ChatToText Exposed- MLM scam on Facebook and Twitter
By: Dennis Yu
In his fight against MLM scams, here is another guest post by Dennis Yu.
Have you seen ChatToText? Sign up for $5.99 a month, which then allows you to enroll others at $5.99 a month. The more folks you have under you, the more money you can make. Get in on the ground floor now before it’s too late! Why work your dull day job when you can be a ChatToText mogul raking in the millions, just like those people you see on late night infomercials (blonde models and rented sport cars not included). So don’t spend too much time thinking– just sign up right now and PayPal me, while I’ve got you all excited.
This is their promotional video:They even use a pyramid diagram in the video! Folks, if the illustration describing how you’re going to make money relies on something that looks like a pyramid, um – don’t argue. It’s just a bad thing.
Okay, fine– it got shut down by Facebook for violating their terms of service– Section 3.3 about pyramid schemes. But as Shawn Pringle, ChatToText founder and CEO of TopNet Solutions, rightly asserts on allfacebook.com– it was because Facebook was afraid of ChatToText and wanted to roll this service into their own product. They shut it down because they saw how ingenious the idea was of having friends sell out their friends, who sell out their friends, for $6 a month.
Facebook better hurry up and do what MySpace and Twitter are doing to allow scammers to monetize. For example, there are a ton of players that sell sponsored tweets, where you as a user can allow somebody to inject ads into your tweets– not marked as ads, of course, since that would defeat the whole purpose. The point is that you can sell your trust– and friends who sign up for scams won’t know what you actually like versus what’s a disguised promotional message.
Imagine that– virtual identity theft at perhaps 10 cents per occurrence. Where do I sign up? I think I’m running low on nutritional products from The Biggest Loser. Probably need to stock up on Viagra, too.
Hey, if Facebook gets to keep all their ad revenue, as the ChatToText founder asserts, why can’t other parasites join the game? It’s just not fair that Facebook can do the hard work necessary to build a legitimate community where users trust one another — and then not allow us to come in and leech off it. Medical marijuana in Colorado is legal, so what’s the big deal with allowing a few pyramid schemes in?
You can always identify folks like me because of how one-sided my arguments are. If anyone ever attacks my pyramid scheme or MLM, I like to argue how they’re not the same thing. I will completely ignore your well-stated arguments and respond back in 3rd grade English. Just look at Send Out Cards – certainly a legitimate MLM, but one where the hard core believers don’t want to admit that 69% of these folks never earned a penny. And these are statistics that MLMs have to publish by law, so it’s hard to argue.
It’s like trying to argue about how many calories a bag of Cheetos has, when anyone who is literate can read the nutritional label themselves. Yet some people will keep asserting that if you are eating Cheetos while watching The Biggest Loser, then those calories don’t get absorbed by the body. Arguing on the Internet….
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Good lord, hadn’t heard of this, but it amazes me what people will come up with to make money. Still, I guess we should give them credit for creativity, after all there is a fool born every minute.
.-= PJ Mullen´s last blog ..There’s a nlog in my blog =-.
ugh. can’t believe how naive some people can be when it comes to these types of things.
.-= ciara´s last blog ..Mini-Me’s First Boyfriend or How I Officially Became My Mother =-.
Ciara: People can be such nit-wits, can’t they? The world is loaded with people who think they’ll get something for nothing. Thanks for visiting!
The funny thing is that while technology constantly changes, the scams themselves hardly ever do. Somebody click on one of the ads above so some of these scammers can lose 3 cents.
.-= Dennis Yu´s last blog ..Google Analytics in Korean– and a scary thought =-.
Wow! This is hilarious! Being that most text messaging is free (or darn near free)… why would anyone choose to pay for it on a computer? The phone in their pocket too heavy? BTW, can’t you chat by smart phone now anyway? I know you can google chat on your phone. Facebook chat is pry only weeks away.
Hethe: for once you and I are in complete agreement!
You can print a greeting card on your computer for almost nothing– which then allows you to hand-write a note. Most ecards sites are free, too. The question is not about the cards, it’s about the charlatans who sell the dream of getting rich quick in typical MLM fashion. Folks like Doo Dilly and Hethe have a field day hitting their arguments out of the park here, yet they still keep coming.
.-= Dennis Yu´s last blog ..A clever trick to automatically invite all your Facebook friends to be fans of your page =-.
Dennis, I don’t think anyone would argue that misleading or straight up lying is a good to have taking place in business. And if anyone ever says doing a business will get you rich quick and is easy to do, they are probably a liar. This is true not just in MLM but in all business and marketing practices. I hate how most MLM’s do play on that idea… “get rich quick” and how many (if not a majority) of MLM’s are so terrible in product/service that it’s hard not to call them a scam in the first moment you see them. You will rarely hear a true leader (true leader being defined as one who leads by example) say their MLM is “EASY” to do. They may say it is a “Simple” concept to execute but not an easy business. That is at least the mantra in my company… none of our leaders will ever tell you it’s easy to make great money in SOC and many even stress the fact that consistently showing 1 person a day about the business can be a difficult challenge. Our training CD says, look to do the business for 2-5 years if you truly want to make it in our MLM business. Personally, if I ever see “easy” “quick” and “rich” in the same conversation I instantly think “Scam!”
I am trying to notify as many people as possible that iZigg has known felons and famous mlm scammers representing them… please help
RE: iZigg a text message marketing mlm co.
iZigg rep’s Dr. Scott Elliot And Brian Underwood… are both felons and known MLM scammers… google them or see… http://www.facebook.com/pages/Is-izigg-mobile-marketing-a-scam/148436058530850 – for links
Elliot’s FTC court doc’s actually say… “The settlement bars Elliott from participating in or assisting others in participating in prohibited marketing schemes, including pyramid schemes.”
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/07/elliott.shtm
they caused thousands of people in their last scams “Local Ad Link” & “Burnlouge” much pain… please pass the word
please help me inform others
I like Chat2text. I have been a customer for about a year. I had no interest in the MLM part of it, I just like the product. It provides live support chat for websites, but the unique thing is that it sends the customer chat to my cellphone by text SMS. I can chat with a website visitor, and not be tied to a computer like all other live chat supports. And at $6 a month, it is the cheapest that I have found.
I also have been using chat to text for a minute now. Hardly noticed the pyramid scheme part, maybe I should be taking a better look eh…
To begin my business with iZigg I invested $2600. and have spent surely hundreds of hours training people in my organization of 58 people (while Izigg has NO training program available to help me unless I’m recruiting – and SADLY that only entails a 3 way sales call or my prospect showing up at a meeting where the ‘top earner’ tells them ‘you can text my name to 90210 and I’m available to help you any time, we’re going into business together and we’re a team’), Currently my organization has sold nearly $100,000. and all I’ve earned is $1600. I continue to listen to calls where, inevitably, I hear ‘top earners’ like Dr Scott Elliot, Michael Rutherford, etc.. claim ‘our company pays back .70 cents out of every dollar to agents!!’ On top of this farce, recently there’s been a HUGE push to sell *agents only* a Facebook product that cost $39.95 A MONTH (while they say it is commissionable – for exactly whom I wonder) iZigg’s official basis for this necessity for us of course is that it will help small businesses by allowing them to monetize their social media (months after ‘some’ agents originally paid for this I doubt it has even made Izigg as much as they paid to develop it – and to date ‘zero’ small businesses are using it because it still isn’t available to small businesses). Now I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but it seems to me we have a money racket going here, where a huge majority of sales come from agency and autoship purchases instead of real retail product sales in the marketplace. The technology is out-of-site and the branding is drop dead sexy, people, that said, iZigg is getting rich based on your agency prices and autoships. In February 2011 Brian Underwood and Dave Liniado told us what the ratio between agency purchases and retail was. They said retail sales accounted for 60% of all money made. Now, knowing what I’ve experienced, I wonder if they were including agent autoships…. and how much worse it’s gotten. Am I just another gullible and disgruntled man playing victim to just another MLM or do I justifiably have cause in raising a flag? Either way, if you’re familiar with the FTC’s case against Burn Lounge and you’ve read the Federal Court’s ruling released in that case on July 7…… you have to admit the similarities are scary for any realistic average American.