speak-asia-online-logoMister Colibri, one of Seven Rings International’s recruitment scams that operates out of Brazil, claims to offer their members weekly payments if they watch advertisements.

Mister Colibri also pays large commissions for the recruitment of others to the company.

Upon examination, these advertiser videos are in actuality little more than random videos pulled of YouTube, which the company embeds into its website and requests its users watch.

The basic idea being that along with membership fees the company charges, commissions are in part paid out by revenue the company earns from advertisers who pay Mister Colibri to have genuine end-users (consumer) view their ads.

Unfortunately for Mister Colibri their members aren’t complete morons and the discrepancy between what the company claims and the fact that they are just using random YouTube videos (one particular Levis jeans commercial featuring Rob Liefeld hasn’t aired since the early 1990s), hasn’t gone unnoticed.

When pressed, it appears Mister Colibri management finally had to confess to their memberbase that infact the company at this stage has no commercial agreements with any of the advertisers featured in the ads Mister Colibri uses.

On February 16th 2012 Mister Colibri member ‘Abimael Oliviera’ (English) writes

I have investigated enough to Mister Hummingbird, made contacts with advertisers who are the videos of Mister Hummingbird and they really have no business relationship.

I got a PIN and my registration as a member of the site Mister Hummingbird on 1/12/12 (I live in Salvador-BA) to know the step by step.

On 17/01/12 I attended a mega event in Vitória da Conquista where the founder of Elia Prisco and his partner in Brazil Mr. Gian (owner of OMNIA Advertising), and various leaders.

To my surprise all the questions I had about the business, or needed to ask were answered. Mr. Gian explained that we are still pioneers in innovative design (with 46,000 affiliates) (and that) any advertisers would be interested in weight by a small group only when a few million members come into the business by injecting lots of money.

The Ads posted in the office of Mr. Hummingbird’s are there to create a community accustomed to watching ads and getting paid (innovative project in the world).

They really are videos available on Youtube (for now) and are in the public domain.

The single point to take away from the above comment is that Mister Colibri has no advertiser relationships.

This is significant because it means 100% of the revenue generated by the company is from membership fees the company charges new members.

At present we have the situation where Mister Colibri are offering significant commissions for the recruitment of others, entirely paid out by the membership fees of new members joining the company.

Or in other words, an obvious pyramid scheme.

On the legality of this, Oliveira appears to be grossly misinformed,

By the way, the advetisers seen in the videos do not yet have business with Mr. Hummingbird. It is not illegal (against the law of any country) display videos as it does not sell any products or services and with their respective brands.

We are only paid by the system itself (do not forget that the accounts are renewed annually) and the investors’ money with the founder of Elia Prisco.

Admitting that members are only paid out by the system itself (membership fees), Oliveira appears to be under the impression that there is nothing wrong in publicly claiming members get paid to watch ads by advertisers, when this is a complete misrepresentation of the business.

Furthermore, paying out 100% of recruitment commissions from membership fees!? I don’t care where you’re from – that’s about as certifiably a scam of a business model as you can get.

The AdMatrix is another of parent company Seven Rings International’s scams that was launched in India and collapsed (read: Seven Rings International ran away with everyone’s money) after a few short months of operation.

Even going so far as to share the same website source-code, the AdMatrix and Mister Colibri are identical scams.

Noting this, Oliveira explains that

regarding the Mister Colibri site’s similarities with the AdMatrix India, it is because AdMatrix belongs to Mister Hummingbird.

The platform of the company was bought and Information Technology (IT) for $2 million with a maintenance fee of $80,000 a month.

The site was adapted to the needs of Mister Hummingbird, and millions of dollars were invested in high-performance servers to deal with the magnitude of data that is processed daily.

With both companies owned by Seven Rings International, we already knew they had the same owners. Although Mister Colibri don’t directly own the AdMatrix, both companies are owned by parent company Seven Rings International.

Mister Colibri’s management revealing that the company has no advertisers is hardly surprising, short of the revelation itself. Thus far Seven Rings International have maintained that all their MLM companies are legit because membership fees aren’t the only source of revenue.

With the admission that there are no advertisers however, clearly this is not the case and Mister Colibri (and the AdMatrix before it) simply boil down into hybrid pyramid schemes (recruitment commissions) and a Ponzi Scheme (redistributing membership fees (the investment) amongst members under the guise of them watching ads and being paid by advertisers).

Seven Rings International’s largest scam to date, Speak Asia, operates out of Singapore and is currently under investigation by multiple government agencies in India for fraud, money laundering and tax evasion.

Speak Asia operate slightly different to the AdMatrix and Mister Colibri in that, instead of watching YouTube videos, members are required to fill out surveys the company makes up from random Wikipedia articles and articles sourced from various free online article directories.

Speak Asia have always maintained that they are paid by clients who purchase market data off them by the way of surveys Speak Asia’s members have completed.

Initially, after being pressed on who these clients were, Speak Asia’s management released a few company names. Shortly afterwards, every publicly named company Speak Asia named denied to have any commercial relationship with Speak Asia whatsoever.

Releasing they’d given the game up, Speak Asia immediately issued a public apology for lying about their clients and then went on to claim that in the few days that had passed since they’d been caught out lying, the names of their survey clients had gone from being freely given (albeit false) information to competitive secrets that could only be revealed by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

To date, not one company has been publicly named as a survey client of Speak Asia.

Looking at the bigger picture, with the AdMatrix, Mister Colibri and Speak Asia all coming under the Seven Rings International umbrella, and Seven Rings confirming that Mister Colibri (and thus the AdMatrix) are pyramid schemes with no actual clients, it’s looking more likely than ever that the same is true of Speak Asia.

Especially when you consider the nonsensical common argument put forth by Speak Asia members that any criminal liability as a result of what  Speak Asia may or may not have done, is negated by the company’s future plans.

  • I’m a big fan of seeking out the simplest answer and if we considerthe similarities between Mister Colibri, the AdMatrix and Speak Asia’s business models (in that members perform a task the company gives the impression is “legitimate work” being paid for by a third-party when it isn’t)
  • the fact that all three companies are owned by the same parent company
  • that 100% of the commissions paid out by Mister Colibri and the AdMatrix are revealed to be derived from membership fees
  • no survey clients of Speak Asia’s have ever been named that weren’t lies
  • Seven Rings has previously lied about its advertiser clients the company claims to have had with Mister Colibri and the AdMatrix

A pretty strong case emerges that, despite what Speak Asia may or may not have presented to the authorities, infact the company does not have any survey clients.

This of course means that like the AdMatrix and Mister Colibri, 100% of Speak Asia’s commissions are thus paid out by membership fees – meaning that it too shares the same pyramid/ponzi scheme hybrid characteristics of the AdMatrix/Mister Colibri business model.

One would hope any such survey client list submitted by Speak Asia to any authority, much the less the general public and their members, was thoroughly investigated… as it stands, apart from ‘but the company said they have clients’, there isn’t a single argument or scrap of evidence lending any credibility to the existence of even one survey client belonging to Speak Asia.