The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Should she join World Ventures?

My daughter wants to join World Ventures. Are they a viable business?

World Ventures is a pyramid scheme. They’ve been marketing themselves in Botswana for a few years now but your daughter mustn’t waste her time and money on them.

We’ve been warning people about World Ventures since 2009 when they took over an earlier pyramid scheme called Success University. They ay they offer travel discounts but so far I haven’t seen any evidence of that. They certainly don’t have any discounts better than those hotel chains will offer you for free without having to pay to join a scheme and then recruit multiple levels of people beneath you the way WorldVentures does.

What pyramid schemes like WorldVentures really sell is the promise of income from recruiting multiple layers of people beneath you, each of whom pays to join and then starts a flow of money up the pyramid, some of which stays with you as it passes by. Of course this rarely happens because it’s almost impossible to recruit the number of people you need to achieve the targets the scheme sets you. The figures produced by WorldVentures prove this.

In 2012 WorldVentures published data on the income their US representatives earned from the scheme. It was sad. Firstly 77.5% of their representatives made no money at all. Nothing. Zero. Then 82% of the small proportion people who made any money had a median annual income of a mere P200. Remember that's income, not profits. It's not money they could spend on themselves. The 1% of the people at the top of the pyramid took 84% of all the money.

Please don’t let your daughter waste her money joining the WorldVentures scam. She’ll just be giving her money to that 1% at the top of the pyramid. They’re the only people who ever benefit from a pyramid scheme like WorldVentures.

Should I trade binary options?

Hi, I need your help. I was contacted by a certain lady by the name Emma Thompson. She says she works for OneTwoTrade company that helps people buy shares through Binary options. She says people get rich within 3 days tripling their money. She entices by offering to give you $200 for first time traders. But what surprises me is she wants to debit a certain amount out of my account. I want to know if they are legitimate or not. I did not give them my card number because she wanted it.

Looking forward to your response.

Binary Options are a very risky business. The idea behind binary options is actually very simple. You select two commodities such as foreign currencies and you bet whether one of them will increase or decrease compared to the other. For instance, you might select the exchange rate between Euro and the US dollar. There are only two possibilities of what can happen, they say. The rate can go up or it can go down. You gamble on which you think will happen and you can win and make a profit, or lose and get nothing. Two options, so they call it binary. So far, so simple.

But there are two important questions you should ask. Firstly, if it’s possible to make money from binary options why aren’t these people keeping this idea secret and making money for themselves? What do they gain from you joining their scheme?

Secondly, if such profits were really possible don’t you think banks would be doing it and earning this sort of money for themselves?

The answer is the same for both questions. These profits are NOT really possible. This company makes money from you joining their scheme. They are the ones making the huge profits, not you and not me.

I found an interesting quote about binary options. Gordon Pape, writing in Forbes magazine said: "If people want to gamble, that’s their choice. But let’s not confuse that with investing. Binary options are a crapshoot, pure and simple."

Please don’t waste your money.