The big news on the 30th was the granting of a preliminary injunction against TelexFree top pimps Santiago De La Rosa and Randy Crosby.

In addition to this order, which was handed down in Massachusetts, several other filings were made in the Nevada bankruptcy court.

As at the 30th of April 2014, here’s where we’re at. [Continue reading…]

A sign of what’s to come on May 2nd?

Following a hearing on April 25th and despite responses being filed in protest by both Randy Crosby and Santiago De La Rosa, on the 30th of April the Massachusetts District Court granted a preliminary injunction against the two.

Relying on TelexFree’s business model and evidence collected from YouTube and the defendants personal efforts to promote TelexFree, the SEC successfully convinced a Judge that both Santiago and De La Rosa were

• directly or indirectly engaged in violations alleged in the complaint (securities fraud)
• likely to repeat said violations
• likely to dissipate and conceal assets which could be subject to an order of disgorgement or an order to pay a civil monetary penalty in this action

As such, the granting of a preliminary injunction against the duo was “in the public interest” and granted. [Continue reading…]

Big Idea Mastermind is the marketing system developed for and used by Vick Strizheus’ Empower Network downline.

Launched in 2012, today Big Idea Mastermind (BIM), is “the number one team in Empower Network”.

After a week of emails announcing what was touted as “the most important webinar that” Strizheus has “ever hosted”, things kicked off last night with a brief refresher on Big Idea Mastermind’s history, and then things began to get interesting.

[15:06] This is not 100% official yet… and I know some people are gunna get pissed, some people are gunna be like “what’s going on?”, some people are gunna go gossip… there is a good chance that I might need to exit (the) network marketing industry.

Vick Strizheus is quitting MLM.

Why? [Continue reading…]

As we barrel towards the May 2nd showdown in the Nevada bankruptcy court, two additional filings were made on Monday the 29th.

Also of note was a new cease and desist issued in the US state of Montana. [Continue reading…]

Global Unity is probably the most direct successor of the WCM777 Ponzi scheme. When the regulatory heat got too much for founder Phil Ming Xu, he put out a message saying he’d sold the business to some new owners, and that he hoped they could turn it legit.

Global Unity was far from legit though, with the owners instead opting to try to reload WCM777’s business model. Global Unity affiliates even professed the company to be safe from the SEC, largely due to the fact that it was based offshore in Hong Kong:

The team now manages the company from Hong Kong is doing so with much more professionalism than the previous team.

Total trust in the new policy according to which there has been. -Global Unity will not close, will continue its activity and will continue to pay according to the payment Plan.

SEC is only for USA. As already known the company not operating currently in USA. The rest of the world continues its activity.

That late March and after the announcement things went quiet. A week or so into April and Global Unity’s website went down, showing an “under construction” message.

Now, it seems the owners are trying to flog the same business under yet another name. [Continue reading…]

Karatbars International launched in 2011 and claim to be based out of Stuttgart, Germany.

The company’s website domain registration however paints a different picture, with “karatbars.com” being registered to a “Harald Seiz” of “Karat Swiss AG”, operating out of Glarus in Switzerland. Adding to the confusion is a German telephone number provided on the domain registration.

Harald Seiz (right) is credited with being the “found and owner” of Karatbars International on their website. Seiz’s corporate biography reads:

Since the early ’80s, Harald Seiz is self-sufficient in the financial industry. After training in insurance and real estate industry, he worked as an independent financial services provider with a number of companies, where he was very successful. During the mid-90s he reached with a company about 60 million in sales.

(At the) end of 2008, he joined a company into a precious metals business. In just seven months Harald Seiz was the no. 1 for the company. However, his visions were larger than those of the company, which was only active in Germany.

Gold in small units available for everyone – and that worldwide – was a fantastic idea to offer people more certainty. So Harald Seiz founded in 2011 Karatbars International GmbH.

I believe the company Seiz joined in 2008 is KB Gold, although I wasn’t able to find anything specific on Seiz’s MLM past.

From what I’ve been able to put together, there’s been much confusion between KB Gold and Karatbars International, primarily due to both being based out of Germany and both having similar abbreviated names.

One regulatory action that cannot be confused however was the specific warning issued by Canada’s Autorité des marchés financiers in Canada. Issued to potential investors as part of “fraud prevention month”, the AMF wrote:

(Karatbars International’s) investment products are primarily promoted through conferences, the Internet and social media.

With the company’s “Affiliates” program, investors can make Internet-based purchases through Karatbars plans and they are encouraged to recruit two other Affiliates. These Affiliates are in turn encouraged to recruit two other Affiliates each, and so on.

Affiliates are lured by the possibility of earning large payouts, in particular through a percentage of amounts collected from the Karatbars plans and gold products purchased by referrals.

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

Click Prime 8 launched in early 2014 and operate in the advertising MLM niche.

A Click Prime 8 website domain (“clickprime8team.com”) was registered on the 13th of February and lists an “Inovative Group”, operating out of the US state of Massachusetts as the owner.

The email address used to register the domain is also the same that appears on an abandoned trademark application dating back to 2006:

The trademark was a “service mark” for the “Abroad World Telecom Corporation”, who described themselves on the application as being

Retail stores featuring telecommunication products; Wholesale stores featuring telecommunication products.

Abroad World Telecom Corporation’s trademark lasted a year, being classified as abandoned in 2007 after the owner could not be contacted.

I couldn’t find any specific information revealing the owner(s) of Abroad World Telecom, so I’m not sure who was behind it.

Update 9th May 2014 – Upset at being called out in the comments of this review as the owner of the above email address, Marcio Alves has had his lawyers write in.

The domain “clickprime8team.com” is not the official Click Prime 8 website, but rather that of an affiliate (Marcio Alves). Alves’ lawyers advise:

(Alves) has received inquiries about the post that are negative, and newspapers are threatening to post articles linking Mr. Alves (sic) current businesses with Click Prime 8.

Mr. Alves was registered only as an affiliate of Click Prime 8, and has since cancelled his subscription and affiliation with the company.

Indeed, if one visits the domain “clickprime8team.com” today, the website is down. Alves’ lawyers failed to mention who the owners of ClickPrime8 team are, or why Alves suddenly abandoned ship (regulatory heat?). /end update

On the Click Prime 8 website, Lui Shau Shing is identified as the company’s CEO.

On his Click Prime 8 corporate bio, Shau Shing (right) is described as being

a successful investor, investment specialist with low cost.

He obtained 70% of its equity only seeking partnerships with great offers and fascinating projects. He has interests in over eight companies among them an ad that merged with three other companies to launch the project, he is always in touch with their employees and promotes constant motivational speaking and corporate training.

Aims by 2015 to have the largest advertising company in the world. Graduated in Economics, Master in Marketing Management is a successful businessman who began his career at 19 years, where he was already helping his father with the family business.

Why Shau Shing himself appears to be currently for sale is not clarified.

Outside of Click Prime 8, I was unable to find any further links between Shau Shing and the MLM industry, indicating that Click Prime 8 is likely to be his first MLM venture. There was also no information tying Shau Shing to Abroad World Telecom, so that appears to be a dead-end too.

A quick search on YouTube revealed that, despite the Massachusetts address provided, Click Prime 8 appears to be operating out of China (Hong Kong?).

As per the screenshot above, South American affiliates film an office space purportedly in China, claiming it is the office of Click Prime 8. The basis for this claim appears to be one room in the office having a Click Prime 8 branded canvas stuck up on the wall (pictured above).

No mention of a Chinese office or address appears on the Click Prime 8 website. From the video above it appears Shau Shing is running things from China, with the question of who or what is at the four US office addresses (three in Massachusetts, one in Florida), as provided on the Click Prime 8 website, going unanswered.

Read on for a full review of the Click Prime 8 MLM business opportunity. [Continue reading…]

Last month saw the publication of a BehindMLM review on startup MLM opportunity ViziNova.

Launched by WCM777 Ponzi kingpin Renato Rodrigues and accepting $1000 to $3000 investments from affiliates on the promise of a 150-166% ROI, we called out ViziNova for what it is: a WCM777 reload Ponzi scheme.

Evidently not to happy with our review, ViziNova approached Obtainer Online to write a fluff-piece designed to disassociate themselves from WCM777 and founder Phil Ming Xu:

ViziNova – Suspected, Condemned in advance and Denounced

It’s sad but, unfortunately, true that on the internet many don’t bother to look behind the scenes before they start trumpeting out alleged “facts”.

Often fundamental research falls by the wayside because today the motto is: The quicker something is published, the better. However, this attitude contains dangers and can cause considerable harm.

In the digital age information and statements are like toothpaste: Once they’re out, you can’t get them back into the tube. How true this saying is something that a young company is currently experiencing at first hand.

Hardly had it been announced that ViziNova had been founded by Renato Rodriguez and Gutemberg dos Santos, than a well-known scam website immediately reported without doing any precise research of its own that ViziNova was the successor of WCM777 and that Dr. Phil Ming Xu was behind the foundation of the company.

Taking care to do proper research and to listen to all sides, as in the case for respectable journalism, seems to be superfluous for many. Instead of reporting objectively, the aim is to trumpet out their own opinions which lack any substance.

So important was the vindication of ViziNova to Obtainer Online, that they

got the magazine’s founder Michael Sander involved in the discussions, because it was necessary to have somebody with sound knowledge and experience in global MLM in order to do everything right from the very outset.

So how does someone with “sound knowledge and experience in global MLM” separate a Ponzi scheme’s top promoters from the company itself?

The fact that Renato Rodriguez and Gutemberg dos Santos were among the top leaders at WCM777 isn’t in dispute. Nor is the fact that both of them earned millions. But the allegation that ViziNova is a new edition of WCM777 is quite simply false.

The success of the two of them at WCM777 wasn’t a matter of chance. It’s just a pity that they get lumped together with Dr. Phil Ming Xu.

Phil Ming Xu was the owner of WCM777. What a shame his top promoters, who admittedly made millions fleecing those below them in the scheme, are “lumped together” with him as Ponzi scamsters. What an outrage!

Obtainer’s article reads like any other fluff-piece, with Sander doing his best to wash the WCM777 Ponzi stink away with disingenous parallels between ViziNova and the likes of Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Neither of which accept money from affiliates on the promise of a >100% ROI.

Sander ultimately concludes

ViziNova has a business concept that is coherent, transparent and profitable.

ViziNova isn’t a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid system because from the very outset Renato Rodriguez and Gutemberg dos Santos are demonstrating transparency.

At this point you’re probably wondering why Obtainer and Sander have gone to such lengths to distance ViziNova from WCM777. I mean, it’s almost like Obtainer and Sander themselves have a personal stake in the company…

ViziNova has engaged OBTAINER’s founder Michael Sander, who as chief consultant has developed the company structure and the set-ups.

But that of course is only scratching the surface. [Continue reading…]

Remember Wazzub?

Yeah, I don’t much either.

Wazzub launched all the way back in 2011 and after an admittedly successful viral campaign, seemingly went nowhere.

The problem of course was that Wazzub sought to be yet another social portal built around search, of which there are already dozens upon dozens (and who knows how many hundreds of failures).

Wazzub’s business model relied on affiliate agreements and advertising to generate revenue, which didn’t really work out (it never does in MLM). Last June there was talk of a Wazzub app being released, but it appears to be little more than a mobile version of what’s already on Wazzub’s “PerfectInternet” webpage.

Wazzub claim over 540,000 people “have joined” PerfectApp, but what that actually means is unclear (downloads, active users, visitors to the website? etc.).

The page itself (perfectapp.perfectinter.net) reveals little to no information about the app itself.

Now it seems the long drawn-out process of whoever is behind Wazzub finally running out money might be at an end. The company recently put out a press-release announcing the use of crowd-sourcing to fund its latest venture. [Continue reading…]

The 25th saw the hearing in Massachusetts for a preliminary injunction against TelexFree Faith Sloan, Santiago De La Rosa, Randy Crosby, Sann Rodrigues and Steve Labriola. Further objections and notices were also filed in the Nevada Chapter 11 bankruptcy case too.

As of April 25th, here’s where we’re at. [Continue reading…]