Instant Recall provides no information about who owns or runs the company on its website.

Instant Recall’s website domain (“instantrecalls.com”), was privately registered on January 14th, 2021.

Further research reveals Instant Recall marketing videos citing Paul Schneider as “creator” of the company.

BehindMLM first came across Schneider in January 2014, as part of our coverage on Med Saver Direct.

As part of that research, which began with Bid For My Meds, a reader tipped us off to Schneider’s securities fraud proceedings in Missouri.

In 2013 the Missouri Securities Division took action against Schneider (right), pertaining to securities fraud related to MVP and SkyBuddy.

I wasn’t able to confirm any further involvement in MLM by Schneider over the past eight years.

As always, if an MLM company is not openly upfront about who is running or owns it, think long and hard about joining and/or handing over any money.

Instant Recall’s Products

On LinkedIn Paul Schneider cites himself as President of MVP Apps.

Full Stack App Developer of enterprise class cloud based apps as well as small retail apps.

Specializing in monetization models, scalability, tracking and delivery, mapping functionality.

Presumably MVP Apps are behind Instant Recall’s free app.

Instant Recall as an app is basically combining a calendar with memory specific features (hence “recall”).

It should be noted this is highly misleading and has nothing to do with Instant Recall as an MLM opportunity.

We’ll explore that deeper in the conclusion of the review.

Instant Recall’s Compensation Plan

Instant Recall affiliates pay $3.99 a month. Commissions are paid on recruited affiliates who do the same.

Instant Recall pays commissions via a unilevel compensation structure.

A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):

If any level 1 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team.

If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.

Instant Recall caps payable unilevel team levels at four.

Recruitment commissions are paid out of subscription fees paid across these four levels as follows:

  • level 1 (personally recruited affiliates) and level 2 – $1 per recruited affiliate paying monthly subscription fees
  • levels 3 and 4 – 50 cents per recruited affiliate paying monthly subscription fees

Joining Instant Recall

Instant Recall affiliate membership is $3.99 a month.

Instant Recall Conclusion

Your first major red flag is Instant Recall failing to disclose their MLM opportunity anywhere on their website.

Instead you get a deceptive marketing pitch for a recall memory app. To be clear: the app very much exists. But it’s a effectively a trojan horse for a pyramid scheme.

In Instant Recall nothing is being marketed and/or sold to retail customers. You sign up as an affiliate for $3.99 a month and get paid to recruit others who do the same.

Textbook pyramid scheme.

The ruse behind Instant Recall’s pyramid scheme is selling of geolocation data.

Instant Recall’s affiliates represent, through the app, that Schneider is selling user’s location data. Whether he is or he isn’t, it’s pretty obvious commissions are coming out of affiliate membership fees – or why charge them at all?

In an attempt to legitimize fraud, Instant Recall donates a percentage of collected fees to charity – which affiliates exploit in their marketing pitches.

Donating to charity does not legalize the running of a pyramid scheme.

Running a pyramid scheme, deceptive marketing, making misleading income claims and failing to make appropriate disclosures to consumers are all violations of the FTC Act.

As for Instant Recall the MLM opportunity, like any pyramid scheme that’ll collapse when recruitment inevitably dies out.

The math behind MLM pyramid schemes guarantees the majority of participants lose money.

 

Update 9th March 2023 – Paul Schneider has been in touch to provide clarification on the flow of money within Instant Recall.

Schneider claims Instant Recall pays Google $7 a month for access to their “mapping API”.

Instant Recall affiliates purportedly contribute $3.99 a month towards this, with the rest covered by revenue generated on the sale of collected data.

When I pressed Schneider on who Instant Recall is selling mapping data to, he cited Narrative, Foursquare and Habr.

The representation is that revenue generated by selling data to these companies, covers the remaining $3.01 paid to Google each month, Instant Recall commissions and business overhead.

I remain doubtful but that’s what Schneider claims.

With respect to Instant Recall operating as a pyramid scheme, it remains a concern if the majority of paid Instant Recall app users are also affiliates.