Back in December last year, TVI Express took note of its members concerned and sought to address claims that fraud was rampant in the business.

With no verification process attached to the process of joining TVI Express, members in countries where identity fraud was difficult to police were presumably finding it easy to inflate TVI membership numbers.

Just two months after implementing a photo ID check however, TVI Express unofficially announced last week it was scrapping the verification system in countries it has ‘not established as a local official body as yet.‘

The countries listed as having established a TVI local official body in are India, Indonesia and Philippines. As far as the rest of the world goes, TVI Express members are free to continue the fraudulent activities they were engaged in before.

From a credibility standpoint, it’s hard to dismiss the scale of the fraud taking place. Had it have been a few isolated cases you’d think TVI Express would have dealt with the fraud internally, rather then make a public announcement admitting fraud was taking place within the company.

To TVI’s credit, the introduction of a verification system seemed to be a step in the right direction of addressing the identity fraud taking place. In order to receive their commissions and sign up to TVI, members had to upload color scanned copies of photo ID containing their name, date of birth and current address.

As with anything computer related, it’d still be a relatively easy task to tamper with official documents in photoshop (or simply create bogus ones in countries that don’t have robust security measures on ID), before sending them to TVI, but by and large I’d imagine that would be beyond most member’s capabilities.

Despite the relatively light hearted nature of TVI’s introduced verification process however, as I mentioned earlier, just two months after its introduction the system has been scrapped for all but three countries.

Why?

I can think of two primary reasons, and they both don’t bode well for TVI’s business ethics.

The first is the difficulty in actually verifying the documents sent to TVI from members in third world countries. As it stands, anyone in a third world country can join TVI Express, start mass recruiting members and rolling in the commissions.

Unfortunately a lot of these country’s official records however leave a lot to be desired and I imagine it’s no easy task working with local government and authorities to verify each and every verification request TVI receive.

Why let a little thing like business credibility and combating fraud eat into your company profits? So much easier to just abandon the whole thing and let your members run riot defrauding the system.

So long as those joining fees keep rolling in, who cares if the people joining are actually real people right?

The second is the possibility that the majority of TVI’s new member signups (remember, the pyramid nature of TVI Express requires a constant stream of new members to survive), are originating from the countries where fraud is most rampant.

Rather then piss off and risk disturbing this constant influx of new members, (and thus cutting off their commission revenue stream), TVI have instead decided to turn a blind eye and let the fraudsters continue their work.

As you can see, both scenarios boil down to TVI Express choosing to chase the dollar returns by trading in massive amounts of the company’s business integrity and ethics.

In essence, TVI Express have admitted fraud is running rampant in their business and have now announced they aren’t going to police it. One can only wonder why authorities around the world where TVI Express is under investigation haven’t jumped at this chance to shut them down.

Due to the nature of TVI Express’ business model, which involves revolving matrices, if a fraudster joins your matrix, waits till there are one or two spots left and then fills them with bogus accounts they’ve created in order to collect a commission – real members lose out.

Now as flawed as a new member recruitment business model is, if this happens enough times and enough bogus accounts are created, god help you if you cycle onto a matrix filled with bogus accounts. None of which are going to go out and recruit members to fill up the matrix in order to begin the next cycle.

With an already shady business model being employed at the heart of TVI Express, its a shame to see that they’ve for the most part completely abandoned any attempt at ethical integrity in policing their members.

One can only imagine that this policy of chasing the dollar at all costs, legal or otherwise, extends throughout the business’ other operations as well.