Some time earlier, the Swedish Gaming Board opened an investigation up into Lyoness. While the Gaming Board carried out their investigation, a separate investigation was opened up in Norway and Poland’s OCCP declared Lyoness to be a pyramid scheme.

Now the Swedish Gaming Board have concluded their investigation into Lyoness… and in doing so have handed over their findings to the Stockholm County Police Department. [Continue reading…]

Back in January Alessandra Marques, of the Acre Public Prosecutor’s Office, revealed in a radio interview that TelexFree was under US investigation.

In a subsequent telephone conversation with Brazilian media, Marques went on to name the IRS as being involved. [Continue reading…]

Earlier this month it was revealed that Rwanda had launched an official investigation into the business operations of TelexFree. The investigation formally began on February the 19th and was a joint effort between the National Bank of Rwanda and The Ministry of Trade.

Now, a month later the result of the Rwandan investigation has been made public:

TelexFree Rwanda Ltd activities are similar to that of a pyramid scheme, which can easily be a channel to jeopardize the financial sector and facilitate money laundering.

The result of the investigation has been made public by the Ugandan Ambassador to Rwanda, Richard Kabonero. Kabonero tweeted the conclusion of the Rwandan investigation and attached an official notice from the Rwandan Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Kabonero also called on his own government in Uganda to follow suit to “protect the public”: [Continue reading…]

Neurs went into beta launch this February and are scheduled to officially launch next month. On the Neurs website a corporate address in the US state of California for “Neurs LLC” is provided.

Heading up Neurs (taken from the last syllabic quarter of en-tre-pre-neurs) is CEO and co-founder Frank Codina.

Prior to co-founding Neurs (the other co-founder(s) are not mentioned on the Neurs website), Codina was in Primerica (financial services) 21 years.

Codina joined Primerica back in November 1991 and achieved the affiliate rank of Senior National Sales Director. According to his LinkedIn profile, Codina left Primerica in August of last year.

Shortly after that work on Neurs appears to have begun, with Codina listing involvement with “Neurs Capital” from September 2013.

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

Empower Network launched on the simple idea that people would pay the affiliate who recruited them $25 a month for WordPress. Once they had their foot in the door and realised WordPress was free and not owned by Empower Network, they’d then be told to “go all in” and purchase further “training”.

Once they’d paid their thousands of dollars, they were then qualified to receive commissions by going out and telling others the same. For each person they convinced to sign up and go through the process as they themselves had done, commissions were paid.

The central problem and give-away that affiliates were simply just paying eachother based on recruitment was that Empower Network didn’t own the rights to WordPress.

WordPress is

a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL, which runs on a web hosting service.

WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013.

WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.

After it became too much to continue the facade of pretending they were selling access to WordPress for $25 a month, with the goal of eventually convincing people to pass up thousands of dollars to their affiliate uplines, Empower Network paid someone to develop their own blogging platform.

ENV2 was released in October 2013 and, despite the “WordPress-killer” marketing hype, all it did was further reduce the blogging functionality of what was already a paper-thin facade to begin with.

I suspect the handful of people who were actually paying their upline on the belief that the Empower Network domain held some SEO value, up and left.

This didn’t go unnoticed at the top and has resulted in a shift away from a focus on “just blog and earn infinity money” to tin-can style internet marketing courses.

By and large these latest attempts to convince people to continue to hand over money to their uplines each month (passed all the way up to the top, where Empower Network owners David Wood and David Sharpe sit), target traffic and lead generation.

The problem with Empower Network traffic generation is that you’re directing traffic to something that’s not as attractive to the type of people who might be convinced to part with $25 for access to WordPress and then thousands of dollars in upsells later on.

ENV2 is a flop, and no amount of hype is going to convince the world that it’s even a remote competitor to WordPress.

Case in point?

David Wood’s own personal blog site?

WordPress.

David Sharpe?

WordPress too.

Wood and Sharpe are the most obvious examples of ENV2’s lack of viability, but look up any other Empower Network top-affiliate and you’ll find the same thing. Yeah they might have an Empower Network blog counter-part but their primary blog, the one they actually give a crap about and brand themselves on?

WordPress. [Continue reading…]

Simply Naturals appears to have launched in 2012 and are based out of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

The company operates in the health and nutrition MLM niche and lists a Peter Willoughby as CEO on their website.

Willoughby (right) is credited with ‘almost two decades’ of “referral marketing experience” in his Simply Naturals executive bio:

Prior to this he was employed by Kleinwort Benson Corporate Finance specializing in the technology and IT sectors and entered the referral marketing sector in 1997.

Simply Naturals appears to be the only MLM venture Willoughby has headed up, although I’m a little unsure of the specifics.

This Simply Naturals newsletter is dated May 2012 and mentions a “pre-launch special”. It’s written in an introductory format by Willoughby and implies the company was only recently launched:

I am pleased to introduce you to Simply Naturals Ltd and look forward to a long and rewarding relationship; Simply Naturals has been established to improve the quality of people’s lives through true health and true wealth.

As we enter a new era of health awareness, coupled with ever increasing life expectancy, the quest for good health and wellness has never been so important.

Then there’s this “U.S. Naturals” newsletter dated November 2006, in which Elmer G. Heinrich wrote:

As you have been informed, I have sold my interest in U.S. Naturals, Inc. to Mr. Peter Willoughby of London.

Simply Naturals obviously existed before 2012, so I’m not sure what’s going on in that first cited newsletter. It appears Heinrich was running U.S. Naturals as a sister company of Simply Naturals (run by Willoughby). He got out in 2006 by selling his share in the company to Willoughby, and both companies have been under Willoughby’s control since.

Again I’m not sure what happened between 2006 to 2012, but there does appear to have been some restructuring that led to a new Simply Naturals “pre-launch”. U.S. Naturals meanwhile is still up and running and appears to function as an independent opportunity selling the same products as Simply Natural.

Why Willoughby continues to use two different company names is a mystery to me, I certainly found it confusing. None of this is explained or clarified on either the Simply Naturals or U.S. Naturals websites.

For the purpose of clarification on this review, it should be known that I’m using Simply Naturals’ marketing material.

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

Things have been awful quiet over at the Phillip Ming Xu Ponzi empire these last few weeks. Following a spate of regulatory crackdowns on his darling WCM777 scheme spanning Peru, Colombia, Canada and the US states of Massachusetts, California and Alaska, Xu appears to have now all but given up.

Well, at least that’s what he’d have you believe.

When the regulators came knocking, Xu first tried to dodge the regulatory gavel by assigning James Tenorio as puppet CEO and changing WCM777’s name to Kingdom777.

When Tenorio went AWOL and regulators didn’t back down, Xu suspended US investor payouts, ordered his investors to stop using investment terminology and opted for a second name-change to Global-Unity.

Not surprisingly that didn’t work either. Further compounding Xu’s problems were rumors indicating that his partner in crime, Zhi “Tiger” Liu (right with Xu), had run off with around $50,000,000 in WCM777 affiliate funds.

Offices were closed, staff and lawyers were fired and sources have suggested that these last few weeks Xu has been negotiating with the SEC in an attempt to escape jail time.

Confirming much of this information comes a new series of tweets from Xu, published just this morning: [Continue reading…]

Despite a video on the Kannaway website informing me that ‘on February 28th this site will begin actually morphing into our actual prelaunch website’, it appears the company is still in this pre-prelaunch stage.

Official Kannaway prelaunch compensation plan documents I’ve cited in my research for this review confirm this is the case, stating

‘The Buzz Campaign’ will run from March 1st – March 31st at which time everyone who enrolls will be placed into one company wide Powerline structure based on the time and date of enrollment.

Due to international laws regarding the sale of cannabis products, Kannaway are currently slated for operation within the US.

And yes, Kannaway’s pre-prelaunch actually has its own compensation plan – more on that later.

At the time of publication the Kannaway website is little more than a sales capture page, demanding visitors enter in identification credentials before revealing anything beyond Kannaway being ‘a hemp lifestyle company with cutting edge CBD Rich Hemp Oil Products‘.

A marketing video features on the site, heavily emphasizing the distinction between hemp and marijuana (which is admittedly likely to be an instantaneous association most people are going to make with Kannaway when they hear the word “hemp”):

Other than a video on hemp’s history though, the Kannaway website fails to provide any additional information on the opportunity unless a visitor ‘enters (their) sponsor’s ID number’.

No ID? no information.

Personally I felt that the whole “we are not a druggie culture marijuana company” video was rather undermined by the whole “buzz” prelaunch. Certainly a better use of the Kannaway website would be providing even the most basic of company information?

Anyway I suppose that’s where I come in. Read on as BehindMLM pulls apart and dissects Kannaway’s “The Buzz” prelaunch campaign. [Continue reading…]

Less than a week is all it took for TelexFree’s top affiliate investors to collectively revolt against the company’s new “everybody needs five retail customers” compensation plan.

What’s even more amusing is that, if true, the change comes just days after TelexFree charged affiliates $169 each to attend “new compensation plan” training in Boston.

Not surprisingly, after paying for their ticket, accommodation, transport to get there and whatever else, some TelexFree affiliates aren’t taking the fact that what they paid to learn only a few days ago might already be obsolete. [Continue reading…]

Despite the industry-wide ramification of a full-blown investigation into Herbalife, there’s surprisingly not all that much to write about.

Earlier today,

Herbalife shares sank as much as 15% in Wednesday trading after the nutritional supplements marketer said it is under Federal Trade Commission investigation.

Kinda curious that Herbalife themselves made the announcement, although after further consideration, I suppose it was probably a “making the best of a worst-case scenario” situation for them.

The FTC themselves, as per regulatory policy in the US, won’t publicly comment on the investigation. That left it up to Herbalife to either maintain radio silence or break the announcement.

No doubt in a lofty boardroom somewhere, it was decided that going public was the best move. News of the investigation would have gotten out sooner or later anyway, better it come from them. Herbalife’s transparency track-record is pretty atrocious, so it’s good to see the company be open and honest about something for a change.

Along with the investigation announcement, Herbalife also reiterated their stance on regulatory cooperation:

“Herbalife welcomes the inquiry given the tremendous amount of misinformation in the marketplace, and will cooperate fully with the FTC,” the company said in a statement.

“We are confident that Herbalife is in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”

That they’re “cooperating fully” is good to know. Y’know, given that they don’t really have a choice.

Meanwhile as I woke up to the news this morning, this pretty much summed up my reaction.

Why am I totally not surprised at an FTC investigation into Herbalife? Read on. [Continue reading…]