uFun Club @ BehindMLM

While I’ve come to accept it’s pretty much “anything goes” in the MLM underbelly, even after almost a decade I still come across stories I find perplexing. Zhang Jian’s latest escapades in Malaysia are one such instance.

After a long investigation and over a hundred arrests, twenty-two uFun Club scammers have been sent to prison in Thailand. Forty four uFun Club scammers stood trial on Wednesday. Twenty-two were found guilty and the remaining twenty-one were acquitted ‘due to insufficient evidence‘.

I was expecting a decision on Nicolas Giannos and Rosita Stanfield’s appeal in October, but turns out a decision was made last month. Long story short, both Giannos and Stanfield have lost their appeal and both convictions have been upheld.

BC Academy first popped up on BehindMLM’s radar as a reboot of the uFun Club Ponzi scheme. uFun Club investors were given positions in BC Academy, suggesting the uFun Club affiliate database had been sold to BC Academy’s owners. At the time limited information about the BC Academy MLM opportunity was available. Since then further [Continue reading…]

uFun Club was an MLM cryptocurrency scheme launched around 2012. Under the pretense of offering the uToken cryptocurrency, uFun Club adopted the Ponzi points model pioneered by Zeek Rewards. In April of 2015 Thai authorities shut the company down and began arresting uFun Club investors. In an effort to salvage the scheme, uFun Club management fled [Continue reading…]

As scheduled, Nicolas Giannos and Rosita Stanfield’s sentencing hearing took place last Friday. The duo were found guilty of recruiting victims into the uFun Club Ponzi scheme in late December. Giannos’ initial sentence was four years, with Rosita Stanfield’s sentence coming in at three. Citing “good character” and Giannos’ foreign-national status in Samoa, Chief Justice Patu reduced Giannos [Continue reading…]

Our last update on the Samoan uFun Club criminal trial left things up in the air. Ponzi scammers Nicolas Giannos and Rosita Stanfield initially failed to appear at their February 2nd sentencing hearing. An arrest warrant was issued but then later recalled, as the pair put in an appearance later that day. Turns out after filing [Continue reading…]

After being found guilty of promoting the the uFun Club Ponzi scam to Samoans, Nicolas Giannos and Rosita Stanfield were ordered to attend a sentencing hearing on February 2nd. Chief Justice Palu remanded Giannos and Stanfield at liberty, which meant they were free until the sentencing hearing. Yesterday saw the scheduled sentencing hearing take place, [Continue reading…]

He was the poster-boy for uFun Club. Regularly appearing in full military garb, retired Major-General Athiwaat Soonpan attended uFun Club events to lend an air of authority to the scheme. When Thai police raided uFun Club’s office and started making arrests in April 2014, Soonpan fled to the US. An arrest warrant was issued by [Continue reading…]

Recently it seems a year of uFun Club investigation and arrests had died down in Thailand. Here at BehindMLM our last story was “uFun Club scammers plead not guilty in Thailand“, published a few months ago in September. Thai police have continued to work the case behind the scenes however, with the latest round of arrests [Continue reading…]