When I first reviewed That Free Thing back in April, it was immediately apparent to me that without an actual product of its own, That Free Thing members were simply selling membership to the service.

As a result of this, it was the business itself being sold and as the That Free Thing compensation plan clearly spelled out, members were directly paid a commission based on how many people they brought into the company.

Sales of membership were directly tied into recruitment so essentially with That Free Thing they were one and the same. The ‘free stuff’ side of That Free Thing didn’t really matter, all you had to focus on was recruitment.

After amassing an alleged 450,000+ members it seems the recruitment side of the business has started to die down and the company has decided to try throw its hat into the coupon and ‘daily deal’ markets.

Today we’re going to take a look at what that means for not only That Free Thing members but also the company at large. [Continue reading…]

Following the collapse of WMI in Norway earlier this year, the sudden and unexplained departure of WMI Pure CEO Deanna Latson in late July, Wealth Masters appeared to dip into a well-observed lull.

One month later in August, WMI founders Kip Herriage and Karl Bessey announced that they were going to issue Wealth Masters shares via an IPO.

At the time I speculated that this was most likely due to a badly needed injection of funds into the company. With WMI’s venture into finance with Opes Partners failing to gain any real traction and the year long delay it’s taken to get WMI Pure off the ground… speculation has fueled rumour that Wealth Masters is having an internal revenue crisis.

Well, as with most things where there’s smoke there’s fire and contrary to Herriage and Bessey’s claims that WMI is ‘debt free’, turns out there’s some truth to this one folks.

In a recent email that came across my desk, an explosive exchange between former WMI Chief Operating Officer Mary Dee and Karl Bessey reveals that there are indeed revenue problems within the company.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg…

Read on for a rare insight into the corporate workings of a MLM company. A glimpse, if you will, at what really goes on behind the fake smiles, extravagant conferences and oft manufactured positivity of Wealth Masters International. [Continue reading…]

If you’ve ever owned a vehicle and gone to an auto shop, you’ve no doubt seen those fuel additives they always stock in the tiny bottles near the registers.

Full of wild claims and promises of slashing your fuel costs, the cordial looking fluid in the bottles are all to easy to pass over as mere snake oil.

Really, I’m going to experience huge savings and increased engine life just by adding something to my petrol tank?

One such fuel additive company however not only promises all this and more, but they also  claim to have documented and certified evidence of it all.

With XFT fuel additive as their flagship product, today we’re going to review the SynTek Global business opportunity. [Continue reading…]

Speak Asia’s COO, Tarak Bajpai was put in the awkward position of having to be the public face of Speak Asia after he was arrested back in late July.

With Speak Asia’s Gobal CEO, Harendar Kaur and its Indian CEO, Manoj Kumar both hiding overseas from Indian authorities, Bajpai at first played the hero role (who could forget the solid reasoning of ‘we are bound to win and we’ll definitely win’), but soon himself hid from the authorities in a hospital.

Heralded as the saviour of Speak Asia, it seemed strange that Bajpai all of a sudden needed medical treatment and subsequent hospital care.

Had Bajpai not have been arrested, how then with the hospital care he allegedly needed was he to lead Speak Asia to victory as its members envisioned?

For months now Bajpai had remained in Jupiter Hospital in Mumbai under doctor’s orders. Still wanted for questioning, it appears Speak Asia’s lawyers had decided feigning medical emergency and then using it to avoid questions was the best course of action to keep Bajpai out of reach of the Indian authorities.

Likewise they pulled a similar stunt after website operator Rajiv Mehrotra was arrested too.

For now, it seems anyone with valuable information that might help either the EOW or CID with their criminal investigations is either shipped off to Dubai, or claims they have some sort of medical emergency that needs to be attended to, whilst subsequently hiding out from the authorities in hospital recovery rooms.

Unfortunately for Speak Asia, all procedures have a recovery time and for Tarak Bajpai, his was up. [Continue reading…]

It’s no secret that the travel niche in MLM and home based businesses has exploded in the past couple of years, although arguably it’s been taken over by irrelevant online training product based opportunities.

Still, out of the many travel based companies out there that launched over the past few years, some are still kicking around as long as there are new members to feed into the compensation plans.

Typically, these business models revolve around matrix systems that require a constant influx of new members to keep paying commissions out. Another common but  less used model is the binary pairing model which pays out a commission based on the amount of new pairs of new members bring into the business daily.

Not content with just following one of these models, iCitiLife have gone for gold and decided to use both.

Read on for a full review of the iCitiLife business opportunity. [Continue reading…]

LiveSmart 360 was the brainchild of Mark McCool when after a decade of running his previou company, CyberWize, product orders ground to a painful halt;

In 2008 270 Cyberwize product orders were placed. In 2009 this number dropped to 26 and in 2010 the total orders placed appears to be just 3.

Facing the inevitable collapse of Cyberwize, McCool pulled the pin on the company and deployed a flashy pre-launch marketing campaign (‘LockYourSpot’).

Attracting thousands to the pre-launch,  McCool reinvented Cyberwize as LiveSmart 360 with the company officially launching on May 15th of last year.

Troubles began to plague the company with reports of distributor payouts being delayed and in some cases not paid out at all.

Shortly after LiveSmart 360’s launch, Mark McCool wrote a blog post explaining that

During our initial pre-launch stage, some of our computer servers and software were provided by a third-party company. This impacted our ability to perform important business functions properly and in a timely manner.

Just weeks after that announcement, one of LiveSmart 360’s frontline distributors (and arguably the company’s second most well-known public face after Mike Potillo) Donna Valdes, took home her first $57,500 commission check and then quit.

LiveSmart 360 still managed to persist throughout the next few months, but it was hard to ignore that most of the momentum driving the LockYourSpot prelaunch campaign had been all but lost.

This seemed to climax when in June of this year the public face and President of Business Development for LiveSmart 360, Mike Potillo quit.

Following Potillo’s departure, Mark McCool put together a training call and personally pleaded with what was left of his memberbase to stick with the company.

On the same call, McCool announced a financial arrangement with new investor and business partner, Chuck Hallberg. Hallberg was to bankroll LiveSmart’s ‘international expansion’ and appeared to be throwing McCool a financial lifeline.

Four months later, the fruits of Hallberg’s cash injection appear to be surfacing and McCool has reverted back to trying to capture some of the hype excitement LiveSmart 360 experienced during its prelaunch.

With the introduction of ‘Manna 360’, LiveSmart 360 appears set to ride the prelaunch waves yet again. [Continue reading…]

As many of you who have been following the Speak Asia drama in India know, yesterday was the 17th of October Supreme Court hearing of a PIL filed by a group of panelists.

Among those who had to respond were Speak Asia themselves and the RBI.

Whilst the RBI didn’t show up, Speak Asia did… and according to their official press release, used their legal counsel to wholeheartedly mislead and lie to the Supreme Court of India.

Trumpeted as a victory, much has been made over Justice Dalveer Bhandari’s negative remarks against the RBI when he learnt they were a no-show.

Indeed Speak Asia’s own October 18th official press release relishes the moment;

The Honourable Justice Dalveer Bhandari of the Supreme Court strongly reprimanded the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank of India, for not having filled the reply affidavit, to the writ petition filed by the panellists of Speak Asia.

Why the RBI failed to make an appearance, I have no idea. But understandably the judge was flustered.

And why shouldn’t he have been?

The complete and utter bullshit Speak Asia fed the Supreme Court was nothing short of fabricated lies.

On October 17th in the Supreme Court, the highest court of India, Senior Counsel for Speak Asia, Gopal Subramaniam, stood up and committed perjury. [Continue reading…]

Way back in November 2010, Wealth Masters International announced that they were going to launch two separate nutrition and finance subsidies.

Named Opes Partners (finance) and PURE (nutrition), both were set to launch in 2011 in January and ‘the first quarter‘ respectively.

Whilst Opes Partners launched (only to disappear into complete obscurity for much of 2011, WMI’s Pure has been plagued with delays and setbacks. [Continue reading…]

The world over, the US is known as being the penultimate litigious society. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous or insignificant you think your claim is, if you can find a lawyer you have yourself a lawsuit.

Without a lawyer though, you’re not getting anywhere.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, with people all over the country running around filing lawsuits like they’re candy – it’s not all that uncommon these days to find yourself, or your business on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

Frivolous or not, you’re still going to need representation or at the very least, some well-informed (and often costly enough on its own) legal advice.

Aiming to provide Americans with legal advice and make some money on the side with a MLM compensation plan is MLM company PrePaid Legal.

Read on for a full review of the PrePaid Legal business opportunity. [Continue reading…]

Something about Manoj Kumar’s video appearances have always struck me as odd. Simply put, he just doesn’t have any natural on-screen charisma and always comes off as awkwardly acting the part, rather than speaking candidly.

These characteristics were quite obvious in Kumar’s last video appearance for Speak Asia, dated early August.

Now, Kumar’s lack of charisma and awkardness is once again on full display in what is an obviously staged video that has surfaced on the internet in the last 24 hours.

Speaking from what appears to the World Economic Forum recently held in Abu Dhabi, Manoj Kumar apparently to sit down with complete strangers and have a brief chat about some upcoming announcements and news regarding Speak Asia. [Continue reading…]