In keeping with general tabs on the MLM industry as part of my research and what not here at BehindMLM, I process a lot more material on a daily basis than I write about.

One particular video came across my desk a week or so ago.

Despite being published a year and a half ago, I felt was worth dissecting as it pretty much confirmed the viewpoints I held about the company after reviewing the Empower Network late last year.

The “No Excuses Summit” is an annual training event (independent of Empower Network) run by Ferny Ceballos and his “crew”.

The footage we’re going to analyse today (available at the end of this article) is taken from the second No Excuses Summit which was held in mid 2011.

It features none other than Empower Network CEO David Wood as a speaker. [Continue reading…]

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

The company’s website domain was first registered back in 2002 but was last transferred on the 4th of August 2008, indicating this is when the current owners acquired it.

Coiros’ domain registration information is public but not being a Spanish speaker, doesn’t really make much sense to me:

Registrant Contact:

ALMACENET
(Ozedit: email address removed)
c/CIudad Cultural nA2
Villalba Lugo
27800 ES

Telf: +99.999999999

I have no idea what “Almacenet” or “ciudad Culutural nA2” is (Google turned up nothing relevant). Looking at that bogus phone number though, I can’t help but wonder if the rest of the entry contains legitimate information.

Vilalba Lugo (no double “L” in Vilalba) is a municipality in Spain and with much of the Coiros website targeting Spanish speakers, it appears that this is Coiros’ target market.

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…]

Money For Causes went into prelaunch a few weeks ago and is headed up by owner Amy Jacobellis.

Money For Causes does not provide their location on their website, however the company’s website domain (“moneyforcauses.com”) was registered on the 18th of December 2012 and provides an address in the US state of Texas.

Somewhat curiously, Jacobellis lists the name of the MLM company Scentsy in the Money for Causes domain registration (image right), indicating a possible relationship between the two companies.

Scentsy is an MLM company founded in mid 2004 who market “scented wickless candles and decorative ceramic warmers”. The company is also a member of the Direct Selling Association (DSA).

Jacobellis isn’t listed as an executive on the Scentsy website, however in 2009 she credited herself as “working at” the company:

In addition to “working” for Scentsy, Jacobellis is also an affiliate of the company, maintaining a downline under the “The Young and the Wickless” team name.

On her personal website, Jacobellis (photo right) openly focuses on the recruitment of Scentsy affiliates, asking readers to contact her to get around Craiglist’s rules on recruitment advertising for any opportunity that cost money:

We should all be advertising and finding people who could easily sell Scentsy to their friends. I am looking for what I call “repeat hosts and hostesses.”

Some of those repeat hosts and hostesses will turn into consultants, and you can start building your team.

I found all my recruits from advertising, and I personally have signed up only 13 consultants. Now my team consists of 192 consultants.

If you can just find a few recruits and get them into the habit of advertising daily, your team will grow, I promise!

If you go to RESOURCES on your workstation, and click on “Consultant Spotlight,” and go to the very last page, you will see a map of where the Scentsy Consultants are.

Small towns are a great place to advertise, consultants in small towns do great. Think about advertising where we don’t yet have enough consultants.

Scentsy lets us advertise for recruits, but not advertise our products for sale. And on Craig’s LIst, we can’t advertise for anything that costs money to join, so this is kind of in-between.

Small towns are free, larger towns cost $25. I personally don’t want to pay, because the ad will need to be reposted daily, and there are so many towns that are free.

I posted the ad under “retail/wholesale.” You can put it under any category you think is best. You should try to re-post the ad daily.

You can’t post on Craigslist for actual recruiting, because it costs money to join, and craigslit (sic) doesn’t allow those ads. I had to make it into a job that doesn’t require any investment to make it follow Craig’s list rules.

Change the wording for each ad you post. I just add a word at the beginning or change the orders of the sentences. Otherwise, Craig’s list will flag you and take your ad down for posting the same ad.

They may also say you are posting too fast. Ask me how to get around this.

Although I am just advertising for them to be my host, I am hoping that as we form a relationship and they start selling, they will want to become a consultant.

Money For Causes appears to be Jacobellis’ first MLM venture on the admin side of things and on the company’s website she explains why she started it:

Before I developed this program, I was already making money passively from a couple of network marketing programs.

In late 2012 I decided to break down some of the compensation plans out there and see how many people it would take to earn $5,000 to $10,000 a month.

I NEEDED to make that much, to keep my kids in college and graduate school. In the spring of 2012, my husband was forced to take a job that paid 1/3 less than his previous job.

Causes was started as a way to raise money for college. And the next stage, graduate school, and the next stage, paying for student loans.

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

What began as a day I thought I’d spend focusing my attention on analysis of the recent FTC bust of the Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing pyramid scheme with Herbalife’s business model, has quickly turned into covering the ongoing accusations between Bidify and former Bidsson CEO, Albert Liske.

Liske’s latest installment of the saga fires shots directly at the legitimacy of the Bidsson penny auction (which Bidify is the MLM business opportunity attached to), with Liske claiming that analysis of the Bidsson backend reveals an alarming number of “company won” auctions. [Continue reading…]

Whilst much of the news coverage surrounding Bill Ackman’s claims that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme has focused on stock market shenadigans, here at BehindMLM we’ve largely been focused on the issue of whether or not distributors can be classified as retail customers.

In one corner you have Herbalife and its supporters claiming you can, primarily on the premise that distributors purchase products for consumption in the exact same manner that retail customers do.

In the other corner are people like myself who believe that if you’re a distributor and participating in an MLM business opportunity, you’re obviously not a retail customer.

At least that’s the simplified core of the discussion that has ensued since I wrote my Herbalife review a few weeks ago.

Another tangent to the discussion is the familiar “well the regulators (FTC) haven’t done anything so obviously they don’t have a problem with Herbalife” argument. Here at BehindMLM we see this argument a lot, primarily used as an unofficial endorsement by the authorities of an MLM company’s business model I might find issues with.

Needless to say it’s a shallow argument that doesn’t carry any water. Moreso when you consider that the public aren’t privy to investigations carried out unless court action results (or the company in question voluntarily reveals they are being investigated, which for obvious reasons never happens).

On this particular topic of regulatory inaction, today news comes down the grapevine that the FTC have shutdown the MLM company Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing for operating what Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway described as being ‘one of the most prolific pyramid schemes operating in North America‘.

Unfortunately I never got around to reviewing Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing (FHTM) so my knowledge of the company is limited. Fortunately for the purpose of this analysis however, FHTM itself is largely relevant.

Putting aside the stock market and Herbalife share prices for the moment (which incidentally slumped 11% upon news of the FTC taking down FHTM), I thought today we’d take a look at specifically what the FTC took issue with in the FHTM case and see if any of it applies to Herbalife from a purely MLM perspective. [Continue reading…]

They might have taken their sweet time rolling out Bidify and Bidsson 2.0 and have had absolutely no luck in resolving their Towah payment issues over the last few months, but within hours of Albert Liske’s latest Ponzi scheme allegations against the company going live, Bidify has responded to Liske’s claims. [Continue reading…]

Following much pomp and ceremony over their appointments by Bidify management, late last year saw the abrupt resignation of Bidsson’s CEO Albert Liske and VP Christopher Robinson.

Liske and Robinson had barely been in their new roles for two months so naturally much speculation arose as to why the two suddenly left.

Bidify, the MLM company the Bidsson penny auctions are paired with, did initially state they would explain why Liske and Robinson resigned, however to date no official explanation has been given.

Bidify simply removed all references to Liske and Robinson on the Bidsson website and seemed content to leave it at that.

Now, in a series of explosive allegations made on a newly created website seemingly owned and operated by the former Bidsson CEO Albert Liske, the reason why Bidify never explained why the resignations took place appears to have been finally revealed. [Continue reading…]

There no publicly accessible information on the Vicesus website indicating who owns or runs the company.

Infact, there’s not a whole lot you can do on the company’s website, with Vicesus restricting public visitors and those perhaps hoping to conduct some due diligence restricted from doing anything but log on. 

And if you don’t already have a Vicesus affiliate account? Too bad, that’s as far as your Vicesus website experience goes.

Clicking on a Vicesus affiliate’s referral link isn’t much better, with the company only displaying a brief welcome message to visitors and still refusing to share any additional information unless visitors sign up.

The Vicesus website domain (“vicesus.com, registered on the 4th of August 2012) is a little more revealing, naming “HOF Group LLC” as the registrant based out New York in the US and a “Mads Frederiksen” as the admin contact.

I wasn’t able to find any further information on HOF Group LLC (an entity bearing the same name does exist in Ohio but appears to be unrelated (food)), however a Google search reveals Vicesus affiliate’s naming Mad Frederiksen as the “CCDO” (no idea what that stands for) of the company.

In what appears to be copy and pasted information Vicesus only provide to members, affiliates also name Sulaiman Abrahams as Vicesus’ CEO and Jesper Madsen as CFO. Kevin Grimes is also being named as Vicesus’ “legal advisor”.

I wasn’t able to find any further information on Abrahams (his Vicesus company bio refers to him as a “south African entrepreneur”) within the MLM industry, so I can only assume this is his first MLM venture on the executive side of things.

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

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

The company’s website domain (“addwallet.com”) was registered on the 26th of December 2012, however the domain registration information is set to private.

Further research into the ownership of Addwallet however has revealed one unconfirmed possibility.

Back when AddWallet first launched a few weeks ago, the website was hosted on a server hosted on the 63.208.1.30 IP address. According to two independent WHOIS records, another domain (and attached subdomains) were also being hosted on this address.

A Google cache of HypeStat reveals one other website on the same domain:

With TrustOrg showing additional subdomains:

Out of the above domains, “wcanow.com” and “members.wcanow.com” are of concern to our research. For those not familiar with the seedier side of the MLM industry, WCA stands for World Consumer Alliance.

World Consumer Alliance is a $2 micro Ponzi scheme started by Paul Skulitz back in late 2012 under the name Wealth Creation Alliance (WCAREV).

Following the initial launch of Wealth Creation Alliance, CEO “Coach” Blaine announce the company was changing its name to World Consumer Alliance, after it was revealed a previous “Wealth Creation Alliance” had turned out to be a scam.

Despite being a Ponzi scheme themselves, Blaine explained they didn’t want to be associated with the previous WCA scam (which had no connection to Skulitz’s new WCA).

In a further attempt to distance itself from the name, the company then later changed its website domain from “wcarev.com” to “wcanow.com”.

Not surprisingly, in early January members of World Consumer Alliance began reporting that the company was not paying its members. Coincidentally, this was also around the time AddWallet was first announced.

The obvious theory here would be that after convincing thousands of people to invest in Wealth Creation Alliance and World Consumer Alliance, that the admins had paid out what they could (initial Ponzi ROIs attract new investors), and were now looking to launch a new scheme under the “AddWallet” name.

This certainly explains why there’s no management or owner information on the AddWallet website and the domain registration is set to private.

To date, no explanation has been provided by either AddWallet or World Consumer Alliance as to why the two company’s websites were being hosted off the same domain.

As late as a week or so ago, both the AddWallet and World Consumer Alliance websites were moved off the shared hosting account and placed on their own dedicated hosting servers.

Update 30th March 2013 – On a recent AdWallet affiliate call Louis Cordero was named as the Ecuador based CEO of AddWallet.

Brandon Bradshaw was also named as Vice-President (based in Florida in the US) and Logan Chamberlain as CFO (based in Ecuador).

An AddWallet presentation I was recently forwarded also names AddWallet as a subsidiary of “Cartera International”, allegedly a registered corporation in Ecuador. /end update

Read on for a full review of the AddWallet MLM business opportunity.

[Continue reading…]

Auruma International was launched in late 2011 by CEO Victor Foo. Foo, a Malaysian national, operates Auruma out of Singapore however the company itself is actually incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (a known tax haven).

Foo has been involved in the insurance industry since 1991, with Auruma appearing to be his first MLM venture.

In addition to Auruma, Foo (photo right) has also operated SG Net Pte Ltd since 2009. SG Net

offers customers a platform to buy and sell physical gold and silver products on a secured online portal.

In early 2012 Foo launched a third venture, Singapore Precious Metals Exchange Pte Ltd (SGPMX). SGPMX is a “valuables” storage facility that ‘offers clients anonymity as well as speedy transactions‘.

SGPMX has a $1 million USD minimum deposit rule and operates out of a “free trade zone” that has been established next to Changi International Airport.

Citing Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) as a comparison, Foo told “The Star Online” back in February 2012 that

Moving 100kg of gold from your house to KLIA is no laughing matter. To clear a consignment at KLIA takes at least 45 minutes. But at Changi Airport, it takes only three minutes.

If you are a high nett worth individual, you wouldn’t want to expose yourself and you don’t want your name to appear in the export papers.

Foo reassured The Star however that he wasn’t ‘going to be laundering any blood money‘ though, because if he was ‘the Singapore authorities will close (him) down‘.

In an interview with “AurumaWorld” (April 2011), Foo claimed he set up Auruma after his previously launched SG Net business stabilised:

After SG Net found it’s footing, I started to look for easily accessible avenues for the man in the street to preserve his, or her, wealth.

That was what prompted me leverage on SG Net’s infrastructure and to start Auruma International.

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