OneCoin declared legal by Ted Nuten

We have gotten to the point where the OneCoin pyramid is starting to fall apart, rumours from OneCoin affiliates claiming that getting money out is difficult, those who sell new packaged are first in line to get paid, it takes 3 months to process KYC for people to be qualified to withdraw money. All the classical signs of a pyramid scheme coming to an end.

And then, in a strange twist, Ted Nuten from Business For Home, publishes a review of OneCoin claiming to be just an honest review to show people the facts rather than the speculations. This is not the first time Ted Nuten writes about OneCoin, he have willingly promoted their business for several years now, among other publishing more or less every top earner in this business. What he don’t seem to understand is that getting paid in worthless coins don’t make you a top earners, to be a top earner you need to get paid cash, which very few in OneCoin do.

The story you can ready you self, it clearly show that Ted Nuten is heavily involved in the OneCoin business – which he is in most of the businesses he writes about.
https://www.businessforhome.org/2016/02/onecoin-facts-and-figures-without-hype/

So we have OneCoin, one of the biggest and fastest growing MLM companies in the world, sounds like a professional business of course, there is no other way when you sell for 1 billion – or is it. Well, it will be the first business ever that is declared legit using their business banking as a reference… Have Ted Nuten ever done a legit business in his life? Any business can get a bank account – and a scam can get it if they setup different companies for different banks.

Kreissparkasse Steinfurt – having a German bank account is not bad.
Is it in the name of OneCoin, of course not. The account is held in the name of International Marketing Services Pte. Ltd

Bank of Africa (T) Limited – I don’t think African accounts give you much credit, but its good to have if you scam people for money in Africa of course.
Is this account in the name of Onecoin, of course not. The account is held in the name of IMS Marketing Tanzania Limited

Lloyds TSB Bank PLC – getting a UK bank account is not easy for a business that sells coins.
Is it in the name of OneCoin, of course not. The account is held in the name of International Marketing Strategies Limited

OK, I see what you are thinking, International Marketing Strategies (IMS) is the same company name. True. But if this business manages the sales for OneCoin there is little doubt that OneCoin would be the shareholder. A simple company check on the UK company show that this LTD company is owned by Manon Wissmann. I will assume that this is Ruja Ignatova’s husband, even if the files claim that Manin is a woman. The company has a share capital of 100 pounds, nothing wrong about that, but not what most 1 billion businesses would go for.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/06264462/officers

Ted Nuten also spends time pointing out the people who helped build OneCoin, Juha Parhiala and Perh Karlsson. Left out is Nigel Allan, the person who travelled Asia together with Ruja Ignatova and who did all the presentations, back when she did not seem to understand much about network marketing or crypto coins. I have said it before and I will say it again, there is little doubt that Nigel Allan was one of the founders of OneCoin, maybe he was kicked out, or maybe he sits in the background now making millions, we will probably never know as OneCoin have spent a great effort to remove his name from their business history.

To end off, Ted Nuten have come up with one proof of OneCoin being a legit business, and that is that it banks with well-known banks. Now you know it, OneCoin don’t bank with any of the banks he have listed, it seem Ruja Ignatova’s husband banks with a lot of well-known banks. If it were a legit business OneCoin would be the shareholder of these companies at least, and normally bank accounts to a 1 billion euro company will be in the name of the company.

You have been warned, again.

Is WorldVentures a good MLM business?

Update: I finally found time to crunch some numbers. It turns out that between 2008 and 2013 the number of people who got paid from promoting WorldVentures went down, from around 30% to close to 20%. Based on their 2013/2014 numbers WorldVentures pay out an amazing 10% in commissions, which probably is the least of all network marketing companies…

There are plenty of websites explaining the WorldVentures business model, so I will only do a quick summary of it. WorldVentures is a travel club, you join, you pay a monthly fee, and this is supposed to save you money when you go on holiday. They claim that by using their travel booking website you will save big money – many have compared their travel booking site with others and claim that you will get the same prices, if not better, booking your holiday with someone else. The main reason is that they don’t include the flights in their pricing, this mean losing out on the great deals other booking sites offer when you book everything with them.

We can argue if their product is good or bad, but there is no doubt that they have a product, and they make it look really nice. The big question are; do people use their product? If you are to pay 200 USD to join, and thereafter 25 to 55 USD per month to save money on travel you better start traveling. If the WorldVentures travel product don’t save you a lot of money, I guess we can assume that not a lot of people will join as customers. This is what the Norwegian authorities (lotteritilsynet) came to when looking into the WorldVentures business in Norway. It turned out that 95% of the sales was related to joining and monthly fees. In Europe more than 50% of a company’s sales must be product related, so it could seem that WorldVentures have a problem, in Europe at least.

So if customers don’t make up all the sales (hundreds of millions per year), who do? The answer is simple, their representatives purchase the travel subscription. Even if they don’t have too, as there is no requirement that they will have to purchase any products, most representatives pay the monthly travel fee. In addition, they pay 25 USD per month which does not generate any commissions, in order to be qualified for commissions. You are probably thinking that this sound really stupid, why would someone pay 25 USD per month to be qualified for commissions, and then pay another 25 to 100 for travel discounts? The simple reality is that all representatives are trained into thinking that each and one of them must contribute towards the success of the company and other distributors, and therefore pay to support the WorldVentures business model.

OK, you have spent several hundred dollars to join WorldVentures, and you will probably spend around 75 to 125 USD every month to stay qualified and help generate sales/commissions. But will you make any money? Most lightly not. The WorldVentures pay plan is very complicated, and it seem designed so that most distributors will not make much money. Over 70% of the representatives fail to earn any commissions. The average representative earn 325 USD per year. 1% of the distributors earn a yearly income above the poverty level (they share around 75% of all commissions). Compared to other MLM companies, this is really bad, the average MLM company will pay around 2% of their distributors a decent annual income.

Conclusion; WorldVentures is not a business I would ever consider, to be honest, I find it difficult to understand why anyone would consider it. As a MLM business it pays less than average, and their pay plan is made so complicated I have to assume they have done it to hide how bad the pay plan is for most people. And if you can book your travel with other booking sites for free, and get the same great deal, why would anyone pay a monthly fee to WorldVentures? That leaves only one reason, people pay to generate commissions, which is getting very close to a pyramid scheme…

Icon Sachs Review

Website https://iconsachs.com/

I will keep this very simple: Icon Sachs offer you to invest by pooling money, which is illegal. You don’t need to know more than this, stay away – but I guess you could be greedy and still consider joining them so I will write a full review.

Icon Sachs offer some kind of financial education, which I can only assume is free stuff found online which they charge for, up to 975 euro. What you in reality pay for is how much you can invest, as this is limited by how much you pay when joining (very clever).

They offer close to 50% monthly returns. There is no person nor company who can deliver returns like this. One month being lucky maybe, over a year impossible. Use your brain, if you had a system that guarantied would return 50% per month, would you share it with anyone? You would be a billionaire in no time, why run a small business. If their trading was public you would see right away that this is not possible, but they don’t trade public, they pool money and just state a return. What their investors eventually will get I don’t know, if they are lucky their money back, but this smells funny so I guess a total loss and a lesson learned that too good to be true is never true.

This is how they present their background:
‘Icon Sachs is the result of the meeting between a group of sophisticated investors that met in Geneva, Switzerland during mid 2000. Among this group, two gentlemen from Switzerland had worked for large investment banks and hedge funds, one had experience from the trading floor in Frankfurt, and two more were asset managers working out of Dubai’

Sounds nice, we all know we can trust bankers…. Not! But a little background check made in middle of July kind of suggest that these guys are not sophisticated investors, neither have they spent much time in Switzerland or Dubai. Their webpage, which I guess was not finished in July (why launch it if it’s not ready… I guess they needed some cash) had Swedish text in it, so clearly made by a Swedish guy.

Their payment system (to pay your signup fee) is managed by a New Zealand financial company, Fennas Finances, which seem to have an address somewhere remote in NZ. But more worrying, the payments are in reality managed by Towah, a UK payment company which was setup by some WGI guy (World Games International) years ago, which have been processing for some shady MLM companies and probably are close to being out of business – which I guess is why they now operate from New Zealand. You would of course never knew this if you did not read the payment terms, and these guys had done a poor edit. The webpage of Fennas Finances don’t really make you want to give them your card details either (please don’t do it), it is poorly designed and clearly not launched by a professional company.

I am not going to waste your or my time going into the details of their binary pay plan. This is a scam, if you give these guys money you are stupid, if you refer anyone to this business you have done something illegal and might be facing legal actions when they are closed down (if lucky you just have to pay back your earnings).

BeWise Trader / GooBets Review

Website: https://www.bewisetrader.com

GooBets recently changed name as they came under heavy fraud allegations in Brazil (GooBets ended up in the news in Brazil). BeWise Trader is the same people and business model, possibly also the same company. GooBets launched November 2014, the company claimed to have some kind of insurance to protect investors deposits and returns, and promised sky high risk free returns from the sport betting market (which is now what BeWise Trader is promising).

The CEO of the company is Miguel Carvalho (Portugal) and their marketing director is Augusto Queiroz (Brazil), which is associated with several scams. It is claimed that Miguel Carvalho is a professional sports betting trader, returning as much as 100 to 200% per month. They have managed to fool people into believing this using other well know traders in connection to Miguel Carvalho. This is the power of the internet, make a lie come true using some close to real facts and people.

To make the business seem legit they have set up a UK Ltd company, where shareholder and directors are nominee, so no one know who is behind. Their operations is run out of Portugal. Several people have visited their offices and can confirm that 40 or so people work their doing sports betting. Not sure why you would need anyone to do this, Miguel Carvalho can easily place the bets, you can manage billions being one person today, so it’s kind of amazing that people gets impressed by 40 people…. Keep in mind that Bernard Madoff had lots of people working for him, he did not invest any money, they were just there to fool banks and investors. This is how fraudsters operate.

Is this a Ponzi? Its actually very easy to prove – do you send all your money to this company, and they post your returns to your back office – then it is a Ponzi. Do you fund you own betting account with a licensed sports betting company, you can see every trade and withdraw your money at any time, then it is not a Ponzi. If you are already involved with BeWise Trade, ask them to bet on your personal account with a sports betting company, they would never do this as they have no idea what to do.

Some people claim that it has to be for real, as they are able to withdraw their winnings. Of course they can withdraw their winnings, it is how a Ponzi work! Make people believe it’s true by paying out some money, people get greedy and put in more money, and when the scammers are satisfied they take the money and run.

I will not waste any time looking at their pay plan, this is not a MLM, it is a scam. Stay way!

LottoSpring / ProSpring Review

Website: www.prospringlaunch.com / www.lottospring.net

The domains where registered June and July 2015, so with prelaunch already from August 2015 this is a business that went from idea to reality very quickly. There is very little information about this business besides most people claiming that the founder is Jamie Mather. I guess we can call that that some type of transparency.

Their gaming license is said to be 8048JAZ2013-014, Curaçao. This licensed is owned by Kootac N.V, a company which offer affiliate and white label lottery setups.

Their business opportunity is that you can take part in other winners prizes, if someone within your ‘syndicate’ wins, you get paid. Your ‘syndicate’ consist of 50 people, if you are the winner you collect 20% of the prize money and 80% is sharer on the other 49 members. Prizes are from 5 to 50 million euro, its unknown how they got these numbers as lotteries normally rely on the amount of tickets sold, which seem not to be the case for this business. Someone claimed on a forum that there is an insurance in place, so with too few players the insurance will cover the prize money… Must be the summer heat, there is not an insurance company in the world that would guarantee for a lottery prize.

On the network side, everyone who joins are entered into a 5×6 matrix, which if filled will consist of 19 530 members. If someone in your matrix wins you get a 5% bonus, if personally introduced you will get 10%. I will assume that the 5% is shared on all 19 530 members, so in the event of a 5 million prize 250 000 is shared on everyone, which means 12.8 euro to each person. Not very exciting, but money is money.

Also, for every person who are active in your matrix for a 4 week period you get 100 points, people you have referred gets you 200 points. For every 300 point you get a ticket in a weekly 50 000 prize draw. If all 19 530 persons are active, and everyone gets paid 100 points per active person, I think the winning odds in this lottery will be really poor, but someone better in math should do the final calculation for this.

The price to be active in LottoSpring is 33 euro per month, for ProSpring 66 euro per month.

I think this business seen from the MLM side is really bad, there is not much you can do to ensure you make money, when it comes down to luck most of us never make any money (how often do you win a lottery?). As a lottery concept it might catch on, it has some interesting features. But I do not understand why this spreads like fire in dry grass among MLM’ers, maybe I have missed something? When I work a company I want to know that I will get paid, not by luck.

OneCoin Review

Website: https://www.onecoin.eu

Offically OneCoin’s Founder, Owner and Chief Operating Officer is Dr. Ruja Ignatova. But if you look at some of the earlier videos posted online from OneCoin meetings she does not come across as the founder, she seem at the time to have limited knowledge and passion for the business – she act like an employee at best. At these same videos you will see Nigel Allan, a known fraudster, as the passionate seller of the concept. It is also said that Ruja Ignatova graduated Oxford with Magister Juris in European and Comparative Law in 2004, but there is no evidence of this.

What most lightly is the case is that some well-known fraudsters came up with this concept and needed a face for their business that no one could attack. The offered Ruja Ignatova a job with an insane income potential, and she did as many would, said yes. She might not even knew at the time that it was a scam. There is a lot that point towards Sebastian Greenwood and Nigel Allan being behind the scam, they are both known to have run, and still are running, scams. In early 2015 Nigel Allan was officially sacked from his job with OneCoin, I don’t buy into this for a minute, but I see why it had to be communicated, his past as a fraudster was becoming a challenge for OneCoin, so better to keep him back stage.

OneCoin is one of the most well directed scams in years, they have even launched a charity foundation so improve their image, the One World Foundation (officially I am not sure if they want to be named the founders, but there is plenty of things pointing in that direction). They also bought a page in Forbes Magazine Bulgaria and told their members that Forbes had written about OneCoin, which was not the case, when you buy a page you buy adverticing.

Onto their product; OneCoin claims to be mining coins. But contrary to Bitcoin, they will not share with anyone how the mine their coins. My guess, a big pool of coins that they hand out as people pay them money. They also state that they launched OneCoin as Bitcoin had failed – when did that happen, why is big investors and financial institutions working with Bitcoin if it failed? They also claim that no one could use Bitcoin any longer, as the price per coin was to high (who could afford a 1000 usd coin). Just in case they read this; Bitcoin is split into smaller units, you can buy Bitcoin for a dollar if you want too.

The OneCoin pricing is from 100 euro up to 5000 euro, and it seem like they are just launching a 12,500 euro deal. For this you get thin air, and coins that no one will ever buy from you, besides possibly stupid members on an internal marketplace. The reason people ‘invest’ is that OneCoin will do as Bitcoin, increase insanely in value, and you will earn thousands of percent on your money. What people forget is that money on an internal account is not real money, its internal money. It only have value of you can exchange it, and when the last idiot has joined, you are left with worthless coins. No auction site or marketplace for OneCoin’s will do anything to help the situation, there is just no chance in the world that a scam will turn into legal, and fake coins will get any value.

OneCoin now claim to have more than 440 000 members (July 2015). It could well be true, there are scams that have reached higher numbers than this, but I am pretty sure they fake their numbers big time. Still, if they have 10% of this, the people behind will walk away (or into jail) with possibly a few hundred million euro. One of the ways they have reach the big numbers is using people like Ted Nuten with the Business for Home newsletter and website. He well willing spread their lies (press releases) a few times, which is kind of surprising for someone who is one of the ‘watch dogs’ of the MLM industry. Maybe he has a good position, I cannot find any other good reason as no one else who take themselves seriously have written about this company in a good way.

As always with these companies, there is no point addressing the MLM side of their business. This is scam, people pay in a sum of money and sit back waiting for the money to grown with several thousand percent. In MLM people work hard to make money, if you sit back and do nothing you make zero money.