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Is My Shopping Genie A Scam?

June 17, 2011 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) 2 Comments

Update: 11/8/2011 – People behind My Shopping Genie

I’ll be going into details about the people behind My Shopping Genie as well as top earners in the company  this month.

Original Post Follows:

There has been a debate raging for several years between people who call My Shopping Genie a scam and others who defend it as a legitimate business opportunity. I’ve pulled together some of the information from both sides of the debate and will be posting it here on a regular basis. My attention was initially drawn to My Shopping Genie when I received the following question:

“I was wondering if you might share your thoughts on “My Shopping Genie” from “My Net Universe”.”

High profile internet marketer Stephen Pierce states in his My Shopping Genie review that “From an internet marketing standpoint, I thought it was a goldmine.” He later goes on to say,

“I wasn’t really interested in like what they call the distributor dollars like with network marketing and all that, because personally I think that with network marketing it is hard to make money, because you have to have such a huge volume with a low percentage payoff. What appealed to me was the superior affiliate model inside – how you can make the money just by giving away the free software. So, you give away the software for free for people to use – and if you know how to give it away and you have thousands of people using it, that’s like walking around with your hands in the pocket of thousands of people.”

You can watch Stephen Pierce‘s video of his My Shopping Genie review below:

In fact, as far as I can tell there doesn’t seem to be much debate about whether or not the My Shopping Genie application works as claimed. From the reports I’ve seen about it, it does. The controversy surrounds the structure of the compensation plan and the nature of the payments the company behind My Shopping Genie makes to its distributors.

Since this type of business opportunity is outside the scope of my expertise I decided to look into what the experts in this area thought. I first talked to Lynndel Edgington of Eagle Research & Associates who pointed me to a June 13, 2011 post at Rod Cook’s MLM Watch Dog site which says:

“Complaints are coming in about selective commissions paid to Distributors. To the WatchDog, this is usually an indicator of a Ponzi-Pyramid meltdown. There are not enough new funds coming in to pay first or large distributors. There has always been debate that the licensed icons My Shopping Genie sold did not return money on shoppers as the company promoted. Editor’s Note: If the signup fee is all that is carrying My Shopping Genie…..the commission payment complaints certainly make sense.”

The potential problem with the compensation plan structure has been cleanly described in the My Shopping Genie review by UK writer Marian Owen at Business Opportunity Watch which states the following:

“My Shopping Genie does pay its distributors for recruiting new distributors. The fact that this payment is structured as the fee for a licence to distribute free copies of the software does not alter this fact. Obviously, if it were this easy to get around the law then everyone would be doing it. So the law is widely drawn to catch any arrangements which have the effect of rewarding participants in the scheme simply for the act of recruiting other people.”

The companies response to these types of allegations was covered by freelance Sunday Independent’s Rory Egan in his My Shopping Genie expose that he did in conjunction with the Irish Television show Prime Time:

“Prime Time offered a right of reply to all three of the distributors featured in the report; Hugh Paul Ward, Tony Lynam and Harry Rayburn, but each of them declined. We put it to the company that they were in contravention of the consumer protection acts of 2007 and in a written reply, MyNet Universe said, “The distribution method is common in the software industry in both individual and enterprise software rights. There is no commission paid for the act of “recruiting”, commissions are paid on the sale of a product: the Genie software license.”

A follow up story about My Shopping Genie by Sunday Indpendent write Don Lavery stated the following:

“An expert in commercial law said it had all the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme and this was confirmed by a representative of the National Consumer Agency.”

You can watch the Prime Time expose of My Shopping Genie in the videos below:

A similar point has been made by Troy Dooly in the following videos. The second video includes a letter written to Troy Dooley with a potential counter-argument to the “My Shopping Genie is a “Ponzi-Pyramid” viewpoint:

The following video is the one that includes a letter containing a potential counterargument to Troy Dooly’s video. In the video Troy states that the letter is from Anders Berglund, who according to Direct Selling News Europe has held the following positions:

“Between 2000 and 2006 (when he retired), he was General Counsel of Lux International AG. Back in 1987 Anders became a board member and legal advisor to the Swedish Direct Selling Association. Since 1989, he has represented Sweden on the board of delegates of the Federation of European Direct Selling Associations (FEDSA). He was Chairman of the Association from 1999 to 2002 and has been Vice Chairman since 2007. He has represented Sweden on the Board of Delegates of the World Federation of Direct Selling Associations (WFDSA) since 1993 and was Vice Chairman, Governance, of WFDSA from 1997 to 1999.”

There is further discussion about this My Shopping Genie video here.

And again, in the comments section in Business Opportunity Watch’s review of My Shopping Genie, Marian Owen counters Anders Berglund’s position. (Note, I have NOT verified that any of the information that Troy Dooly or Marian Owen discuss – including the scribd document – is in fact from Anders Berglund).

Allegations of unpaid My Shopping Genie distributors:

According to a June 13th, 2011 post at BusinessForHome.org which apparently is a letter from Kalpesh Patel, Kalpesh Patel has claimed about MyNet Universe:

“They have not paid most of my distributors since January unless they were globals or they asked several times to be paid, even then it was a hard struggle…. I can provide dozens of emails if required, to this day hundreds of reps have not been paid in my team alone, thousands worldwide. They owe me over $50,000, emails to prove this too if it ever gets there. Nobody replies to my emails, calls or texts since they stopped paying me 5 weeks ago, have proof of this too.”

And again, according to a June 13th post at BusinessForHome.org, Andrew Burling sent them the following letter (again I haven’t verified the letter was actually from him):

“They owe us TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, and after asking, then begging, then threatening to get paid, they turfed us! We were turfed on June 6, 2011. We were accussed of CROSS SPONSORING, but we were not even in another Company.”

One of the commenters there asks a question that appears to be directed at Andrew Burling: “how come a video was uploaded to you tube on june 3rd ( 3 days before your termination, coincidence ?)”.  The upload date can be seen in the following image:

Limu video

Limu video

The video referenced can be watched below:

MyNet Universe’s Response

MyNet Universe has written a letter countering both Kalpesh Patel’s & Andrew Burling’s allegations. Click here to read the full text.

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Push Button Cash Site review of sales tactics

May 6, 2011 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) 21 Comments

I started doing this Push Button Cash Site review of its sales tactics because of my new interest in the sales tactics used in recent launches. The sales letter itself was so misleading and bizarre that I ended up creating the following equally strange Push Button Cash Site review video  (A more standard review of the sales tactics is below the video).

The sales page goes a long way to tell you what the product is, but of course never tries to explain what the “magic, secret, whiz-bang” software/system is. Not only that, but it uses the typical dubious claim of only have “x numbers of a certain piece of software left” when it states:

“Now, I know you might hate reading this, but you have to make this decision fast, because I’m forced allow this software to be downloaded by only 200 people. ”

The Internet Will Disappear Soon!

The Internet Will Disappear Soon!

It’s the typical sales letter that tries to suck in people by claiming they can “push a button and make tons of money”. If you want to keep believing in fairy dust and magic secrets then fine. But what I’ve tried to do over the years is put up videos such as the video here which actually explains what it REALLY takes to make money online…and it’s NOT a secret AND it’s not a $37 piece of software that claims to make tons ocash from a Push button Clash Site – review that last statement very carefully!

Push Button Cash Site will only cost you $47 + a few hundred more dollars.

I don’t have a problem with upsells that are reasonable. But don’t you wonder why “Daniel Young”, the “owner” of Push Button Cash site is paying people up to $263 per sale to sell his Push Button Cash Site product? Take a look at his page where he’s recruiting people to sell his software:

Push Button Cash Site paying people up to $263 to sell its software

Push Button Cash Site paying people up to $263 to sell its software

So what does that page mean for you? It means that he expects YOU to spend up to $438.33 on his $47 product by trying to get you to buy more and more “stuff” to help you succeed.

But wait a minute…doesn’t he claim he claim in his sales letter that he used the exact same $47 software to make $2,428,749.88 dollars in 24 months? I mean, if he’s telling truth that he made $2,428,749.88 with his $47 software, why would you need to pay for anything else?

According to Don & Jeremy’s Push Button Cash Site review he wants you to play for plenty more in order to be “successful” with his amazing “can’t miss” push button software. But here’s something even more interesting that someone who bought the software said:

“It adds a “powered by” link to the footer of your site which is not good at all since Auto generated content is totally against Google’s TOS.”

If you’re wondering if that’s true, then you may want to read what Google itself has to say about auto-generated content:

Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don’t add any value to users.

Now, there are rare cases where auto-generated content does add value – the popular TechMeme site is such an example:

“Techmeme uses an algorithm to order stories by importance, which depends on several factors that include the number of links to the story’s web page and how old the story is. “Anti-gaming” efforts have been made to lower the effect that a high number of links can have on a story if the links were created in a short period of time, or by a small number of people.”

In other words, Techmeme is actually providing a potentially valuable service for certain type of users. It’s not just scraping content from other sites and posting them to a new site.

Push Button Cash Site customer support problems

I’ve also seen several people complaining about the lack of support at Push Button Cash Site. Even people saying the software didn’t even work when they bought it and tried to use it with certain hosting companies.  Maybe that’s been fixed maybe it hasn’t. I’d love to hear your own experience with Push Button Cash Site – you can share them below. But, please do NOT place links in the comments.

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Profit Jackpot review of sales process

March 28, 2011 By Paul (Founder, WorkAtHomeTruth) 1 Comment

I recently received an email from Anik Singal about a Profit Jackpot review video where he shows how he created 10 sites in 10 minutes and claimed that he did it because someone challenged him to do so.  Of course if you’ve been around internet marketing for any period of time this is probably one of the least impressive accomplishments ever proclaimed.

I don’t do autoblogging anymore, but I have done it in the past, and studied a lot of the best autobloggers (primarily because they were so far ahead when it came to automating processes).  At one point several years ago I even created my own system that did the following:

  1. Autobuilt Joomla sites on an S-Curve schedule based on starting & ending date parameters provided.
  2. At the end of each day – automatically checked content that was created on the site, pulled the first paragraph from each piece of content, and created multiple blog posts that were then randomly sent out to x out of N blogs. Those posts had links back to the original articles as well as the directories that the articles came from.
  3. The blog posts then randomly triggered a series of bookmarking actions back to the blogs – again completely randomized.

Keep in mind that this was FOUR YEARS AGO and there was already software that people like Adam Short, who used to run PGInsider had developed that could do the WordPress install portion to HUNDREDS of sites across MULTIPLE servers MUCH MORE QUICKLY than what Anink shows in the Profit Jackbot video.

And there were (and are) extremely easy ways to clone master blogs to target blogs – which is key if you don’t want to mess around with setting up your favorite plugins on each blog you install.

The programmer I was working with at the time also developed a way to quickly clone the Joomla sites with the categories, design, and extensions in tact.

At the end of the post I’ll go over several other things you must keep in mind if you still want to test out autoblogging (not recommended – especially with this system).

In fact, my guess is that the autobloggers from those days would be laughing at the Profit Jackpot video and wondering what all the fuss is about. And that’s because…there seem to be…

Two Types Of People Providing Profit Jackpot Review, Analysis, And Questions…

In fact, the Facebook comments of people who actually do a Profit Jackpot review of the video, analysis of the video, and who are asking questions can be broken down into two types of people:

1) Those who know what’s going on.

2) Those who are easily impressed.

Profit Jackpot Review Of Case Study Video From Those Who Know What’s Going On

a. Google Farmers Update Questions

When I first went to the Profit Jackpot reviews of the video there were a couple people who’s comments stood out quickly. One particularly interesting comment was from Cory Bornmann, founder of AffPortal who stated the following:

“28 duplicates found. Auto blogging is not such a good idea now after the recent Google Algorithm change that has crushed content farms. Even legit content farms like ezine articles got it hard. I’m not so sure another auto blogging platform will work now.”

Although I’m not fond of some of Cory’s Marketing tactics that some of my friends have shared with me, I am impressed by how much he actually tests. He appears to be a real “prove-it-to-me” kind of guy.

He ends by stating “I don’t see this software working long-term”.

In fact, long-time Search Engine Optimization expert Michael Campbell would agree. In his recent

“If you duplicate content from another site, you might think its curation, or syndication. But if you do so excessively without adding value, its considered low quality. So you’ll want to minimize posting low value content, where all you do is summarize what others have said.”

And while you’ll see some people posting comments stating their autoblogs weren’t hit, the fact that they’re posting those comments is telling in and of themselves. Anyone who has been hit by Google algorithm changes in the past – whether it be in Adwords or on the Organic side, knows that this early in the game, the more accurate statement for a person to make at this early in the game is that their autoblogs haven’t been hit…”yet”.

b. Where Is Profit Jackpot Pulling Comments From?

There is also quite a bit of discussion about how Profit Jackpot is automatically pulling comments into the blog. This is a very reasonable pre-sales question that Anik should be answering.

But at this point – as of 3/28/2011 the only answer he’s given is, “Can’t tell you. It’s a secret”.  Later on in the video he says:

“160 Comments because it’s sucking the comments in. I can’t tell you from where, but it’s doing it very legitimately.”

Well, I can tell you where Profit Jackpot is pulling comments from – and it’s no “big secret”.  If someone told me it was a secret I would question how much they respect me as a person.

It’s NO secret. It’s pulling them from YouTube. In fact the YouTube API allows comments to be pulled.

However – a bigger question is whether or not Profit Jackpot is complying with YouTube’s API’s terms of service when pulling the data.

I don’t think it is.

Take a look at the following video to see why:

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Profit Jackpot Review Of Case Study Video From Those Who Seem To Be Easily Impressed (Or Are Newbies)

You’ll also see quite a few people that are really impressed by the software.

Funny Profit Jackpot Comment Exchange Between Luis G. & Anik Singal

Luis G. states:

“Looks like those phony softwares that are released every week promising money in a push of a button. But because Anik has an astonishing authority and I look up to him then it definitely works. Your the man Anik.”

To which Anik replies:

“Thank you- TRUST me.. it’s NOT the push button softwares you seen in the past.”

I find that exchange particularly hilarious, considering that not to long ago I received the following series of emails from Anik Singal promoting the much maligned Instant Cash Empire “push-button” software :

Come to think of it, why would anyone even need the Profit Jackpot software if they can already produce so much dang money with the Instant Cash Empire software?

Sure, the Profit Jackpot Software only takes a minute to build a site…but the Instant Cash Empire Software promises me I can make MONEY in 2 minutes! ;-)

If You Actually Do Decide To Try Autoblogging (Again…NOT Recommended)…

You need to make sure whatever software you use offers the following:

  1. Ability to group your blogs in projects (essential).
  2. The ability to automatically install across multiple IPs – And ideally across multiple hosting accounts.
  3. You should NOT have to install each blog individually.
  4. The ability to clone master blog configurations to multiple target blogs (i.e., so you don’t have to install plugins every time).
  5. Auto-Upgrade Of Plugins – And a reporting system if the autoupgrades fail.
  6. Ability to automatically vary the type of content used
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