There’s a lot of outrageous claims made in the MLM industry. Some of them are deceptive, some of them are disheartening, some of them are outright lies and some of them… well, some of them are just comical.

I was browsing through some information about TVI Express the other day when I couldn’t help but have a laugh at TVI Express member Reut Marks claims about the company. [Continue reading…]

Wealth Masters International (WMI) have thus far existed with the sole purpose of providing ‘access to world-class education, tools, experts, experiences and opportunities that empower individuals to create success on their own terms and achieve true freedom in all areas of their lives‘.

Up until now however, this has been achieved through education via self help courses and conferences. If one wished to put into practice the lessons they’d learnt through the various WMI programs, they had to either branch out into one of the affiliate programs WMI approved to advertise at one of their events, or apply what they’d learnt to market the WMI business opportunity itself to other people.

All this is about to change with the announcement that WMI are now planning to branch out into the nutrition, insurance and finance industries. [Continue reading…]

GiveOpp was launched on the 4th of July this year and is the brainchild of a series of ex-Liberty League and Polaris Media Group (now known as Polaris Global) members.

There’s CEO Mark Cosby and marketing guy Don Glanville, both of whom were prominent members of Liberty League back in its hey day.

Also it’s hard to go past John and Shannon Lavenia, EMC members of Polaris Media Group who left the company in late 2009. With them they brought several members from Polaris to bolster up GiveOpp’s prelaunch numbers.

With most of the founding members of GiveOpp coming from a background in personal development and companies that market personal development cds, dvds and workbooks, GiveOpp’s new product line shouldn’t really come as a surprise. But it does still feel heavily cliched.

Introducing ‘Solution2011 – Your plan for prosperous living’, GiveOpp’s new flagship product that consists of… you guessed it, cds, a dvd and a workbook. [Continue reading…]

As a new distributor of Wealth Masters International, or any MLM company for that matter, there’s a whole bunch of material you need to familiarize yourself with.

Amongst the profit potentials, marketing materials, the product itself, backoffice, compensation plan and beginning to build your business, it’s easy to over look the policies and procedures of the opportunity you’re joining. Infact more often than not you’ve probably never even read them, rather they were an afterthought or something you hastily agreed to when completing the enrolment process.

In this article I wanted to focus on Wealth Masters International’s ‘Statement of Policies and Procedures’. It’s quite a lengthy document and one that I believe all new members should read in detail. Not just for WMI but for any opportunity you’re considering.

The WMI policies and procedures are well written and quite easy to get your head around so there’s really no excuse not to read them. And after going over them myself, here’s 5 standout policies I believe are the most important points to consider when considering joining WMI. [Continue reading…]

A post from Project GiveOpp popped up on my radar recently and I was a bit surprised it’d already racked up 24 comments within 24 hours of being published.

Curious I took a few of the comments and punched them into Google. Not surprisingly it turned out the content had been stolen from another website with absolutely no attribution whatsoever. [Continue reading…]

Earlier this year, Wealth Masters International opened up it’s first satellite office in Oslo Norway.

With an estimated 1000+ strong local member base, things seemed to be going quite well for WMI in Norway.

As 2010 progressed however things started to take a bit of a downturn and from about April the Norwegian regulators began to get involved.

Recently, BehindMLM reader ‘M_Norway’ provided some very interesting information regarding Wealth Masters International’s Norwegian activities.

They detail a company in boom in early 2010 and subsequently document a gradual decline into regulatory oblivion.

Unfortunately the information provided is universally in Norwegian and from my own poking around, there seems to be very little information in English regarding WMI’s Norwegian dramas.

Today I present to you the story so far in English. [Continue reading…]

Recently I’ve started writing about Wealth Masters International and one thing I’ve noticed in particular about this MLM company is that they’ve got an exhaustive list of policies members must adhere to.

One particular list is their Advertising policies which outlines 9 extensive rules WMI members must comply with when promoting their business.

In designing their advertising policies, Wealth Masters International admits that it has no confidence in its own members advertising ability.

WMI requires that all members ‘must use the sales aids and support materials produced by WMI‘ because if WMI members were allowed to come up with their own advertising, ‘the likelihood that they would unintentionally violate any number of statutes or regulations affecting a WMI business is almost certain.‘

In other words, those looking to join WMI would inevitably wind up breaking the law if they were given permission to advertise freely.

It’s not usually a good sign when a company admits the type of people it’s looking to recruit are almost certainly going to break the law if allowed to think for themselves.

Infact, as far as marketing goes, WMI practically prohibits its members from any type of independent thinking. WMI members

must not produce their own literature, advertisements, sales aids and promotional materials, or Internet web pages.

This from a company that claims to ‘empower individuals to create success on their own terms and achieve true freedom in all areas of their lives.’

Yes, you can have your empowerment and true freedom… just not when it comes to advertising our company.

Today I thought I’d provide a further  analysis of the 9 policies WMI use to regulate company advertising and investigate how strictly the company is enforcing them.

With such strong claims and clauses laid out in the opening paragraphs of the advertising policies, one would think the adherence and compliance with them would be a good indication of how WMI is run as a greater company.

Let’s find out. [Continue reading…]

Following the Bank Of Namibia’s claims that TVI Express is an illegal pyramid scheme, members of TVI Express lawyered up and rolled out threats of a class action lawsuit unless the bank met their demands.

Through their lawyers, Metcalfe Attorneys, members of TVI Express demanded that the bank meet with them and retract their public warning.

In response to these demands, the Bank of Namibia again put out another public warning reminding Namibians of the possible N$1,000,000 ($145,000 AUD) fine or 10 year imprisonment penalty for promoting TVI Express.

Following this second public warning, members of TVI Express have since come out with what they believe is a rock solid defense. Instead of addressing the TVI Express business model, explaining or analysing it – TVI express members are claiming the bank of Namibia has no ‘jurisdiction over them‘.

Why?

Because apparently all members of TVI Express operate as sole traders. [Continue reading…]

Late last week the Bank of Namibia warned Namibians against participating in TVI Express. The bank claimed that TVI Express was nothing more then a pyramid scheme and stated that

in the whole, selling of purported products or services is a small component of the business models in the scheme and therefore designed to defraud members of the public.

The business operations of the scheme places substantial emphasis on recruitment of participants. In this respect, the scheme offers lucrative incentives to the participants, calculated primarily on the basis of the number of participants or members they recruited into the scheme.

Obviously not happy about the public warning, TVI Express today unleashed it’s lawyers upon the Bank of Namibia in the form of a strongly worded letter.

The gist of it?

‘Meet up with us, retract your ridiculous accusations or we’re coming after you with a class action law suit’. [Continue reading…]

Over the past year or so I’ve written a number of articles on Liberty League International, then Polaris Media Group, then Polaris Global Marketing and now simply Polaris Global.

Over the course of these articles many people have been written about and discussed, all within the context of the MLM industry of course. Some of the people I’ve written about are still with Polaris Global and some have moved on.

One of the people written about was Cassandra Rigbye and she’s not too happy about being mentioned in an article. Yesterday afternoon I received the following email; [Continue reading…]