Passport4Success Review: Better Bid penny auctions
Passport4Success launched in mid 2014 and are based out of the US state of California.
The company operates in the MLM penny auction niche, with Ruben Rivera credited as the Founder and Lead Distributor of the company.
Why Rivera (right) doesn’t hold an executive management position within Passport4Success is unclear.
According to Rivera’s Passport4Success bio:
It was while he was with McDonnell Douglas that he was exposed to Network Marketing through a friend and saw the tremendous potential of the industry.
He is a seasoned network marketer of over 22 years building massive organizations in the tens of thousands. He has been on the corporate side of multi-level marketing for over 7 years.
Prior to Passport 4 Success he was the VP of sales for a $900 Million dollar multi-level coffee company overseeing daily operation.
The coffee company referred to above is Organo Gold. Why or when Rivera left Organo Gold is not clear.
Read on for a full review of the Passport4Success MLM business opportunity.
The Passport4Success Product Line
Passport4Success market penny auction bids for their Better Bid penny auction platform.
Better Bid operate lowest unique bid auctions, which sees the lowest unique bid placed winning the auction.
Auctions end when a fixed number of bids have been placed, at which point the lowest unique bid is calculated.
Retail bids for Better Bid cost 50 cents each.
The Passport4Success Compensation Plan
The Passport4Success compensation plan sees affiliates spend between $195 to $7665 on affiliate membership, with commissions paid on the recruitment of other affiliates and sale of penny auction bids.
There are five levels of Passport4Success affiliate membership available as follows:
- Associate – $195
- Executive – $595
- Director – $1095
- Director 3 Pack – $3285
- Director 7 Pack – $7665
Recruitment Commissions
Passport4Success affiliates are paid to recruit new affiliates down three levels of recruitment (unilevel).
Specific commissions paid out are not provided, but the official Passport4Success compensation plan material does state that if a Director affiliate is recruited, a $200 commission is paid out.
If a Director is recruited on levels 2 or 3 a $50 commission is paid out.
Percentage wise $200 is approximately 18% of the $1095 cost of Director. $50 is 4.5%, with these percentage payouts presumed to be the same or similar across the other available affiliate packages.
Residual Recruitment Commissions
Residual recruitment commissions are paid out in Passport4Success via a binary compensation structure.
A binary compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of two binary teams, split into left and right:
Positions in the binary team are filled via affiliate recruitment, with one affiliate on the left matched with one affiliate on the right paying out a commission.
How much of a commission is paid out is determined by what affiliate package a newly recruited affiliate has purchased.
The official Passport4Success compensation plan material quotes a $50 commission paid out on the recruitment of two matched Director affiliates (4.5%). Presumably a similar percentage is paid out when other level affiliates are matched.
Note that Passport4Success affiliates are capped at 20 matches or $1000 a day, whichever comes first.
A 10% matching bonus on the binary earnings of personally recruited affiliates is also available.
Revenue Sharing
Passport4Success take funds spent on Better Bid bid purchases and pay them out through a revenue-sharing pool.
Payments are made on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with each affiliate given 90 revenue sharing payments before “retail sales requirements take effect”.
What these requirements are is not disclosed.
Joining Passport4Success
Affiliate membership with Passport4Success is available at five different pricepoints:
- Associate – $195
- Executive – $595
- Director – $1095
- Director 3 Pack – $3285
- Director 7 Pack – $7665
The primary difference between these pricepoints is income potential through the Passport4Success compensation plan.
Conclusion
Despite the obvious issues with the Passport4Success business model on the compliance side of things, the official corporate marketing spiel pitches the opportunity on legal compliance:
Naturally who these lawyers are is not disclosed.
Amazingly, despite the wrap MLM penny auctions have for charging affiliates thousands of dollars to participate in closed-loop opportunities, Passport4Success does exactly that.
Affiliates sign up and then fork over between $195 to $7665 (!!!), in exchange for income potential and a bunch of worthless Better Bid penny auction bids.
Why do I say worthless?
As per the official Passport4Success compensation plan material;
One guy gets a laptop for $60 (plus bid costs), with everyone else losing $9500.
How stupid do Passport4Success think their customers are?
And as a Passport4Success affiliate, for how long do you think any customers you might nab are going to empty their wallets to the tune of thousands of dollars only to have nothing to show for it?
This of course lends itself to a complete lack of retail activity taking place, which is reflected in Better Bid’s penny auctions being a ghost town.
What your then left with is affiliates pumping money into a scheme, hoping to get a >100% daily ROI paid out before the 90 times retail requirements cap kicks in.
All you’re doing is shuffling new affiliate fees to pay off existing affiliates.
The rest of the Passport4Success compensation plan deteriorates into a recruitment fest, with affiliates directly and indirectly compensated to recruit new participants into the scheme.
Once that recruitment slows down, the scheme collapses. The recruitment commissions cease immediately, with the daily ROIs following soon after (there will likely be some lag before the kitty runs dry).
But uh remember, “lawyers” have totally signed off on Passport4Success and there’s “HUGE PROFITS!” to be had by all.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
I would normally completely agree with you, because that has always been my assessment of penny auction websites—that the website (like the casino house) makes all the money on the bids being used/placed in the auction.
However, what you don’t know, is that BetterBid actually does something that makes this otherwise crazy, stupid model work: The company/house shares the profit from the auction.
The “$9,500” for example that you show above. That is split with qualifying representatives and customers. In that way, the people are actually profiting off the system. And they do have a former federal attorney as their president.
Again, I’m the first to call out these silly and scammy penny auction sites, but I think Better Bid may have actually found a way to make it work, by sharing those huge profits.
And? The penny auctions are still a big fat waste of time for bidders (your retail customers).
Retention is going to be garbage and won’t last (just like every other penny auction MLM).
Paying affiliate more doesn’t fix the crappy end-user experience.
It’s paid to affiliates. Anyone not interested in the business (signing up as an affiliate) will statistically lose money bidding.
You can’t compare bids to casino chips. Casino chips have a temporary function, e.g. winners can exchange bids back to money when they leave the casino. You can’t exchange bids back to money?
They’re trying to trick your brain there.
The example shown there is plain BS. Penny auctions (incl. unique bid auctions) earn revenue from sale of bids, not from bids being used in auctions. They’re trying to trick your brain there.
Example:
Affiliate or customers buy $10,000 worth of bids. Then it will be the same $10,000 revenue. It doesn’t really matter whether they spend 10 bids or 10,000 bids. The revenue will still be the same.
They’re trying to trick your brain here.
Having been involved in PASSPORT4SUCCESS and having done everything asked of me, when it came time for the company to pay us they had no money.
In exchange for not paying us they replaced our bids back up to the original amount of bids when buying into this scheme.
The second time it happened and they could not pay anyone, they did not even replace the bids.
The people who buy multiple units in the MLM have a greater chance of winning auctions because there is no limit on the amount of bids a person can spend on any one auction and most of the time the bidding site barely functioned in the time I was involved.
Even if the owners have no intention to scam the public ultimately that is what is happening, because they do not have a working platform in place and the new money coming in is all going to web development.
Although they do insist that the people coming in are getting a working business, THAT IS THE BIGGEST MISREPRESENTATION!
This is not a fully functioning MLM and as far as I know they have not even given those already involved the go ahead to start bidding again to accrue your daily payouts which are accumulated and supposed to be paid once a month which never happened.
All I know is a $500.00 XBOX System sold for $30,000.00 with 60,000 bids at .50 cents per bid if a distributor / .78 cents per bid if just a bidder not a distributor when the item closed and they have no money!!!
If it sounds to good to be true it is and this definitely sounded to good to be true when it was presented.
It was the desperation of my personal situation which made me leap and that is what people prey upon when presenting and enlisting people for these so called opportunities.
Doesn’t sound like typical consumer behaviour. Either Affiliates getting rid of bids they don’t care about, or Passport4Success themselves running bid bots to fake auction activity (wouldn’t be the first MLM penny auction company to do so).
holy crap that claim is hilarious. No is stupid enough to bid over retail price. I mean c’mon……you gotta do better than that.
That’s as bad as dubli trolls claiming shit was flying off the shelves for pennies when there was always the same winer.
@Me
There’s a missing part in the article here = “retail sale requirements”. What are those requirements about?
You may think that is a hilarious claim, but I don’t that is exactly what happened and if your were not involved who the heck are you to say I am ridiculous.
Go watch the auctions or better yet experience something yourself instead of ridiculing others, it appears to me your mouth moves a bit faster than your brain find out what you are talking about !!!
Payments in the revenue sharing pools had never been paid when I got out a short time ago they were still telling distributors to not bid if you were just bidding for daily’s because daily’s would not be paid.
Is M Norway still involved with Passport4Success ???? Sounds like it !!!
It is not typical consumer behavior really the only people shopping betterbid.com are the distributors go out and find just plain consumers who are not distributors or people affiliated with distributors shopping betterbid.com they are very few if any at all.
If I spend 15 bids a day as required to get into the daily bonus pool and there were 1500 members in PASSPORT4SUCCESS at the time, why couldn’t an item hit 60,000 bids they were only running maybe 6 to 10 different auctions at a time, and those items included undesirable things for me so you place your daily 15 bids just to get paid your daily’s.
What is 15 (Daily Bids) x 1500 (members) per day 22,500 bids per day being placed on 6 to 10 auctions that run until ???
That XBOX was on auction for almost a week and collected 60,000 bids and based on .50 per bid for distributors that is $60,000 and if you go to the site and look up past auctions the item sold for between $50 and $100 to the person who won the item.
At 15 bids per day at .50 per bid I spent $7.50 per day for one week to win the item and collect Daily’s or $52.50 and so did 100’s of other people that is how they achieve that $60,000 price for the house it is cumulative.
I would have earned back my Daily’s so the $52.50 spent would go down although ultimately daily’s were never paid anyway.
I say report the whole thing to the Attorney General and let them decide if this is real or a scam !!!!
someone with a grip on reality. lol.
you allege you ‘don’t know’ exactly what happened but you stated:
again…. ridiculous. lmao!
It’s $0 in terms of revenue (income).
* People pay for the bids when they buy them.
* They don’t pay anything EXTRA when they use bids in auctions.
* So bidding won’t bring in any extra money.
You will need to recheck your own idea about “How things work”. Currently you’re repeating some ideas people have tricked you to believe in.
Look at the number of opportunities reviewed here? And look at the number of followup stories. I don’t even HAVE any Attorney General to report it to.
Passport4Success doesn’t seem to be very successful anyway.
Use your brain rather than a calculator?
15 bids × 1500 = 22,500 bids = not enough to buy a cup of coffee.
The bids didn’t cost much to produce, so they don’t have any “product value”. They cannot easily be sold in a normal market, so they don’t have any “retail value”. Bids are not monetary units, so they don’t have any “monetary value”. The bids are not made of gold or silver, so they don’t have any “precious metal value”.
The bids cost every distributor .50 each do you think P4S gives the bids away for free.
But as you say bids are worthless they must be free for you, now who is being ridiculous!!!
The Attorney General in CA is Kamala D. Harris and she is the Attorney General where P4S is located!!
Bids still cost money when you buy them who cares if you pay for them prior or subsequent to the auction they still cost .50 each.
You individuals involved love to twist words however you wish to for your advantage, that is how these SCAMS exist is by twisting truth.
P4S is not a working MLM and betterbid is a sometimes functioning website yet you are still taking peoples money telling them it is functioning.
That is a SCAM and that is the real bottom line the rest does not matter.
You pay for the bids one time when you buy them = income for the company.
You don’t pay anything when you use those bids in auctions = no income for the company in that part.
You can’t use the idea “Since I paid for those bids, the company will make money when I use those bids too”. They have tricked you to believe in an idea like that, but that doesn’t make it true.
I’m not member of P4S or any other program. 🙂
P4S is either a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme, or a combination of both types. If anyone should complain about P4S, it should be the investors themselves.
You are playing a game of semantics just word twisting, a value was established per bid when the distributor paid .50 per bid that is the monetary value established at purchase and is simply as measuring stick like chips in poker.
If you buy a $100 chip the poker chip is not worth $100 the $100 cash you paid to establish that value for the poker chip makes it worth $100 when you place a bet with the chip!
The Chip by itself on it’s own is worth pennies.
Given that you have to pay up to THOUSANDS of dollars to buy-in / qualify, this is obviously a pay-to-play scheme.
Consider this: what are the operating expenses for such a scheme?
Practically nothing, since bids are PREPAID (you have to buy them before you can use them).
Server and bandwidth and programming are cheap or can be sourced cheaply. Even the products can be dropshipped via Amazon or such given the “profit margin” you cited.
Which leads to the question you didn’t think of asking, or perhaps, do not want to ask: Why do they need your money? Hmmm???
Also as a footnote to the previous post:
As a distributor when with P4S I could have sold my bids that I bought when buying a distributorship, and I could sell them for up to .78 per bid to anyone any consumer out there who just wanted to bid but not be a distributor.
So just like the Poker Chip I mentioned above could be cashed in for money I could have cashed in my bids by selling them should I have found a buyer.
I never tried to sell anything for P4S because nothing worked properly from shortly after I got into the MLM and I am not out to take advantage of anyone.
Everything I have posted here is simply a warning to others, if you choose to find out for yourself go ahead and you will see that what I have stated is the truth.
How far P4S has progressed since my leaving I cannot answer I have nothing to do with them.
In the time I was with them they never really progressed at all functionally, although there was always a lot of hype and hoopla over what was going to be done and what was coming in the future.
They do drop ship with Amazon although the guy who presented this P4S to me made it seem as though Amazon was on board with the project and not just a drop shipper it was through research we found out otherwise.
There whole operation is about bringing more people in always with meetings at offices and other offline and online events it is about bringing new blood as the saying who go.
The real tell tale issue for me early on within days of my joining was they were on a shared server and not on their own independent server.
That was the first real big red flag for me with this P4S because of all of the sensitive data they would have to handle credit card processing, personal information, income information and spreadsheets, contact information and so on.
Only within the scheme itself. And a poker chip is a physical item, online penny auction bids are numbers on a screen.
Use your own brain? “Just like chips” isn’t really true.
Chips in a casino has a temporary function.
* If you you lose all the chips, you will have lost the money you paid for them.
* If you lose half of the chips, you will get half of your money back.
* If you win $1,000 in chips, you will get your principal amount back + $1,000 when you leave the casino.
You can’t do the same with bids.
That was my impression too, but P4S has a revenue sharing component too (similar to ZeekRewards, but it may be fake).
Director 1-pack, 3-pack and 7-pack look like a copy of BLGM’s “stacked positions in the binary matrix”. 1 binary pair = $50 payout.
1 position
1+2 positions ($50 payout or discount)
1+2+4 positions ($50+$100+$100 payout or discount)
OK since you believe that poker or gambling chips are physical items (Ozedit: Offtopic derail attempts removed. If you want to discuss gambling chips do it elsewhere.)
Bids serve the same temporary function until used the application is different the theory is the same. Gambling Chips are not always physical especially when dealing in computers and the internet that is the world P4S operates in is virtual and based Online since it is driven by the operations of an online penny auction betterbid!
If you spend all of your bids on auctions and do not win any you will have lost all the money you spent on the bids as well and if you win the auction you will win an item at a fraction of it’s retail value to you as the winner same as the poker chip wins you something.
Bids serve the same temporary function until used the application is different the theory is the same.
Do BetterBid buy back unused bids?
No betterbid does not buy back unused bids they encourage bids to be sold openly or given away as a lost leader for distributors to bring new people in to the MLM or at least to come and buy bids and participate as an auction participant.
They actually encourage all distributors to give away half of their bids to bring new people in they get approximately 100 to 200 bids for free through an email which they accept from the distributor and when they sign up to use those bids it is done under that distributor who sent them.
As I stated earlier the bids sold to individuals who are not distributors for .78 if the distributor sells the bids.
If the person comes back and buys more bids directly from betterbid supposedly the distributor is credited .28 per bid purchased by that individual.
This was another income avenue offered to the distributors and the practice is of course encouraged because really bids are free for the company to create in the end.
So in reality the bids have no monetary value once purchased, and that’s that.
If the bids were actually worth something, BetterBid would be more than happy to pay for them.
All that’s happening here is affiliates are spending money on bids, which is the driving force of revenue for Passport4Success.
No MLM penny auction has ever generated significant retail sales, because they all pay commissions on affiliates buying bids.
Bidify tried to go retail and it failed spectacularly, so they rushed back to their affiliate purchase model.
The main part of the business is normally the part where the money comes in, e.g. from customers.
A purchase of a Director pack:
* You pay $1,095 to P4S (your bank account → P4S’ bank account)
* You get bids in exchange
P4S has already got your money. You will not bring more money in when you use those bids in auctions.
As long as we can agree on that, then it should be fine. One Director Pack purchase will generate $1,095 income for P4S, and that’s all.
The other model will imply that you don’t pay anything for the bids when you purchase them, the money will first be extracted from your bank account when the bids are being used in auctions. But that’s not the reality here.
“Give away as sample bids” is an idea stolen from ZeekRewards (Ponzi scheme). The rest of it seems to come from BLGM Better Living Global Marketing (Ponzi scheme). They both had penny auctions as “front businesses”.
If you have accepted the idea that one Director Pack purchase only will bring in $1,095 gross revenue (income), then I can move on to something different.
“The next thing to know”
The next thing to know is that the purchase of one Director Pack only will bring in any money if you bring in real money from the outside = a transaction from your bank account → P4S’ bank account.
Funds held in back office accounts can be compared to monopoly money, i.e. “a type of money that only will be accepted inside a game or a system, with no real value or function out in the real world”.
They are, and when you consider that lowest unique bid auctions are considered to be pure chance like a lottery, the actual value of a bid is virtually zero (regardless of what you paid for it) since it gives you so very little chance of winning anything. 15/22,500 did you say? Those are long odds.
So what are you paying for? Its not 50 cent bids because those have purely nominal value.
What do you get?
The way I see it, you get a “license’ to sell P4S to others and a promise from the company to pay you commissions for bringing more cash into the scheme …. and if you perform the meaningless task of placing 15 bids every day you may receive a partial refund of the money you paid to join in the first place (they call this profit sharing…which is to say profit they made from selling memberships to you and others).
I am glad to hear you are getting out and that you have taken the time to tell others, but i think its important to mention that the problem with this business is not just poor execution, but deception by design.
When you buy into P4S you receive what amounts to electronic lottery tickets (called bids) and unlike poker chips you can not return these tickets to the cashiers cage, cash out and leave the casino.
Instead you can can only expend the bids you have already paid for in a futile effort to win the “big prize.
Its a carnival game, a one way street that is not paved with gold…at least not for any particular bidder who stands very little chance of winning “the big prize,” which is why this model will never attract retail customers.
There should be some auction winners, but very few relative to the number of tickets sold… which is how this company intends to make a profit and why they are willing to pay you to bring more cash/participants into the game.
Somebody on the board opined that this was a pay to play scheme, which seems to be the case.
Passport 4 Sucess is a scam for certain. It has been reported to Utah Attorney General’s office. The Better Business Bureau of Utah as well. Rivera is a con man for certain.