The California Attorney’s General office raised the red flags on YTB, aka Your Travel Biz, recently with a 25 million dollar law suit. Now mlmwatchdog reports that a 100 million dollar class action law suit has been filed by a St. Louis legal firm and that the Illinois AG is working with the California AG.

MLM Watchdog Story

The red flags were being rasised on YTB long ago. There is no reason anyone should be caught off guard. Check out this link. Reality Check

Critical thinking network marketers that I know had no problem seeing the red flags right away years ago.

Possibly even YTB realized their fate prior to the California AG’s law suit, as they notified the public of plans to change from network marketing to a franchise system. Major red flag announcement.

Franchise Info

What should be of concern to the network marketing  community is the bad light that is put on us when these situations arise. The public and even many network marketers do not understand that there is no such thing as an illegal network marketing pay plan. If a pay plan is illegal, then it is not network marketing. It is only an illegal pay plan disguised as a network marketing pay plan.

From one angle, we are happy to see the government take action. But on the other hand, people associate them with us. Even worse, there are many more still in business.

Can people make money in these illegal plans? Yes, and some people will make huge amounts of money. But many will lose, and the longer one is allowed to exist, the more people will lose and the worse they make the network marketing industry look. What if the government just let them be? They typically do for a while. It takes time and money to investigate and prepare for a law suit.

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On August 1st, reports came in that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia had frozen all assets of Ad Surf Daily, also known on the internet as ASD.

No charges have been filed. But likely only because the investigation is still in progress.

Read all about it in the local newspaper’s internet site. Hopefully this site will be available at this link for a while. If not, just do a google search.

REPORT

If the link above fails, get some info from our friends at MLM Watchdog.

Why did this happen so quickly? We have seen programs almost identical to this one that lasted years. This seems to have been around only a few months. I suspect it had to do with the rapid growth. As in $53,000,000 seized by the secret service.

Do people join what often turns out to be a scam because they don’t know better or because they are just greedy?

At Mentoring For Free, we can help you avoid scams if you don’t know how. We can show you how to develop your on crystal ball. If you are just greedy, I don’t know if anyone can ever help you.

The secret, if you want to call it that, is to first put yourself in the best possible position for success. If you join a scam, you failed at step one.

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“YourTravelBiz.com operates a gigantic pyramid scheme that is immensely profitable to a few individuals on top and a complete rip-off for most everyone else,” Attorney General Brown said. “Today’s lawsuit seeks to shut down the company’s unlawful operation before more people are exploited by the scam.”

The above quote comes directly from the office of the Attorney General for the State of California. You can view the news release here…. http://ag.ca.gov/newsalerts/release.php?id=1596&

Knowledgeable people in the network marketing industry immediately reported, YTB, or Your Travel Biz, as being a pyramid when they first looked at the program. The same was true of Burnlounge, another publicly traded illegal pyramid. When they were sued, they terminated the MLM program within days in hopes of surviving. Note that YTB had just last month announced plans to change to a franchised based pay plan. See http://www.ytb.com/downloads/franchiseInfo.pdf

What should be of concern to many people, is that the compensation plan which is the reason the company is being called an illegal pyramid scheme is very similar to many other network marketing companies. If you look at companies with products or services with a very low margin of profit, you will likely see a similar compensation plan.

So if you are in or planning to join a program, be sure to check it out. Types of companies with low profit margin products and services using a compensation plan that pays mostly for recruiting of people include many MLM travel companies, MLM electric service companies and technology based companies such as long distance service.

The bigger each of these companies get, the more people get scammed. The more people that get scammed, the more complaints come into a state’s Attorney’s General office. The more complaints, the more likely it is that the AG will investigate. With a presidential election year in progress, fewer complaints are needed to catch the attention of the AG’s.

For more information on this subject, go to the website of a well known MLM distributor rights protector, Rod Cook. The site is MLM Watchdog

Check out other articles while you are there. You just may be surprised what is going on in this industry in plain view that you should know about.

Network Marketing is the greatest industry in the world. We just need to eliminate the pyramids and the scams. It all comes down to your education. Get one before it costs you for not being educated.

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As gasoline prices continue to rise the MLM gasoline scams keep showing up on the seen.

One site that I use for information on scams and wrong doing in our industry is MLM WatchDog. Rod Cook, who owns this site, just happens to have been put into a position where he had to learn about the legal vs. illegal in regards to marketing of gasoline additives.

So rather than me tell you what to watch out for and why you should be running from all of them, let’s let Rod tell you at his site. The main site is MLM WatchDog.

There is a link on the main page titled, “MLM Gasoline Shame“. The link takes you to the first of five reports on the page. You can see all five links at the top right of the page.

If you are in an MLM company touting fuel savings or contemplating joining one as you watch gasoline prices soar, this is a must read for you.

The MLM WatchDog site will be listed in our links for your future reference.

And by the way. If you can’t tell from the site, Rod Cook is one of the good guys in MLM. He lead the push for the creation of The Distributors Rights Organization, designed to protect the rights of distributors. He probably knows more stories of people terminated in this industry than any one person.

Soak up some knowledge and save yourself some headaches.

Plug into Mentoring For Free for even more knowledge on avoiding MLM scams.

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At Mentoring For Free, we teach people to avoid MLM scams and bad MLM companies. It is just a small piece of the valuable free skills training that we teach.

I am going to show you one of the simplest techniques to avoid being scammed.

All you have to do is some simple Google research. When looking at a program, just Google the program and the people running it as a scam.

Here is an example using BurnLounge. Your Google search would look like this.

“BurnLounge” scam

I put BurnLounge in quotes, not because it had to be, but just as a reminder to you that anytime you have a company with two or more words in the name or a persons name, then you use the quotes to avoid unwanted search results.

Now you have your search results on – “BurnLounge” scam. When the results are a huge number of pages you pretty much no you have a scam already. But remember that these results do not always find a scam.

These results simply have the name you put in quotes and the word scam on the same page. So someone could be using scam on their page to get attention. Or they may be telling you that this is not a scam.

Read the results on page one. More if you need too. You will find people claiming a scam and possibly some defending the company or person as not being a scam. Real scams will have overwhelming results suggesting a scam.

You will almost always get Google results even on the cleanest companies. Read your results.

The reason I chose BurnLounge to use as an example is because they are no longer in business. Secondly the evidence of a scam was huge. Very recently the company websites disappeared from the internet.

When this publicly traded company launched, I quickly realized that they met the definition of an illegal pyramid. Don’t let the fact that a company is publicly traded trick you into thinking that this fact makes them legal. It doesn’t.

The Federal Trade Commission (Wired) stepped in a year or so later and said the same thing. BournLounge disagreed for about 2 days before eliminating the MLM compensation plan and avoiding going to court.

There are so many programs on the internet that if you did a search on the company’s, you would be shocked at all the reports from people claiming to have been scammed.

The same holds true for individuals. Try this google search.

“phil piccolo” scam

Now I don’t know Phil. Only know what I see on the internet. But if I did this search then I would not be involved with him. It is just that simple. I don’t want to take a chance. Maybe you read these same Google search results and decide there is no problem. So we may each see things differently. You get to decide.

Hopefully you will start doing some basic research like this before spending your time and money on scams. You are going to be amazed how many new programs come along that are being run by people with many scam complaints against them.

You will also be amazed at how many people running new programs have no internet identity except what it says about them on the company website. How can that be?

Happy Googling.

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I really think you needed to read that again. The title of this post was not enough for you. Think about the statement.

If you have been on the internet for very long then you have mostly heard that It is in the List. I am telling you it’s not.

My friend and mentor, Tom “Big Al” Schreiter, has built an enormous online list. He has done it by offering people great free information to build on their MLM Success in exchange for their email address. Then after you get on his list he keeps giving you great free info. He builds relationships with the people on his list.

Now, go to one of Tom’s workshops. And by the way, what a deal, $20 for 3 hours of solid training. You will see that he has relationships with many of the people attending the workshop. Some were built online. Some are people that are attending their second, third or more workshops with Tom. Some are people that Tom has known for twenty or thirty years.

So these people that have relationships with Tom will keep coming to his workshops and buying his material because of the relationships.

What if I had my hands on Tom’s list?

If I emailed the list, would they come to my workshops or would they buy my training materials or join me in my network marketing company? They are targeted right? We know they attend workshops. We know they buy training materials. We know they are into network marketing.

But no, they would not buy from me. We have no relationship. Their relationship is with Tom.

What if we have Tom mail the list and ask them to attend my workshops or buy my materials. Now since Tom has a relationship with the people on the list, they may buy on his recommendation. But it is because he has the relationship.

It is the same with any list. If you go out and generate a list but you never build a relationship then your list is almost worthless to you.

What about buying leads? They are targeted, right? Not targeted to the degree that you are led to believe. And you have no relationship with them. No wonder buying leads is such a scam. You may as well just use the phone book for leads to call.

There are safelists. Same problem, no relationship. List building programs. No relationship.

What about advertising to known network marketers at social networking sites. Targeted? How targeted? No relationship. So if you have no relationship then why promote to them? It doesn’t work.

Let’s look at a Mentoring For Free list. I create my Mentoring For Free list by offering a free ebook, Success In 10 Steps. I target network marketers. The one’s that download the book have one thing in common. They are all trying to figure out how to make network marketing work for them. They are feeling the failure and frustration that most people do in this business.

They already have the desire to achieve MLM success. They have all tried it without reaching the kind of success they expect. They are all looking for answers. This is a highly targeted list. When they read Success In 10 Steps, the relationship building starts.

Next, they will receive emails from me. Then a phone call. And I will not make any sales pitch to them. They will learn about some important recorded training, just a few hours to start. Then they learn about ten live training call each week and that much of the training has been recorded for years and is available to them along with some videos.

They plug into this free generic information and about two to three weeks into it I hear things from them like, “I have learned more about network marketing in a couple of weeks with the training than what I learned in years prior to this.”

We are building a relationship. If the person from my list who has received all of this free MLM training ever wants to look at a new network marketing company, chances are good that they will look at mine and join me because we have a relationship.

And people join people, not companies.

If everything you read seems to not be working, and all those things your upline is telling you to do to build your business don’t work for you, then it is time for you to stop and take a look at what you are doing versus what I am doing.

You see, I was one of those people who struggled for years. No success worth mentioning. I found Success In 10 Steps, read it, plugged into the training, and discovered that this is different and it works like nothing I had ever done. You owe it to yourself to give this a serious look.

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I sponsored 20 people in two years but no one stayed, they could not purchase the amount of leads needed to get any where. The two guys running these lead scams are still out there today scamming people making money off the innocent.

Penny Dude, New Brunswick, Canada

Now listen to this audio where Michael Dlouhy will introduce you to many full time network marketers and their experience with purchased leads.

I hope we just saved you tons of money. If you found us to late to save yourself any money, then hopefully you learned that your failure in network marketing is not your fault. You were lied to. Now it’s time to get the truth. Read Success In 10 Steps

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