Limitless Worldwide was founded in early 2013 with the company claiming to be “powered by” another company, “Basic Resarch”.

On their website, Basic Research provide background information on the company:

For almost two decades we’ve been distributing innovative formulations that address the specific needs of consumers – from weight loss to bodybuilding, anti-aging, joint health, skin care, cosmetics, and more.

You can find our products at Wal-Mart, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Sephora, GNC, CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreen’s… and over 40,000 individual retail outlets worldwide.

Steve and Melyn Campbell are named on the Limitless Worldwide website, with the company claiming to have been “introduced” to the pair:

Basic was introduced to Steve and Melyn Campbell, who both have decades of experience in the network marketing industry, and the Limitless partnership was born.

There’s no official management or owner(s) named on the Limitless website but a marketing video credits Steve Campbell as co-founder of the company:

Melyn Campbell later appears in the same video, also being credited as a co-founder:

On the Limitless Worldwide website Steve and Melyn Campbell claim to

have over 20 years of experience and proven success in building and training distributor forces.

MLM history wise they were the master-distributors of Exfuze (“multi-botanical” drinks) between 2007-2010.

In April 2011 they c0-launched a partnership named Cyrano Partners that sought to sell AeroGrow International products (indoor gardening products) via an MLM business model.

After Cyrano failied to raise the capital to fund the joint-venture however (a condition of the partnership agreement), the partnership and MLM company was terminated in August 2011.

Putting two and two together, Limitless Worldwide appears to have been set up to market Basic Research’s product line via an MLM style compensation plan and business model.

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

The BehindMLM review of Lyoness (US) was written just over a year ago on the 5th of May 2012. Since publication of the review, over 1000 comments have thus far been left with the resulting discussion being largely cyclical in nature.

Typically a Lyoness affiliate reads the review and then proceeds to leave a long-winded comment “educating” myself and readers on the merits of the Lyoness merchant shopping network.

When it’s pointed out that comparatively this pays peanuts to the Account Unit investment scheme, what then follows is either justification of the scheme on the promise of future shopping (which it is argued will one day eclipse AU investment scheme revenue), or claims that merchant shopping generates the bulk of revenue within Lyoness.

Given the absence of proof other than the mere noted existence of customers, this claim naturally fails to hold up to scrutiny.

At this point the Lyoness affiliate either disappears or admits the AU investment scheme is problematic, but chooses to ignore it and focus on the merits of the merchant shopping network instead.

A few weeks/months after this, another Lyoness affiliate stumbles across the review and the process repeats itself.

1038 comments later and to date nobody has been able to justify or explain how the affiliate-funded accounting unit investment scheme is not just a Ponzi scheme with an attached shopping network.

Lyoness recently released their 2012 Income Disclosure Statement (IDS) which, not surprisingly, only raises more concerns and questions about the company’s business model and compensation plan. [Continue reading…]

Hot on the heels of sweeping reforms to the MLM landscape and talks of banning the industry altogether in India, news broke yesterday that Amway India’s CEO William Scott Pinckney has been arrested on charges of “financial irregularities”.

Pinckney (right) was arrested by police officers from Meppadi police station in the Indian state of Kerala, along with Amway India Directors Sanjay Malhotra and Anshu Budhraja.

The trio are expected to be presented in court today, being formally charged under India’s Prize Chits and Money Circulation Act (1972), following an investigation into a First Information (FIR) report filed back in 2011.

A top official of Economic Affairs Wing (EOW), Kerala, who was part of the operation that led to the arrests, said:

“With the call of easy money, they have been luring people to invest.

The new members in turn had to get more people and this was leading to illegal money circulation. We had received several complaints against the company.”

Since then, a number of other FIRs have been registered against the compny, including one filed just last year by a distributor named Vishalakshi: [Continue reading…]

There is no information on the Global Marketing Seven (GMSeven) website indicating who owns or runs the business. The company’s “About Us” page simply states that the information is “coming soon”.

The company’s website domain (“gmseven.com”) was registered on the 28th of April 2013, however the domain registration is set to private.

In order to protect the website from “hackers, malware , spam, viruses, and scams”, GMSeven use the services of SiteLock. GMSeven’s website registration with SiteLock reveals that the owner of the company is Grigore Turcanu:

Grigore Turcanu (also known as “Greg Turcanu”) last popped up on BehindMLM as the President of Skippy Cash Matrix (later renamed to Skippy Advertising).

Prior to the launch of Skippy Cash Matrix Turcanu was an affiliate of and marketing EPXBody (weight-loss).

Skippy Cash Matrix launched in mid 2012 and under the guise of selling advertising, paid affiliates to recruit new affiliates via a series of matrices.

By October things seemed to be in decline with Turcanu (right) rebranding the company as Skippy Advertising and attempting to relaunch it.

In response to the BehindMLM review of Skippy Cash Matrix, Turcanu wrote

I’m From Australia and our Business is legal registered and soon our business will be listed to Direct Sale Association.

To know about our Payplan you must first be a member. That is the best MLM concept ever. We are not a game or pyramid scam.

The Skippy Advertising website is still online today but with the recent launch of GMSeven, it is unclear whether or not the company is still operational.

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

To date not one revenue-sharing MLM company has managed to generate any significant revenue from retail customers. Thus the common Achilles’ heel that holds true in all of them is that if affiliates investment slows down, the daily ROI paid out to earlier investors starts to drop.

Despite the facade of “external revenue sources” that are never publicly revealed and other smokescreens put up to mask the reliance on affiliate money, when the daily ROI drops, those familiar with how your typical affiliate funded investment scheme do what usually occurs in this situation.

They start to withdraw as much funds out of the scheme as they can.

Typically a reduced ROI signals the beginning of the end of the company and with new affiliate money already reduced, it propels it towards the inevitable “we don’t have enough money to pay out our affiliates” conclusion.

Over the last few days we’ve been watching this exact situation develop over AddWallet, with a log of the daily ROI paid out to affiliates showing a sharp decline from the 23rd of May (figures sourced from an AddWallet affiliate): [Continue reading…]

There’s a general consensus in the MLM industry that if you see an MLM company using one of three particular payment processors, then at the very least it’s worth taking a precautionary approach.

Payment processors handle money between MLM companies and their affiliates. In an age where global affiliate membership is the norm, payment processors simplify the process in which companies are able to effectively pay their affiliates commissions.

Today Liberty Reserve, easily one of the most frequently used payment processors in the MLM industry, was shut down following the arrest of its creator and owner in Spain. [Continue reading…]

After months of delays OfferHubb look to be finally gearing up for launch “sometime soon”. With that development has come a rather interesting announcement from Robert Craddock.

Craddock served as Acting COO Greg Caldwell’s right hand man in the $600M Ponzi scheme, Zeek Rewards. Following the SEC bust of Zeek, Craddock then raised thousands of dollars on the promise of organising legal representation for Zeek Rewards affiliates against the SEC.

This representation eventually amounted to charging those who pledged money to Craddock an additional $300 for a template letter those who bought it could sign their names to and send off.

What happened to the rest of the money is currently unknown, however one affiliate recently shed some light on where some of it allegedly went:

I have first hand knowledge of what RC is up too, I think it’s interesting that he collected so money from folks for legal representation in regards to Zeek Rewards and not one affiliate was represented.

He took in 6 figures and what was it spent on?  I was told from a very reliable source that over 50k of that money went into fixing the engine of his small plane.

With the court-appointed Receiver now seeking to recover funds from Craddock and other “net winners” in the Zeek Rewards Ponzi scheme, Craddock and person(s) unknown have been working on OfferHubb, hoping to replicate the daily ROIs they were paid in Zeek Rewards.

In an email sent out to OfferHubb affiliates on May 23rd titled “We are going live”, Craddock wrote [Continue reading…]

When Global Hangout launched earlier this year several key issues were raised following a review of the opportunity.

Primarily there was concern over the lack of adequate differentiation between  retail subscribers and affiliates, with Global Hangout simply requiring a subscriber to sign up again free of charge to be given access to commissions.

Seen more as a psuedo-compliance measure than genuine effort to make a distinction between subscribers (retail) and affiliates, typically measures like this still result in a company mostly retaining affiliate subscribers (non-retail).

Secondary issues raised included no mention of company management or ownership on the Global Hangout website and that Global Hangout’s product, Google Hangout training videos, was already offered by Google, the creators of the service.

Official Google training was offered free of charge and had been available since Google Hangout’s release back in August 2011, begging the question why someone would pay $99 for Hangout training.

This played into the thin differentiation between customers and affiliates, leading towards the inclination that people wouldn’t sign up and hand over $99 for Google Hangout training without the free-of-charge attached Global Hangout income opportunity.

Seeking to address these issues (whether raised by myself or elsewhere), Global Hangout rebranded themselves Hubity sometime over the past month. Were they successful?

Let’s find out. [Continue reading…]

Wealth Podium launched in early May with Danny Gauthier crediting himself as the founder and CEO of the company on the Wealth Podium website.

On the Wealth Podium’s “About Us” section of their website, Gauthier writes

Many self employed people have been looking for a way to get a foothold into 21st century technology.

I said the timing is perfect to provide these tools and services. You have probably heard the saying “Find a need in the marketplace and fill it.”

This is a sure formula to wealth.

You have seen it with telecommunications. Now it is the Internet‘s time. I wanted to provide a turnkey system for doing business that would encompass anyone who wanted, yes, needed a chance in life.

I wanted to do this at a price that would not exclude anyone. I wanted an all inclusive business that would embrace everyone who wanted it worldwide.

I wanted to help people to generate income and take away the stress of living from pay check to pay check.

Between 2006 and 2009 Gauthier launched several low-key matrix-based MLM opportunites (WeNetProfits, Seed2Wealth and United TSI). Due to the recruitment-driven nature of these schemes, none of them survived any considerable length of time after being launched.

Writing off the failure of these previous company launches as “4 years of market and software testing”, Gauthier then went on to launch a new scheme in January 2012 called Ultamex.

Ultamex was your typical membership-based digital library, with affiliates paid commissions to recruit others into the scheme on a one-time affiliate membership fee of $59.

Just over a year after launching Ultamex, not surprisingly, appears to be in steady decline and with that comes the launch of Gauthier’s latest company, Wealth Podium.

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

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

The only mention of executive management on the Avisae website is the following vague marketing spiel, taken from the “People” page:

The founders of Avisae began with a belief and confidence in the human spirit and the fulfillment found in trusting and enduring relationships.

Further research into the company however reveals a “Brooks Yates” naming himself as “CEO and Founder” of Avisae on his LinkedIn profile:

In his profile, Yates also credits himself as being the former Vice President of International Operations, Managing Director of Distribution Systems, Director of International IT Systems and Senior International Technical Product Manager over at Monavie (a juice orientated MLM company).

Yates left Monavie in April of 2012 before launching Avisae a year later in April of 2013.

For reasons not immediately clear, at the time of publication Yates’ name does not appear anywhere on the Avisae website:

Furthermore the Avisae website domain, registered on the 28th of April 2012 (shortly after Yates left Monavie?), has its domain registration information set to private.

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