Melius Review: $50,000 passive forex trading account for $3000?
Melius operates in the forex and cryptocurrency MLM niches.
The company provides corporate addresses in Dubai and the UK on their website.
The UK address is a virtual office, I wasn’t able to verify the provided Dubai address.
Somewhat curiously, early Melius marketing material claimed the company had a third office in the US state of Nevada:
Melius has since removed any reference to their Nevada corporation and office from their website and marketing material.
Speaking of Melius’ website, on it the company identifies Jeremy Prasetyo as CEO and co-founder of the company.
Melius’ other co-founders are not disclosed.
As far as I can tell, Melius is Prasetyo’s first MLM venture as an executive.
Prasetyo’s social media profiles suggest he has spent much of the past year speaking at and promoting various cryptocurrency events (non-MLM).
Read on for a full review of the Melius MLM opportunity.
Melius Products
Melius markets forex and cryptocurrency trading package subscriptions:
- Melius Adventure – Forex Mastery Course, trading strategies, analysis daily live sessions and a video library, $450 for 90 days
- Melius Escape – blockchain course, coin analysis, weekly coin magazine, daily live cryptocurrency trading sessions and a video library, $450 for 90 days
- Melius Experience – combines Melius Adventure and Melius Escape, $600 for 90 days, $999 for 180 days or $1800 for 365 days
As far as I can tell there is no passive ROI opportunity within Melius Adventure or Melius Escape themselves.
There is an iGoTrade app bundled with any Melius subscription, through which affiliates can set trade with signals provided by Melius (copy and paste).
Melius also markets “GoPro Forex” on a $3000 90 day subscription.
Each GoPro Forex subscription supposedly provides access to a $50,000 trading account, through which a passive ROI can be received (50% of the total ROI generated by the account).
The Melius Compensation Plan
Melius pays commissions on subscription purchases by retail customers and recruited affiliates.
Note that to qualify for commissions detailed below, each Melius affiliate must maintain active qualification.
To be and remain active, a Melius affiliate must invest and/or convince others to invest 120 PV worth of funds each month.
The Melius compensation plan doesn’t specify a dollar amount for 120 PV.
Melius Affiliate Ranks
There are eleven affiliate ranks within the Melius compensation plan.
Along with their respective qualification criteria, they are as follows:
- IBO – sign up as a Melius affiliate
- Executive Team Trainer – recruit and maintain two active IBOs and generate 120 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Executive Team Leader – recruit and maintain four active IBOs or two Executive Team Trainers and generate 1500 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Executive Coordinator – recruit and maintain four active Executive Team Trainers or two Executive Team Leaders and generate 5000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Executive Director – recruit and maintain two Executive Coordinators and generate 15,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Senior Executive Director – recruit and maintain two Executive Directors and generate 30,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Vice President – recruit and maintain two Senior Executive Directors and generate 150,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Senior Vice President – recruit and maintain two Vice Presidents and generate 300,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Ambassador – recruit and maintain two Senior Vice Presidents and generate 1,000,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Senior Ambassador – recruit and maintain two Ambassadors and generate 2,000,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
- Crown Ambassador – recruit and maintain three Senior Ambassadors and generate 5,000,000 GV a month in weaker binary team volume
Recruitment and Retail Commissions
Melius affiliates are paid a 20% commission on funds invested by retail customers and recruited affiliates.
An indirect 10% commission is paid on investment by second level retail customers and recruited affiliates.
Residual Commissions
Melius pays residual commissions via a binary compensation structure.
A binary compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a binary team, split into two sides (left and right):
The first level of the binary team houses two positions. The second level of the binary team is generated by splitting these first two positions into another two positions each (4 positions).
Subsequent levels of the binary team are generated as required, with each new level housing twice as many positions as the previous level.
Positions in the binary team are filled via direct and indirect recruitment of affiliates. Note there is no limit to how deep a binary team can grow.
At the end of each week Melius tallies up new investment on both sides of the binary team.
Melius affiliates are paid a 10% residual commission on funds invested in their weaker binary team side.
After the weekly residual commission is paid out, paid investment volume is flushed from both sides of the binary team.
Leftover volume on the stronger binary team side carries over into the following week.
Note that to qualify for residual commissions, each Melius affiliate must recruit and maintain two active affiliates (one placed on both sides of the binary team).
The following weekly residual commission caps also apply:
- Executive Team Trainers can earn up to $4000
- Executive Team Leaders can earn up to $8000
- Executive Coordinators can earn up to $16,000
- Executive Directors can earn up to $20,000
- Senior Executive Directors can earn up to $30,000
- Vice Presidents can earn up to $40,000
- Senior Vice Presidents can earn up to $160,000
- Ambassadors can earn up to $400,000
- Senior Ambassadors can earn up to $1,000,000
- Crown Ambassadors can earn up to $2,000,000
Matching Bonus
Executive Coordinator and higher ranked Melius affiliates qualify for a Matching Bonus.
The Matching Bonus is paid out on residual commissions earned by personally recruited affiliates.
- Executive Coordinators earn a 10% match
- Executive Directors earn a 15% match
- Senior Executive Directors earn a 20% match
- Vice Presidents earn a 25% match
- Senior Vice Presidents earn a 30% match
- Ambassadors earn a 35% match
- Senior Ambassadors earn a 40% match
- Crown Ambassadors earn a 50% match
Rank Achievement Bonuses
Melius reward affiliates who qualify at the Executive Director and higher ranks as follows:
- qualify as an Executive Director and receive a “holiday retreat”
- qualify as a Senior Executive Director and receive a Rolex watch
- qualify as a Vice President and receive a Porsche Macan SUV
- qualify as a Senior Vice President and receive a Bentley or Audi R8
- qualify as an Ambassador and receive a Ferrari or Lamborghini Huracan
- qualify as a Senior Ambassador and receive a Lamborghini Aventador
- qualify as a Crown Ambassador and receive a “dream house” or $1 million dollars
Leadership Global Pool Bonuses
Melius take 3% and 5% of company-wide investment volume and respectively place the funds into a President and Ambassador Pool.
Vice President and Senior Vice Presidents earn a share of the President Pool.
Ambassador and higher ranked affiliates earn a share of the Ambassador Pool.
Shares in both pools are paid out weekly.
Joining Melius
Melius affiliate membership is $45.
Conclusion
Let’s cut to the chase, Melius’ lower tier subscriptions are designed with one goal in mind – to get punters to fork over $3189 for a GoProForex subscription.
The notion that Melius is handing over $50,000 trading accounts for $3189 is absurd.
Even more so when you consider the holder of the account can request it be doubled ($100,000, $200,000) every time they increase the account by 10%.
This is supposedly capped at a million dollars, begging the question – where is this money coming from?
If Melius had access to that kind of capital and was able to auto-trade successfully, why would they be wasting their time shilling access for a few thousand?
In the lower subscription tiers there’s no direct trading, but I believe through the iGoTrade app that passive trading is possible.
This drags all tiers of Melius’ MLM opportunity into unregistered securities territory, as the company isn’t registered to offer securities in any jurisdiction it operates in.
On the trading side of things, Melius represents affiliates and retail customers will be “learning from industry experts”.
The two names provided are Brad Alexander and Jonathan Morgan.
According to a May 2017 Finance Magnates article, Brad Alexander signed up CEO of FX Large a year and a half ago.
FX Large appears to have since collapsed. The company’s website has so little traffic visiting it that Alexa doesn’t even bother to rank it.
Jonathan Morgan’s LinkedIn profile cites him as a day trader for Shield Wall Trading.
Shield Wall Trading’s website is little more than a graphic and Morgan’s email address. It is also unranked by Alexa.
Yet these are supposedly the two geniuses Melius are counting on to train subscribers to the point Melius is willing to hand over the keys to a $50,000 trading account (which they swear is not a demo account).
Unfortunately Melius’ insurmountable regulatory non-compliance overshadows the company’s token effort at pseudo-compliance.
Retail subscriptions are offered with no retail volume requirement, it’s clear Melius’ compensation plan is merely there to incentivize affiliate recruitment.
To operate legally Melius would need to register its securities offering in every jurisdiction it operates in. Considering Melius claims to be active in 160 countries, that’s a lot of jurisdictions.
Registering with regulators would in turn see Melius provide full disclosure regarding the source of its trading education, iGoTrade app, claimed $50,000 trading accounts and anything else pertaining to use of a Melius subscription to generate a trading ROI.
One particularly important disclosure I couldn’t find anywhere was what if a Melius affiliate blows through the entire $50,000 trading account.
Unfortunately rather than operate legally, Melius appears to have chosen to targeting victims in third-world countries.
As I write this Alexa cites Nigeria (56%), Benin (10%) and Togo (3%) as the top sources of traffic to the Melius website.
Spearheading these efforts are the brothers Monir and Moyn Islam:
Originally from the UK, after scamming people out of millions in OneCoin, the Islam brothers now spend most of their time hiding out in Dubai.
Which is coincidentally where Melius claim it operates from.
On his LinkedIn profile Jeremy Prasetyo cites his location as Frankfurt, Germany. Gee, I wonder who Melius’ other co-founders could be…
In summary, Melius is yet another dodgy MLM company specifically targeting low-hanging fruit across Africa…
Here we go again.
Update 6th July 2020 – Melius collapsed in the first half of 2020. As of late May/early June, the company has been rebooted as Be.
Firstly, Just to be clear.
Melius isn’t offering any ROI to any members at all. There is no investment opportunities here whatsoever.
There is no “signals/autotrading” also, they provide a market outlook and trading ideas every other day for members to get a better overview of what is happening in the markets.
They are not told to follow these ideas and there is no promise of profits or returns from any of these ideas.
Members only come and pay a monthly fee for Forex/Crypto education and Live daily education sessions, they can also cancel at anytime.
There is no promise of any returns on the presentation slides or on their website, or any of their daily live sessions.
The $50,000 funded account is a REAL Live forex trading account only for members who complete the Melius Adventure package (Forex Beginner-Advanced) course.
They need to complete a quiz at the end of every chapter. (Melius wants to actually make sure members are going through the education and not paying for the sake of coming in to earn commissions)
Then they also have to do another test on their Forex knowledge before being able to buy the Forex GoPro Elite 90 days education.
Every members trades on the $50,000 account is regularly monitored by the risk management team.
If they feel a trader isn’t ready to carry on trading, or is risking too much of the account they will take him/her off the account and bring him/her back on it until he/she is ready again.
The company isn’t telling anyone to invest a penny, instead the company is doing opposite of what all these other MLM INVESTMENT companies have done in the past.
They are charging $3189 for “The ELITE 90 Days Mentorship Program” and giving a $50,000 account to a customer to trade with.
Members are NOT paying $3189 to buy a $50,000 account. NOT AT ALL.
As you will only be allowed to purchase this after going through all the Forex education provided in the first place.
The company wants to ensure, real traders are given an opportunity to trade with funds they will never have access to.
I genuinely believe they have the right intentions, as they are not selling any investment here, and are only charging for education and are also giving their customers a platform to trade on after they complete all the forex education provided on the smaller packages.
The customers don’t invest. The company Invests in its customers.
So i don’t see any need to be regulated, if you are the one investing in people and not taking any investment.
$450 for 3 months education without any promise of returns is called a subscription for a service, not an investment.
Sure they are, nobody is taking out a subscription without the expectation they’ll be able to derive a ROI through the iGoTrade app.
Copy and pasting provided signals is busy-body work, the actual ROI is derived via the efforts of the signals provider (Melius).
As for GoPro Forex…
Who will cancel the account if I stray beyond what Melius wants me to do with the account, right?
I invest $3000 and get access to returns through a provided $50,000 trading account – which Melius won’t let me do whatever I want with. Thus, despite appearances, said account is actually under Melius’ control.
That’s a security and requires registration with regulators in every jurisdiction Melius operates in.
Sure they are. I pay Melius $3000 and I get a $50,000 trading account. That’s exactly what GoPro Forex is.
Any required “forex training” is just to generate commissions for top recruiters.
I hand $3000 over to Melius and that qualifies me to receive passive returns through a monitored $50,000 trading account. That’s an investment and a passive one at that.
You can try to pseudo-compliance it by focusing on the education packages and claiming there’s no ROI promise (the return needs to merely exist, whether it’s promised or not is irrelevant from a regulatory standpoint). At the end of the day though nobody is paying Melius thousands of dollars for education.
Melius affiliates are chasing implied returns they’re told they can earn in Melius’ marketing material.
Ive learnt the basics of how melius works as my cousins with them.
now how do i recruit people as the people i talk to come up with the excuse they dont want to get in the trading industry as its difficult and some say its not trust worthy so i want some advise.
thanks
Sounds like those you are trying to recruit did actual due-diligence. Sorry for your loss.
What do you mean “excuse” ?
Refusing to join an obviously fraudulent and highly risky securities fraud scheme isn’t an “excuse” it’s a “reason” why sensible people don’t want to be involved.
how is it ‘fraudulent’ mate. I dont think you understand the term. Fraud = intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right.
nobody is being lied to g, you pay for a subscription that teaches you to trade.
The intention perversion of truth here is scammers such as yourself claiming Melius is legit.
1. unregistered securities (passive returns)
2. where does the $50,000 come from? (nobody is giving you $50,000 to play with)
3. pyramid scheme commissions
Feel free to address any of the above, else stop lying to people about Melius being legit.
the layout is good but consider third world economies can it be be brought lower.
Just to confirm; Jon Morgan is a genuine professional trader and educator based in the US. I saw him speaking at an event in London in January.
Brad Alexander trades, educates and provides content for many brokers and FinTech companies and, contrary to your article, FX Large is doing quite well as a B2B content provider.
I met him at a Society of Technical Analysts meeting in February. bestctraderbrokers.com/expert-view-brad-alexander-founder-of-fx-large/ and you’ll find him as well on the FX Street Forecast Poll every week.
FX Large’s website has an Alexa ranking of 7.5 million. The business is dead fam.
i only know the gopro 50k account, with just that i can conclude that melius is scam.
Fancy explaining the mention they got from Forbes Middle East and Silicon Review?
Fancy explaining what a mention in a publication has to do with Melius’ MLM opportunity and business model?
Legitimacy via association isn’t a thing. And ‘sides…
Forbes offer a paid article service:
Let us know if they get a feature in Forbes’ main editorial stream.
The Silicon Review:
Did Melius get a mention in Yahoo Finance too? 😆
Pay money, get spam marketing articles. Herp derp.
They are a plague in Costa Rica, targeting low income people and destroying their lives with false promises.
Their operation here is huge because its poorly regulated.
Having actually done melius I can say that this company is a total fraud and will steal your money.
to anyone considering joining, please dont. invest your money in other companies (who dont scam their customers).
Hi there. Here in Colombia is taking force now, the only one thing I actually can understand is the way paste and copy in forex via iq options and another brokers.
I see some people sharing on their stories in whatsapp and instagram having amazing profits but I can believe it because I know being trader is complex.
What’s going on with this company did they change name to BE. ?
I saw a video the brothers promoting this new brand. Like most educational trading scams they change names after 24-36 months, because they have to.
This is a video done by a investigative journalist in France. Really interesting to have an insight how Melius operates.
youtube.com/watch?v=OuMK8j0hTVs
For the people that understand French, very interesting to share.
Any further updates or legit reviews on this company as i know someone who is involved and i am worried about them.
Yah, Melius has been rebooted as Be. On my review list for up an update.
@scambuster789:
That French video is in itself unremarkable, to anyone who already knows what kind of outfit Melius is, but the story that led to it is absolutely hilarious.
On June 9th, a completely unknown young man from Switzerland (who is described as being of French-Swiss-Peruvian origin), Jean-Pierre Fanguin, posted a video to Twitter and Instagram, promoting a get-rich-quick scheme, about which he doesn’t give any specifics (you have to contact him personally for that), but turned out to be Melius.
That video went viral, and within days he was a celebrity in francophone Europe. It has by now racked up somewhere close to 3 million views.
Considering that this fame is limited to France plus francophone parts of Belgium and Switzerland, about 74 million people in total, that is massive.
And it’s all because absolutely everything about that video is so hilariously, cringeworthily awful and obnoxious. His suit meant to be stylish but which is a size too small (with his crotch drawing particular viewer attention), his inane babble full of insults towards people who aren’t as rich as is he is unconvincingly pretending to be, the obviously rented expensive car, the absurdity of drinking from a champagne glass while standing next to a car parked, probably illegally, on an ordinary road, then tossing it over his shoulder before speeding off (leading to a passing cyclist audibly swearing at him), the way he incongruously ends his wannabe alpha-male rant with the off-screen greeting “bisous” (kisses), the absurdity of what he’s actually saying – everything about it caused hilarity.
It helped that this didn’t turn out to be a one-off thing. He’s made several others in the same vein, and even released a second one after he’d become famous, which was if possible even worse (he pretends to have a driver/manservant in that one).
In fact, it’s so god-awfully bad that a lot of people still believe he can’t possibly be for real, and that this was some clever parody. Or a clever way of drawing attention to himself and Melius by pretending to be this stupid and obnoxious.
Obviously, that’s only people who aren’t familiar with the wonderful world of MLM, and don’t know this is actually a pretty routine type of video, and that the field abounds with people who really are this stupid and this obnoxious.
But the one thing that stood out, and which immediately became an endlessly-repeated joke, was one ungrammatical sentence he used: “la question, elle est vite répondue”.
It’s hard to convey why that’s so funny in French. The best I can do as a translation is: “The question, it’s quickly replied.” He obviously meant something like “the answer is obvious”, or “the question answers itself”, but the way he put it just exudes deep, deep stupidity.
Memes ensued, parodies, t-shirts and mugs with his immortal expression, what’s described as a “hip-hop/rap” remix, on and on. When I put the phrase in Google now, it gets about 216,000 results. As just one little taster, here is a clip of his words dubbed over President Macron addressing the nation:
youtube.com/watch?v=9h-zj7MHXmY
(just put the phrase in the Youtube search box for lots and lots more.)
The result of it all:
(1) Fifteen minutes of insta-fame for Jean-Pierre Fanguin.
(2) The local Swiss police have already contacted him, because in one of his other videos he shows himself driving 150km/h on an 80 km/h road (in another rented expensive car of course).
(3) The Swiss police have also announced they are starting an investigation into the legality of Melius.
(4) Lots of media outlets are reporting not just on the viral phenomenon, but on get-rich-quick MLM scams in general, and Melius in particular.
(5) The only people who aren’t amused are affiliates of Melius, and other MLM schemes.
They’re angry at him, for exposing them like this, in front of an audience of millions. They prefer operating without the glare of publicity, keeping under the radar of both the media and the authorities.
I don’t think anything MLM related has every produced this much entertainment value for this many people.
That… crotch. Wearing improperly sized suits like that is going to leave you infertile in a few years.
One thing that I used to joke with Anjali about is the Islam brothers terrible fashion sense.
There’s a paid Forbes advertisement shot they use on Be’s website. The brothers have their pants cut off around their calves lol.
“All your French are belong to us. Someone set us up le bombe.”
(ref:) youtube.com/watch?v=jQE66WA2s-A