The Future Trade Review: Winner, best scam marketing vid
The Future Trade provides no verifiable information on its website about who owns or runs the business.
Supposedly The Future Trade is headed up by Meril Rid;
Rid however is quite obviously played by an actor. Outside of The Future Trade’s The Office style marketing video, Meril Rid doesn’t exist.
Just a note on the video linked above, the guy Ryan who sells Rid the doll both at the start of the video and at [4:37], also appears as a seated extra at [2:29].
The Future Trade’s marketing video is your typical rented office with actors affair, albeit with a higher production script.
In an attempt to appear legitimate, The Future Trade provides shell company incorporation documents for The Marshall Islands, Singapore and Seychelles on its website.
For the purpose of MLM due-diligence, these documents are meaningless.
For example, the Singapore incorporation of Future Trade INT PTE LTD, lists Meril Rid down as being British with a UK address.
Fun Fact: Ryan’s driver at [4:37] in the previously linked video is driving a right-hand side car. Lin’s US accent aside, the UK drives on the left.
Wherever The Future Trade’s marketing video was shot, it wasn’t in the UK.
Scams typically create shell companies with bogus information through local agents. Things get even more questionable when shell companies are incorporated in scam friendly jurisdictions like the Marshall Islands and Seychelles.
The Future Trade’s website domain (“thefuturetrade.com”), was initially registered in July 2018. The private registration was last updated on October 24th, 2020.
Update 8th March 2022 – There appears to be some renewed interest in The Future Trade.
I had a review request which prompted me to take another look. I noted above in the September update that investors in Turkey were being targeted.
Having gotten rid of their cheesy “Meril Rid” marketing video, The Future Trade uploaded a bunch of “actors sitting around a rented office” photos to their website:
If you scroll down a bit you’ll come to one photo showing a lanyard for “Jared Ryan”:
The brand of the lanyard is “Brauberg”, a Russian office supplies store:
From this we can confirm Russian scammers are behind The Future Trade.
Meanwhile The Future Trade recruitment in Turkey appears to be in decline:
In comment #9 below, dated September 2021, I noted Turkey made up 67% of visits to The Future Trade’s website.
As of March 2022, that has dropped to just 20%. Unless new victims are found, looks like that might be it for The Futures Trade. /end update
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.
The Future Trade’s Products
The Future Trade has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market The Future Trade affiliate membership itself.
The Future Trade’s Compensation Plan
The Future Trade affiliates invest funds on the promise of an advertised return:
- Basic 1 – invest $50 to $1000 and receive 5% a week for 40 weeks (200%)
- Basic 2 – invest $1001 to $10,000 and receive 6% a week for 40 weeks (240%)
- Moderate 1 – invest $10,001 to $25,000 and receive 8% a week for 30 weeks (240%)
- Moderate 2 – invest $25,001 to $50,000 and receive 9% a week for 30 weeks (270%)
- Classic 1 – invest $50,001 to $100,000 and receive 10% a week for 25 weeks (250)
- Classic 2 – invest $100,001 or more and receive 12% a week for 23 weeks (276%)
Note that The Future Trade charges a 6% withdrawal fee.
Referral Commissions
The Future Trade pays a 7% referral commission on funds invested by personally recruited affiliates.
Residual Commissions
The Future Trade 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 the pay period, The Future Trade tallies up new investment volume on both sides of the binary team.
Affiliates are paid 9% of funds invested on their weaker binary team side, capped per pay period based on how much they’ve invested:
- Basic 1 tier affiliates are capped at $500
- Basic 2 tier affiliates are capped at $1000
- Moderate 1 tier affiliates are capped at $2000
- Moderate 2 tier affiliates are capped at $3000
- Classic 1 tier affiliates are capped at $5000
- Classic 2 tier affiliates are capped at $7500
Note that The Future Trade don’t specify the duration of a pay period. Typically however it is either daily or weekly.
Joining The Future Trade
The Future Trade affiliate membership is free.
Full participation in the attached income opportunity however requires a minimum $50 initial investment.
Conclusion
Corny or otherwise, there’s no doubt The Future Trade has put out the highest effort marketing video we’ve seen from scammers yet.
If there was an awards show for this sort of thing, they’d win – no question.
The bad news is The Future Trade is otherwise a cookie-cutter MLM Ponzi scheme.
The Future Trade claims to generate external revenue through “forex and crypto trading”.
No evidence of trading is provided, nor is there any evidence of The Future Trade using external revenue of any kind to pay advertised returns.
Being a passive investment opportunity, The Future Trade’s MLM opportunity constitutes a securities offering.
The Future Trade is not registered to offer securities in any jurisdiction. The shell company documents provided are not a substitute for registration with financial regulators.
This means that, at a minimum, The Future Trade is committing securities fraud the world over.
The company marketing no risk returns is also a red flag;
Will I be exposed to any losses?
No, we offer safety and security to our customers by positioning them in an impervious zone and keeping them away from all sorts of risks possible.
As with all MLM Ponzi schemes, once affiliate recruitment runs dry so too will new investment.
This will starve The Future Trade of ROI revenue, eventually prompting a collapse.
The math behind Ponzi schemes guarantees that when they collapse, the majority of participants lose money.
Update 30th September 2021 – As at the time of this update The Future Trade has removed its “Meril Rid” marketing video from YouTube.
I did have the video linked but have had to disable the link as a result.
Update 3rd August 2022 – BehindMLM revisited The Future Trade for an updated review in June 2022.
How right you are. By my dark and powerful magic, I am able to tell it was shot at 100 E Pine Street, Orlando, FL 32801, United States. A.k.a. the Venture X Downtown Orlando coworking space.
The steps I went through in my magic ritual were:
1. While the interior looks as anonymous as all such places around the world, what one can see through the windows just immediately screamed “US / fairly southern” at me.
2. This was partially confirmed at 6:10, where one can see a wall socket.
It’s a type B, meaning we’re in North or Central America, or one of the northernmost countries of South America.
3. While skimming through the video, I had this “I’ve seen this place before” feeling. In particular the plant pots on poles in the street seemed to ring a bell.
Then I remembered what I think was my first-ever successful location of a fake office video, almost a year ago: My Gold Rev (whatever happened to them?). It’s the same place.
Same location, same approach of hiring an over-the-top actor, so probably the same outfit.
Although with a somewhat original twist, in an attempt to avoid repeating a blatant problem with the earlier video: by having the obviously fake CEO put on an unfunny comedy routine, they’ve sort of made the fact that he’s obviously pretending part of the show.
And you cut corners on getting other things right as well, such as giving the staff hand-written name badges: people can think that’s all part of the comedy.
I really can’t be bothered to go looking through that old My Gold Rev video to see if maybe some of the extras, or bits of the sales patter, are the same as well.
I’m struggling to believe this isn’t a parody. If they do actually steal your money, I can only imagine they’re targeting the self-aware HYIP crowd.
If judged as comedy it’s bog-standard amateur dreck (derivative, too obvious, too long), but some of the individual lines are actually quite good. “I am this company’s pall-bearer, um, torch-bearer.”
The video might be a parody, but that doesn’t mean the scam itself has to be.
If you look at their other videos and their website, it’s all very much the bog-standard crypto-themed Ponzi scheme, without a hint of the whimsy they’ve tried with the “CEO” video (although the fake people from the video do appear on the website as “Our Team”).
Complete with one titled “BUSINESS PLAN PRESENTATION (ENGLISH)! THE FUTURE TRADE”, delivered by someone with a heavy Slavic accent (who notably isn’t in the CEO video), and lots of the usual grammatical errors in the script. (The same one in French, with a different person, also uses a heavily-accented non-native speaker.)
In short, there’s absolutely nothing pointing to it being US-based, or a parody, except for that one unusual “comedic” video, and lots of stuff pointing to it being yet another run-of-the-mill but genuine crypto-themed Ponzi, probably Russia or at least Eastern Europe based.
A possible explanation could be that they’ve hired some people in the US to make one slick, “professional”, presentation video for them, who aren’t otherwise involved in the scam, and that they’ve been pranked by them.
We’ve seen plenty of fake office and fake CEO videos that make one wonder “they don’t expect anyone to believe this is genuine, do they?” – yet one has to assume the people who put them out think they are convincing.
So clearly, such perceptions do not carry well across cultural and language borders.
If they hired the same people who did the My Gold Rev video (and what are the odds of two different outfits using the exact same office rental space to make the same kind of fake office video, out of the thousands of such places available in the US?), those might have thought:
“well, we managed to sell them a video with a ludicrously unbelievable fake CEO in it, and they fell for it. Let’s turn it up to 11 and see if they still don’t get that we’re making joke videos, which make them look totally ridiculous”.
IOW, make an intentionally funny video, where most other fake office/fake CEO videos are unintentionally funny.
It may seem fanciful, but it’s the only explanation I can think of.
Besides the “CEO” video, there’s another “comedy” one, titled “The Future Trade reaches to you for entreating about your #Health & #Wealth in this Covid19 chapter”, which also seems to spoof the usual bad English of such scam videos.
It’s obvious these two are made by entirely different people from all the other ones, otherwise, why wouldn’t they use some of the same US actors in any of the “serious” videos?
And if the US authorities ever were to come knocking on the door of the Orlando-based video makers for complicity in a scam, they can always defend themselves by claiming they made a comedy video, and never believed it was intended to sell a real scam.
No US jury shown those two videos would believe them to be for real – but the people who ordered them might genuinely not realize that.
@”Meril” Don’t call us, we’ll call you…
They were obviously in a pinch for extras as some of them seem to have double assignments.
Pink blouse lady and portly guy next to Allison are both in Support and Knowledge teams. Dev lead Michael also turns up seated in the Knowledge team. And the company seems to employ a few people that just wander around having a chat.
Maybe they are lacking a workplace seeing as these all seem makeshift with people gathered around for an impromptu meeting. Not observing any Covid protection measures what so ever.
To be fair, that’s what all these “coworking spaces” tend to look like all the time, not just in fake corporate videos (at least the ones that aren’t completely empty).
They’ve used US actors in some of the scams. These are opportunistic expats though, nothing stateside.
I think it’s easier to sell “don’t worry, it’s just a prank bro!” than “read this script and pretend to be our CEO.”
Your memory continues to amaze.
It’s been 7 months since I joined the platform I never faced any delays or issues with the team, The CEO number is displayed and the customer support is very good.
I currently have around 150 members under my team and nobody has encountered any type of issues, If the above-mentioned video is about marketing I might take it for granted.
As of my experience with The Future Trade, it actually has a trading team and by far the most sustainable platform I ever engaged with.
Future Trade’s CEO is an actor lol. You don’t have his number.
As for getting paid, Ponzi schemes pay out as long as scammers such as yourself recruit new victims.
Math is math and no Ponzi scheme is “sustainable”.
By the time scams like The Future Trade collapse it’s too late. Recruiting scammers like yourself will make off, the victims you recruit not so much.
Ruh roh, Meril Rid Boris CEO video has been deleted from YouTube.
The Future Trade’s web traffic is down, with Alexa citing Turkey as the only notable source of traffic (67%).
Review updated confirming Russian scammers are behind The Future Trade. Also appears to be on the way to collapse.
What russians are behind TFT? Can you please show us proof?
I need to know because looks like they are still in business running strong and everything is running clockwork.
See March update in review introduction.
Ponzi schemes run, until they don’t.
I am agent M of Scam Alert. We had just been asked about this company. After a review, we issued a scam warning.
We had also concluded that the people in the promotional videos are indeed Russians even though they are supposed to be from the UK.
We will be contacting the FCA and the Cyberpol and the EuroPol.
Why people are always in the act of scamming people, I have been scammed before by CHY MALL.
If the same act happened again, I will stop doing online business.
I think I have identified the Boris ceo “Oliver Campbell”: Anton Brovchuk or Антон Бровчук, an actor (surprise, surprise).
Face recognition website Pimeyes.com returned several results to him when I used
-> thefuturetrade.com/home-asset/images/team/OliverCampbell.jpeg
Compare that picture to this one of Anton Brovchuk. Take a special look at the shape of the ear, exactly the same.
-> kinolift.com/en/6175
The mouth angle is a bit weird but it looks to be the same guy.
Cheek bones differ in definition but that hairline “dip” directly above his nose and odd hairstyle is a dead match (obviously Brovchuk has died his hair too).
And “Arundel Holmes”, Chief Marketing Officer -> thefuturetrade.com/home-asset/images/team/ArundelHolmes.jpeg
is probably played by Vasilij Turkin / Василий Туркин
-> freshfilms.su/actors/vasilij-turkin/
Check the particular spot on his skin right / below his mouth.
And yes, agree with the hairstyle resemblance of the actor and “Oliver Campbell”.
Here’s the actor that features as “Candy White” or “Cady White”
-> thefuturetrade.com/home-asset/images/team/CandyWhite.jpeg
Maria Smakhtina / Мария Смахтина
-> castupload.com/actors/maria-smakhtina
Look at the birth marks at the left and right cheek.
All three (and their fellow actors) are playing in this wonderful promo video: youtube.com/watch?v=zVG-dLT5Qv8
Thanks for doing the legwork!
I also realized I hadn’t linked to our updated The Future Trade review. Fixed.
so that they take it into account, they have changed their domain to the initials:
tft-max.org/
Thanks for that. Gotta love: