‘The Greatest Vitamin in the World’ was a MLM company focused around the sales of a multi-vitamin… supposedly the greatest one in the world.

Run by Donald Lapre (photo right), the basic idea was that you paid your $35, recruited other people into the business and then took home commissions ranging from $1000-$5000 with up to 50% in matching bonuses on those you directly recruited.

The Greatest Vitamin in the World collapsed sometime in 2008, and following the collapse Lapre seemingly spiralled into a run of promoting increasingly dodgy looking business opportunities.

By 2011 the law had finally caught up with Lapre and

in June 2011, Lapre was charged with 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and promotional money laundering.

After originally failing to rock up to court, Lapre was subsequently arrested in late June.

Prosecutors handling the case alleged that

investors and customers spent nearly $51.8 million, but received just $6.4 million in commissions.

Between 2004 and 2007, they say, Lapre himself took in at least $2.2 million from the business.

Lapre himself consistently denied the charges and maintained his innocence.

In the face of allegations accusing him of defrauding 220,000 people to the tune of $52 million USD, yesterday Donald Lapre chose to commit suicide. [Continue reading…]

This morning I read Ashok Bahirwani’s 2nd October 2011 AISPA update.

As usual, whilst Bahirwani’s report does contain some useful information and clarification, it’s still riddled with mistruths, distortions and at times completely false allegations.

I’m starting to think dissecting Bahirwani’s updates might make for a regular feature on BehindMLM. [Continue reading…]

Despite vehemently denying the fact that Speak Asia wasn’t just making up its surveys and relying on new membership fees to generate profit, it has come to light that Speak Asia’s surveys were indeed ‘sourced mostly from Wikipedia and other sites on the Internet‘.

A far cry from the corporate clients the company claimed to have and subsequently vowed to protect the names of in the interest of competition.

Although Speak Asia supporters claim investigations by the EOW are going nowhere and have assured themselves of a landslide victory in court over the next few weeks, evidence to the contrary continues to inconveniently surface. [Continue reading…]

A recent trend in MLM opportunities these days is to offer training products (usually ebooks) to help internet marketers market other opportunities.

This works to the advantage of the company offering the training in that if things don’t work, they can always suggest it was the opportunity the marketer was trying to promote that was the problem, rather than a failure of the training tools they are providing.

Putting aside the rather disturbing trend in MLM to pair dubiously legal matrix based compensation plans with rehashed training tools of late, one common part of the equation that’s missing from these opportunities is an online platform to get started.

You can have all the internet marketing training tools in the world, but if you’ve got none of the technical knowhow, not even a helping hand to guide you, then you’re not going to be able to apply any of it.

HostThenProfit seeks to bridge that need by combining web hosting along with a series of internet marketing tools.

Designed to be a complete internet marketing solution for those in MLM, today we’re going to review the HostThenProfit business opportunity. [Continue reading…]

I last reviewed the BizOppers MLM opportunity back in June this year, they were getting ready to wind up their ‘phase 1 beta launch’ and hadn’t really announced what they were doing after that.

Fast forward a few months later and it appears BizOppers are getting ready to launch ‘phase 2’ of their beta launch… whatever that is.

Despite BizOppers having its own compensation plan attached to it, the company has decided to launch a seperate marketing arm they’re calling ZingBizPro.

ZingBizPro has its own website, compensation plan and members, so today we’re going to review the ZingBizPro opportunity itself. [Continue reading…]

A quick visit to the Skinny Body Care website doesn’t reveal all that much.

You’re presented with a bunch of login screens, a recently enrolled list on the side and not much else.

There’s an enticing ‘free tour’ option at the bottom of the page, but without a referring member ID,  you can’t do that either.

Apart from a few policy pages, there’s not really any information on the company itself, its products, the compensation plan, who’s running it or what Skinny Body Care is about.

All this despite an official company launch just a few weeks ago.

With a bit of digging around however it’s not all that hard to get a snapshot of the Skinny Body Care business and that’s exactly what I had to do in order to review the company.

Read on for my review of the Skinny Body Care MLM opportunity. [Continue reading…]

Ironically, X4More state in their terms and conditions that the opportunity may not be used ‘in connection with chain letters, junk email, pyramid schemes, money games‘.

Want to know why? Read on for a review of the X4More business opportunity. [Continue reading…]

Recently MyShoppingGenie announced a new and upcoming product, RocketGenie. Details have been scarce but from the bits and pieces that have been made public, RocketGenie appears to be a video email and conferencing product.

Initially I found this interesting as on the surface MyShoppingGenie appeared to be entering  iWowWe’s territory and going head to head with them.

Interesting enough to take note of… but not enough to investigate and do a write-up till RocketGenie launched.

Or so I thought. [Continue reading…]

TVI Express’ long fought battles with the authorities in Indonesia seems to have come to a head yesterday with the revoking of their ‘business license’.

Effective immediately, TVI Express’ business activities in Indonesia have been frozen. [Continue reading…]

Reports of MyShoppingGenie not paying its members started appearing on my radar shortly after I wrote about PreLaunch Australia and its connections to MyShoppingGenie.

From what I could gather, due to whatever reason, MyShoppingGenie company hadn’t been paying out its leaders for a while now. The worst of these accounts cited six months with others citing a few months or unspecified amount of time.

Hitting the internet in search of answers I wasn’t able to verify anything so I held off on publishing. MyShoppingGenie itself still seems to be operating as normal and company wise certainly aren’t letting slip any news payments being suspended to its members.

All that changed however when I was forwarded some revealing emails, not only confirming that MyShoppingGenie had stopped paying members, but also  citing the reason why. [Continue reading…]