The Austrian Supreme Court has ruled that Lyoness’ affiliate contract and compensation plan are illegal.

The decision follows legal action taken by the Austrian Association for Consumer Information (VKI).

In Austria’s lower courts, VKI argued

47 contractual clauses that were part of Lyconet agreements and so-called Lyconet compensation plans … (lacked) transparent regulations and … clarity.

VKI’s lawsuit was decided in its favor. The Supreme Court’s ruling reaffirms earlier rulings and is final. [Continue reading…]

Some top earners at least pretend to be remorseful about the millions they stole through OneCoin.

Then there’s Kari Wahlroos, who in an upcoming documentary tells OneCoin victims to “kiss my ass”.

Wahlroos, a Finnish national who describes himself as “one of the grandmaster orchestrators” of OneCoin, is set to feature in “OneCoin – The inside man”. [Continue reading…]

The EchoOne Ponzi scheme has collapsed.

EchoOne initiated its exit-scam on Saturday, December 23rd. The ruse of choice was a “transition to litecoin”. [Continue reading…]

The LGreen Ponzi scheme has collapsed.

Problems began roughly five weeks ago with withdrawals delays. These culminated in LGreen’s website being pulled offline over the weekend. [Continue reading…]

JUFB fails to provide ownership or executive information on its website.

JUFB’s website domain (“jufb.top”), was first registered in July 2006.

The private registration was last updated on October 26th, 2023 through a Chinese registrar. Note that this is around the time the current owners took possession of the domain.

If we click through to JUFB’s official support link, we find Chinese in the source-code:

Together with the Chinese registrar, whoever is running JUFB appears to have ties to China.

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. [Continue reading…]

Alyx Union fails to provide ownership or executive information on its website.

Alyx Union’s website domain (“alyxunion.com”), was privately registered on October 30th, 2023.

Web access to Alyx Union’s root domain is disabled. Instead the MLM opportunity is hosted on a “dapp” subdomain.

At time of publication this is nothing more than an affiliate sign up page:

Despite only existing for a few months, Alyx Union held a staged “year end celebration event” in December.

The event was held in Chinese at the Regal Airport Hotel in Hong Kong…

…and featured a bunch of token white guys playing fictional executives.

The ringleader of the bunch is CEO “Ryan Stasser”, played by this guy:

Naturally Strasser doesn’t exist outside of Alyx Union marketing. This includes a repurposed Twitter profile, full of retweet spam backdated to 2021.

And a fake LinkedIn profile:

I wasn’t able to pin down a name but did tie whoever is playing Strasser to China.

What you’re looking at there is a promo photo on A Heart For China’s website.

A Heart For China is a Shenzen based charity run by Belgian national Ronny Verdoodt. The guy playing Ryan Strasser appears to have volunteered at A Heart for China circa 2017.

The Chinese scammers actually running Alyx Union are likely based out of Hong Kong or Singapore.

Dubai, the MLM crime capital of the world, is another possibility.

BehindMLM’s guidelines for Dubai are:

1. If someone lives in Dubai and approaches you about an MLM opportunity, they’re trying to scam you.
2. If an MLM company is based out of or represents it has ties to Dubai, it’s a scam.

If you want to know specifically how this applies to Alyx Union, read on for a full review. [Continue reading…]

Life Miner has four known website domains:

• lifeminer.tech (main website), privately registered March 5th, 2023
• lifeminer.io (affiliate backoffice), privately registered September 19th, 2023
• lifeminer.app (affiliate backoffice), privately registered September 19th, 2023
• mpytoken.app (currently only used for website asset CDN), privately registered April 14th, 2023

On its main website and YouTube channel, Life Miner presents “Jairo Bonicontro” is its CEO.

Bonicontro is a prime Boris CEO candidate but does appear to be using his real name.

Bonicontro appears to be based out of Paraguay. This fits with Life Miner representing it is based out of Paraguay.

Other than registration of a shell company and hiring locals to appear in marketing videos, Life Miner doesn’t appear to have any actual ties to Paraguay.

The Wayback Machine cached Life Miner’s website in mid 2023. At the time the site was presented in Portuguese. There are also Portuguese words in Life Miner’s website source-code.

This is odd because the two most common languages in Paraguay are Spanish and Guarani.

Note that there was no mention of Bonicontro on Life Miner’s website at this time. He appears to have been added sometime thereafter.

Something else odd is two of Life Miner’s websites being registered through a Spanish registrar. While we can’t see full registration details, one domain country is set to CN (China) and the other BR (Brazil).

This could just be bogus registration data but, within the context of everything else, is worth noting.

Finally we have SimilarWeb traffic analysis for each of Life Miner’s websites:

• lifeminer.tech – 31% from Italy, 31% from Poland, 20% from Brazil and 11% from Bangladesh
• lifeminer.io – 39% from the Dominican Republic, 19% from the UK, 13% from the US, 9% from the Italy and 9% from Poland
• lifeminer.app – 45% from Italy, 44% from Poland and 11% from Brazil
• mpytoken.app – not enough traffic to measure

I’m tempted to say Life Miner is being run by Brazilian scammers but can’t say for sure.

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. [Continue reading…]

Federal Stock Bond has received a pyramid fraud warning from Russia.

As per the Central Bank of Russia’s January 12th warning, Federal Stock Bond exhibits “signs of a financial pyramid”. [Continue reading…]

Three scammers behind the 8 Figure Dream Lifestyle pyramid scheme have been criminally charged.

• Alex Dee, aka Alex Dowlatshahi, was arrested in Washington on January 10th, 2024
• Brian Kaplan was arrested in Colorado on October 2nd, 2023
• Jerrold Maurer, aka Jerry Maurer, was arrested at an unknown date

[Continue reading…]

Following executed search warrants on January 11th, Indian authorities have frozen Rs. 6.4 million (~$77,000 USD).

In a January 12th press-release, the Enforcement Directorate revealed the funds were tied to iX Global and TP Global FX. [Continue reading…]