Anyone here know about ACN digital phone marketing?

[wiggs]

My daughters have been sucked in by their friend into thinking they can make thousands of dollars with little effort...by becoming an ACN rep. My smart but naive girls are helpless against a well trained, charismatic sales shark who knows exactly what to say to get their 500 sign up fee. They haven't bought in yet, and won't, if I can help it. My online research tells me this is a pyramid scheme with failure written all over it and I'm showing this to them.

Can anyone reinforce this impression with firsthand experience?

[MADem]

1. There are only a few professions where you can make thousands with little effort

And they are illegal in most states. And any outfit that makes you kick in money to make money sounds like a huge CON JOB to me.

Tell them to run like hell.

[Kutjara]

2. No firsthand experience, but...

...there seem to be quite a few people on the Net who are less than complementary about them. Here's one I googled at random:

http://arbyte.us/blog_archive/2005/04/ACN_Pyramid_Scam.html

It appears to be just another of the thousands of pyramid scams out there. Such scams do make people thousands in no time. Unfortunately, the people they make the money for are the people who started the scam, not the suckers at the bottom of the pyramid.

One simple question is sufficient: if these kinds of business are so incredibly lucrative, why do new members have to chip in joining fees? Surely $500 is chickenfeed to the multimillionaires who are already in the scheme. The answer, of course, is that the only real money in the scheme comes from signing up new members. The key to success is to find someone even more gullible than you are.

[wiggs]

5. That's right...you make money by signing new reps. The answer to

the question of why the initiation fee was to weed out the non-serious participants.

[citygal]

3. Yes...it is a pyramid scheme.

My husband's sister was into this a several years ago, and still is. She swears she is making money. (However, her main customers are her family. And, we are pretty certain she is not making enough to sustain a living because her husband works constantly and she never stops to ask us to purchase Xmas wrapping paper for her children's schools. We are much younger and still have not had children...) Anyway, she got my husband to try this (before I married him and told him this idea was not entrepreneurial) and he LOST money. Furthermore, she signed us up three different times for long distance service. I canceled our phone account because it cost more (and we live in one of the largest US cities).

Then, while in law school, I learned one of my friends' mother's also initially got caught up this. Unfortunately, she, too, lost money. This is a basic pyramid scheme...I hope you can talk your daughters out of wasting t heir time and money. I have yet to hear of anyone really making money on this. It is like Mary Kay.

For the program to work, I think everyone a person knows must be on ACN so that they receive favorable rates. I watched my (now) sister-in-law get everyone in her family to join up. Now, no one in the family is involved in the "sales" portion of ACN, they just pay ACN for her. I think the only person who made any profit was her and it was minimal.

Good Luck!

[wiggs]

6. Yep...I think one of the real downsides is alienating your friends and family

by pulling them into this. And one of the "rules" is that you can't cold call to get people to sign up as new reps...they want you to approach friends.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. Avoid ANY multi-level marketing schemes...

like the plague.

These guys seem to be worse than many of them, though, since they prohibit you from actually selling the product the most people sell things-- advertising and promotion. They force you into simply getting more salespeople to build your downstream.

I got suckered into going to a MLM "seminar" once when I thought it was an actual job interview. I got thrown out when I added up all the commissions involved and they came out to around 30% I asked why I had to build a downstream and get all these little 5 percents when I would really rather just get the 30% for selling a product.

No one understood what I was saying but the two guys running the show, and they weren't happy.

Oh, it's perfectly legitimate to build an outside sales force for a product if you're able to. Some companies might even encourage it, but that's far different from these scams. And that's something you do on your own with hard work, or by buying a line or route, not by paying for a spiel and a dream.