Due to the lack of information that usually surrounds regulatory investigations in the US, this one’s going to be brief.

Last we checked in with Herbalife’s regulatory woes, the company acknowledged that they were under an FTC civil investigation.

Now comes the news that the FBI and Department of Justice are also involved… [Continue reading…]

When Zeek Rewards burst onto the scene and began promising affiliates a 125% ROI over 90 days, people were naturally suspicious of where the money was coming from.

Despite appearing to already have covered this base with the attached Zeekler penny auction, Paul Burks would infamously go on to insist that how Zeek Rewards generated 125% for every dollar invested with it was a “proprietary information”.

Of course this later revealed to be complete baloney by the SEC who, after shutting down the $600M+ Ponzi scheme, observed:

Approximately 98% of ZeekRewards’ total revenues, and correspondingly the purported share of “net profits” paid to current investors, are comprised of funds received from new investors.

Burks is solely responsible for determining the amount of “net profits” to share in the Retail Profit Pool.

Burks unilaterally and arbitrarily determines the daily dividend rate so that it averages approximately 1.5% per day, giving investors the false impression that the business is profitable.

Zeek Rewards’ “proprietary information”?

Mastermind Paul Burks sat in his office each day and told the system to use new affiliate money to pay out existing investors.

Now, almost two years later, another scheme that promises a >100% 90 day ROI is also claiming the source of their ROI funds is “proprietary”. [Continue reading…]

Origin Unite launched around late 2011 early 2012 and on their website name a “Fred P. Stege” as the company’s CEO.

The Origin Unite website domain (“originunite.com”) lists a Mark Moller-Bengtsson as the domain owner, with a supplied address in Tripiotus, Cyprus. No corporate address is provided on the Origin Unite website, so presumably Cyprus is where the business is located out of.

Bengtsson’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the Origin Unite website, however his LinkedIn profile lists employment with “Origin Pure Corporation Limited” from June 2011 to December 2013.

Origin Pure appears to be a sister company to Origin Unite, offering different products. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a completely separate opportunity, as the compensation plan link on the Origin Pure website was not working at the time of publication.

That said, further research reveals both companies come under the parent company “Origin”, which is claimed to be based out of Switzerland:

The Origin online store, functioning at the internet address originunite.com (hereinafter referred to as the “online store”), is operated by and belongs to the company Origin (hereinafter referred to as “Origin”), with its registered office in Switzerland, Grabenstrasse.

Origin is the sole distributor of Origin’s products and marketing ideas bearing the “Origin” trademark. Origin is the sole authorised online store which offers marketing materials with “Origin’s” trademarks. The trademarks of “Origin’s” include: Origin’s, Origin.

Clear as mud. Why the need for two separate companies I can’t say, but it might possibly be due to the donation-based nature of Origin Pure’s business model.

On the executive side of things, Fred P. Stege appears to have been primarily involved in MLM lead generation and marketing. One of the earliest examples I was able to find was a paper Stege wrote in 2002 called “How to write so people buy like crazy”. The paper was published by “Madison Touche Publishing”, which I believe is a company Stege owns.

Another publication Stege published under the Madison Touche Publishing banner is “How to recruit your way to millions”.

In the publication Stege, who claims he is a “top 1% money earner and master trainer”,  promises to reveal ‘doable down to Earth, no holds barred, raw, and real network marketing recruiting methods‘.

When you learn and apply the strategies revealed in these pages, recruiting will become easy, fun and enjoyable.

You will never again have to beg anyone to take a look at your MLM opportunity – instead, they will move heaven and Earth to meet with you.

As the title suggests, the paper focuses on the recruitment of new affiliates, and promises success if enough new people are recruited into a downline, irrespective of the MLM opportunity being pushed.

There is no mention of focusing on retail product sales anywhere in the book’s 133 pages.

Later opportunity launches of Stege’s include “MLM dynamite” (1998) and “Traffic Oasis” (2002). Both of these opportunities revolved around lead generation and are now defunct.

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

A profit & loss statement recently filed in the US state of Alabama provides some insight into the financials of TelexFree.

Marked as an exhibit of an “application for interexchange authority”, the statement reveals that for the year 2013, TelexFree took in $689 million USD from their affiliates.

Affiliate commissions and other expenses ran up a liability of $652 million, leaving TelexFree with a “net income” of $36 million.

On paper that sounds great… until you consider TelexFree’s business model. [Continue reading…]

There is no information on the Paymony website indicating who owns or runs the business.

Launched in late 2013, the Paymony website domain was registered on the 28th of November 2013 however the domain registration is set to private.

Paymony does have an “About Us’ section on their website, but only the following vague marketing copy is provided:

The Paymony is a company of Andpry Inc Group focused on developing products and technology services, partners in Silicon Valley (Silicon Valley – California – USA) having a differential ease of usage.

All marketing is done electronically, where we enjoy the Relationship Marketing as main channel, generating a distribution fair and equitable.

Formed by experts of wide experience in the areas of technology, marketing, knowledge management, information architecture, usability and web solutions.

Right.

As always, if a 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…]

When we last checked in with SiteTalk, they’d ditched the Unaico name and reinvented themselves as “The Opportunity Network”. Both The Opportunity Network (OPN) and SiteTalk are still chugging along today, with news from the company last month indicating a new push into the US market.

If you’re wondering why SiteTalk had previously abstained from the US market, CEO Frank Ricketts explained the situation earlier this year at a SiteTalk event. Ricketts revealed that three years ago he ‘blocked the USA market for the OPN business opportunity:

We are a scam, we are illegal, we are running a pyramid system everywhere around the world. You can read that in Google.

So if we are a scam, we’re a pyramid, we’re illegal – what’s the problem with not being in North America? Why not do this in North America as well?

The reason is because one aspect of our business, that our legal adviser said that the authorities would probably say it’s 70% ok, but 30% maybe not.

And in the most important market in the planet, we decided that that risk was too high.

When I reviewed The Opportunity Network in late 2013, I identified a complete lack of retail activity within the business. It’s likely that 100% of the commissions being paid out of affiliate money is the root problem of the “30%” Rickett’s mentions above.

Another potential red-flag is the virtual stock exchange SiteTalk ran under their Unaico brand. Early investors were promised shares in a SiteTalk IPO, which eventually manifested itself as a listing on the Cyprus Stock Exchange’s “Emerging Companies Market”.

SiteTalk is listed under the stock code “STC” and company name “Global Digital Systems PLC”, with a current share price of €0.248 EUR per share.

In any case SiteTalk has persisted and appear to have gained a significant following in China of all places. At the time of publication Alexa estimate that 37% of SiteTalk traffic originates from China, and ranks SiteTalk as the 648th most visited site in the country.

Evidently though being popular in China hasn’t reaped the economic rewards SiteTalk’s owners might have previously thought it would.

A “statement of comprehensive income” filed on March 31st 2014 reveals SiteTalk generated €723,553 EUR in revenue. That sounds alright until you consider “sales” and “other expenses” during the same period set SiteTalk back €3,816,365 EUR.

The end-result is a 19th December 2012 to 30th September 2013 net loss of  €3,092,812 EUR.

Obviously not looking for a repeat performance this year, this is likely to the be primary reason for SiteTalk’s recent push to enter the US market. Currently the percentage of US traffic visiting SiteTalk is so insignificantly low that Alexa do not track it. The smallest recorded percentage by country is Venezuela, who account for 0.5% of SiteTalk’s global traffic.

Nonetheless earlier this year, via a series of press-releases, SiteTalk announced to the world its plans for the US. [Continue reading…]

No doubt as a result of the TelexFree narrative taking on a life of its own these last few weeks, ironically due to a complete lack of communication by the company itself, yesterday saw the release of two official TelexFree corporate marketing videos.

Featuring Steve Labriola, TelexFree’s “Director of Business Development”, the two videos revealed little new information, but there were two interesting tidbits that I felt were worth going over. [Continue reading…]

There is no information on the Golden Today website indicating who owns or runs the business.

The Golden Today website domain (“goldentoday.com”) was registered on the 23rd of December 2013, however the domain registration is set to private.

The company has two YouTube videos embedded on their website, with both being uploaded to an account named “Michael Smith”.

Michael Smith sounds a bit generically suspicious, so I kept on digging for information. Not long thereafter I found reference to two “localized domains” being launched on Golden Today’s Facebook page:

That second domain, “goldentoday.es” lists a “Kevin Ka” as the domain owner (right).

Who Kevin Ka is, whether that’s a complete name and/or his involvement in any previous MLM business opportunities is unclear. If I have to choose between “Michael Smith” and “Kevin Ka” owning Golden Today though, I’m going to go with Ka.

For starters all three Golden Today websites (English, Spanish and Japanese) are hosted out of Hong Kong. Then there’s the Golden Today “403 forbidden” error page, which is in Korean:

All of that aside, I wasn’t able to find any further information on Ka, so I’m still going to flag the name as suspect. Why Golden Today do not provide any information on their website to clear up ownership of the company is a mystery.

As always, if a 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…]

There is no information on the Wiscup page indicating who owns or runs the business.

The Wicup website domain (“wiscup.com”) was registered on the 5th of April 2008, however the domain registration is set to private.

Printed in the footer of every page on the Wiscup website is the following message:

Wiscup, a fundraising program of the GCA.

If you click on “GCA”, you are redirected to the website of the “Global Chance Alliance”. The Global Change Alliance state on their website that they are a “political organization”.

On their website, the organization claims to want to implement:

• a new debt-free financial system
• a new taxation system
• basic living standards for all
• alternative energy
• demilitirization and
• individual freedom

There is no information as to who owns or runs the Global Change Alliance, with their domain (“global-change-alliance.org”) also set to private.

Both the Wiscup and Global Change Alliance websites are hosted on the same private server, with additional websites also hosted on the server including:

• Euredo (“euredo.org”) – a “political initiative for immediate change of the present wrong direction of Europe” with a €10,000 EUR “joining fee”
• 2Profits (“2profits.com”) – redirects to Wiscup website
• Sunis (“sunis.org”) – defunct domain
• GCShares (“gcshares.com”) – defunct comain (presumably “GC” stands for “Global Change”)
• GC (“gc.tm”) – defunct domain

As all of these domains appear to be related in either content or their naming, one can assume single ownership of all the hosted domains.

The GC domain (“gc.tm”) lists a “Roy Caral” from Seychelles as the owner. The GC domain uses the name-servers of “gc-a.org”, which is a domain that redirects to the Global Change Alliance website.

I wasn’t able to connect Caral to any other MLM opportunities on the executive side, so other than GCShares and 2Proftis (both of which sound very HYIP’ish), I don’t believe Caral has any prior experience running an MLM company.

Why Caral’s name does not appear on the Wiscup or Global Change Alliance websites is a mystery.

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

Blessing4All launched in February 2014 and is headed up by “admin” Edwin Ramos.

On the Blessing4All website, Ramos is credited with having been ‘involved in online programs for more than 5 years in which he acquire the needed skills and knowledge on how to operate an online business’.

Blessing4All and Ramos (right) are based out of the Philippines, with a “certificate of business name registration” from the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry provided on the company website.

Note however that,

Blessing4all Enterprise is 100% online business for now but as we grow and the need arises we will set up a base office for this program.

On the MLM history side of things, Ramos’ YouTube account reveals a plethora of uploaded videos marketing “Ads2Freedom”. Further research reveals Ramos to be the owner of the opportunity, which used a series of matrices to pay affiliates commissions on the recruitment of new Ads2Freedom affiliates.

Despite Ramos claiming to have involvement in online programs for five years, I was unable to find anything specific other than Ads2Freedom.

In December 2013 Ramos advised on the company website that Ads2Freedom had their hosting account suspended by HostGator. Ramos claimed this was due to HostGator’s policy against “matrix or MLM program(s)”.

Ramos claimed the HostGator backups of Ads2Freedom were “useless because they are corrupt”, and did not restart the scheme elsewhere. At least not under the Ads2Freedom name.

Read on for a full review of the Blessing4All MLM business opportunity. [Continue reading…]