the-viral-franchise-logoThe Viral Franchise launched in 2013 and credits Frederick Spears as the company owner.

Spears runs The Viral Franchise as part of his other company, “I Wanna Be Rich”. The domain registration for I Wanna Be Rich lists Spears as the owner. An address in Ontario Canada is also provided.

I wasn’t able to peg any other opportunities to Spears or I Wanna Be Rich, so The Viral Franchise appears to be the first opportunity Spears has launched under the brand.

Read on for a full review of The Viral Franchise MLM business opportunity.

The Viral Franchise Product Line

The Viral Franchise has no retailable products or services. Affiliates join the company for $7 and are then only able to market membership to the company itself.

An advertising service is made available to affiliates who continue to pay their monthly participation fee.

The Viral Franchise Compensation Plan

The Viral Franchise compensation plan revolves around affiliates spending $7 to sign up.

Upon signing up, an affiliate is given a replicated webpage on The Viral Franchise domain. This web page has placement for four names, with an affiliate’s own name placed at the top of the list.

The position below them is filled by the affiliate who recruited them, the third is the affiliate who recruited that affiliate and the fourth the affiliate who recruited the third affiliate.

If the affiliate wants to get paid, they must then go out and recruit new affiliates.

Each affiliate recruited is given their own replicated webpage with their own list. The affiliate who recruited them is placed in the second position on these lists and the affiliate who was just recruited is placed at the top of the list.

If these recruited affiliates recruit new affiliates they receive replicated webpages with the original recruiting affiliate placed in the third position of their lists.

One more level of recruitment sees the original recruited affiliate placed in the fourth level of these lists.

The above mechanics are true of any new The Viral Franchise Affiliate. In a nutshell an affiliate is paid down three levels of recruitment.

How much they are paid each month is unclear (whether or not an affiliates $7 monthly fee is split equally between the four positions on the list is not clear).

The Viral Franchise affiliates also seem to be able to purchase something called “sales cuts” ($10 to $224). These “cuts” appear to be a way for affiliates to purchase shares in company breakage (commissions paid to redundant positions because someone quit and/or stopped paying their monthly participation fee).

When a Viral Franchise is sold from an established franchise the payments go to the appropriate upline BUT if it’s an un-established franchise those payments go to the sales cut owners.

How breakage funds are paid into the six levels of sales cuts buy-ins isn’t clarified, ditto how affiliates are paid through them.

Joining The Viral Franchise

Affiliate membership to the Viral Franchise is $7 a month.

Participation in The Viral Franchise’s Sales Cuts will cost an additional $10 to $224.

Conclusion

With nothing being sold to or bought by retail customers and affiliates paying their membership fees to those who recruited them (and their uplines), The Viral Franchise operates as a cash gifting scheme.

Think of it as the chain letters of old that used to get mailed around, only this one is managed via the internet.

Back in the day participants would receive a letter in the mail with a list of names. They sent money to a name or names on the list and then sent out a new list with their name added to the bottom of the list.

In The Viral Franchise affiliates join and receive a virtual list. They market this list to potential participants and if they join, they then send payments to people on the list and in return receive their own list.

An advertising platform is bundled with affiliate participation but it is the gifting scheme itself that is being marketed here.

The Sales Cuts component of the compensation plan appears to add a layer of unregistered securities to the scheme too.

Affiliates buy positions for between $10 to $224 on the expectation of ultimately receiving a >100% ROI, paid out of breakage commission funded by the sale of new gifting participant fees.

Ultimately cash gifting schemes follow a similar fate to that of their pyramid scheme cousins.

Once recruitment of new participants slows down, those at the bottom will stop paying their monthly $7 participation fee.

When this happens those above them will stop receiving monthly gifting payments and they too will stop paying their monthly $7 fee. Those above them then find themselves not getting paid.

Over time this trickles up the company-wide lineage until the scheme suffers an irreversible collapse.

Instead of referring to The Viral Franchise’s commissions as what they are, cash gifting payments, Frederick Spears instead refers to them as “micro transactions”.

Spears runs the payment processor IWBR Financial, which he describes as

a loadable credit payment system where users add money/credits to their accounts in order to make purchases online to our select network of approved websites and businesses.

When a user makes a purchase using our system it moves credits from their account to the recipients account, subscription payments will be automatically deducted and transferred every 30 days.

We do not take any banking information (for your safety) so in order to load your account you would need to use an external payment processor, paypal, payza, ego pay, STP, ect. (sic)

We specialize in processing micro transactions (under $5) in bulk, so if you are receiving hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of these transactions every month it adds up to a ton of cash that you are now able to keep.

Anonymous banking? Liberty Reserve ran something similar for a few years until it was shutdown in 2013. It’s owner and management are now facing jail time on money laundering charges.

Spears charges his affiliates a 5% fee on withdrawals, which is in addition to any gifts he makes via participation in The Viral Franchise’s gifting scheme (typically an owner will preload such a scheme with multiple positions at the top).