D landed they are making all sorts of changes that never address the core issues.
The $30 AntRouters (or $58 for the newer unit if that is what they’ll be selling) come bundled with 500 “Hash Rate Units,” aka Mintage Mining points.
So the vast majority of money invested into the effort to not be a passive income op goes directly into the passive income op.
I really want to know what presumably qualified attorney signed off on that one.
Furthermore if you have purchased a Kala mining rig you are exempted from needing to buy an AntRouter.
This makes sense how?
Kala coin mining is a separate offering from Mintage “Hash Rate Units,” owning a Kala rig (which causes your electric bill to close to triple) does not affect the legitimacy of the core Mintage offering and unless you are fluent in MLM speak you could never suppose that it does.
Mintage no longer allows you to reinvest your mining profits in batches less than 100 (nominally $100) so if you want to benefit from the power of compounding you’ll have to throw some fresh cash into the mix and if you own neither a Kala rig or a $500 AntRouter by the end of October you will not be allowed to reinvest at all.
Almost sounds like a cash grab, another swing at the promoter pinata, just in case the Judge in their Texas securities fraud case isn’t fluent in MLM speak.
Updated Nui review out tomorrow. News was a bit much today and I had some website maintenance to finish off.
Holding off on the Nui review for a few days. Will be out sometime this coming week.
John Johnson held an update call for his downline organization last night. I took some notes but my Luddite cell phone can’t record the meeting and no recordings were made (you know, for compliance). So I waited till he posted his summary before commenting:
A few top to bottom comments:
The move to (eventually) making affiliate payments in Kala “could be” exit scam door number 1. Why pay people with bitcoin, which is an actual expense when they can just pay them in worthless Kala?
And good luck using a Visa card as a link in your crypto payment scheme. Can you say KYC problems? Expect the Visa deal to end abruptly and without warning.
CompChain? It’s like a comp plan only more crypto sounding.
You have to pay $100 to buy your block, which is like your position but Nui can’t call them that in public (you know, for compliance).
Small problem here, “blocks” are of Zero value to anyone outside the comp plan so it’s illegal to make them commissionable.
This is also an additional $100 out of pocket expense to the affiliate base to follow up the $500 out of pocket expense for the $30 AntRouter. But no no, this isn’t a cash grab, it’s you know, for compliance.
I love the story about other MLM companies lining up to join Nui’s CompChain. I think I’m going to get HerbalLife in my downline.
And in 45 days “Nodes” will be explained, no word yet as to the price tag.
ServerX is something that has been whispered about but very few actual details have been made public (you know, for compliance). I know there is a $7150 minimum buy in (but some people put a cool million into it). It offers ROI in excess of Nui’s other investment offerings.
Some personal observations:
VERY little talk about the Texas C&D even though it is the largest immediate issue facing the company. This is a fine example of Nui’s commitment to transparency.
Nui had till August 11th to respond to the charges and I can only assume that they did. Then probably asked for a hearing date as far in the future as possible. More time to sell $30 AntRouters for $500.
One comment from last night’s call: the Texas C&D can not be dismissed until Nui’s internal Kala exchange proves the worth of the Kala coin. I literally burst out laughing when I heard that.
There is expected to be a “KeyStone” call next Tuesday but these things sometimes get pushed back to let them reframe their explanations.
TL;DR: New pyramid scheme compensation plan stuffed with crypto jargon and an exit-scam through pre-generated kala tokens.
Have to run a script to convert kala into an altcoin and get it onto some public exchanges before exit-scam can be initiated though.
I really can’t see the Texas Securities Board signing off on this…
Some additional thoughts, the “nodes” and “serverx” sound like a way to earn commissions on spends deeper in your downline (think generational bonuses).
Also despite insistence to the contrary, kala is following the same “everyone is going to want to use our coin because e-commerce” route. Nope.