MLM – The Latest Online Scams and How to Avoid Them

Is Zurvita a good opportunity or just another MLM exploiting its distributors? Zurvita promises to help you generate an income and leave a legacy for your family, but there's more to the story. Here’s what you need to know. Is Zurvita a good opportunity? According to the Zurvita Income Disclosure Statement, most people who try the Zurvita business opportunity fail to earn a profit. If most people can’t make money with Zurvita, it can’t be a genuine opportunity. This article may save you $500 and a lot of misery. If you look past the superficial, feel-good marketing of the Zurvita website and dig a little deeper, you’ll discover Zurvita is not what it pretends to be. Is Zurvita a Good Opportunity? Someone has probably approached you about joining Zurvita and is trying to sell you the opportunity. If you join Zurvita, you will be expected to sell the opportunity too. Before you sink your time, money, and reputation into Zurvita, take a moment to understand the game. In his book, The Business Guide: or, Safe Methods of Business, author James Lawrence Nichols reminds us to “…never try to beat a man at his own game.” If you join Zurvita, you will be betting on a game where you don't understand the rules and the odds are stacked against you. Zurvita Will Cost You. The odds you will SPEND money on the Zurvita opportunity is 100%. You may even go into debt. The odds you will MAKE a profit are near ZERO. These facts may shock you, but your financial loss is built into the Zurvita compensation plan. It’s a mathematical certainty. In a moment, I’ll prove it to you. Think Like an Investor. If there is a 100% chance, something might happen, it WILL happen. If there’s a 0% chance it might happen, it WON’T happen. A 1% chance isn’t much better than a snowball’s chance in the bad place. A professional investor wants to know BEFORE she invests if she will make money. Proper analysis will show her. You can do the same thing. Proper analysis will show you the odds of succeeding with Zurvita. Think like an investor. The Odds Are You Will Lose. Before we look at the odds of success with Zurvita, let’stake a look at the odds of some well-known gambling games. A skillful card player has about a 51% chance of beating the house at Blackjack. Those are not good odds, but there’s a fair chance he’ll win more than he loses. Slot machines in Vegas pay out about 25% of the time. These are horrible odds because the player loses 75% of the time. The odds of winning on a roll of dice ranges between about 3% and 17%. This means if you played that game, you’d lose 97% to 83% of the time. According to the Zurvita Income Disclosure, if you play the Zurvita game, there is a 95% chance you will lose money and less than 1% chance you will earn $1,967 or more a month. No one in their right mind would bet on a game where there is a 95% chance of losing. Your odds are better in Vegas. Imagine You Clone Yourself. Imagine that you clone yourself and send your clone off to work a part-time, minimum wage job while you work the Zurvita opportunity for a year. In 2016, Federally mandated minimum wage was $7.25 an hour. Assuming your clone worked 20 hours a week, he would earn about $580 a month before taxes. Remember that number, $580. At the end of the year, your clone will have earned a lot more than you. And, to make matters worse, all you’ll have to show for your Zurvita misadventure is a credit card bill, annoyed friends and some expensive protein powder. What is Zurvita? Zurvita is a direct marketing company with a multi-level compensation plan. I think most people would describe Zurvita as a Multi-marketing company or MLM. It’s rare to see an MLM company admit it’s an MLM, and Zurvita is no different. You will not find mention of MLM anywhere on theZurvita website. Exhaustive research published on the Federal Trade Commission website shows that MLMs exploit people, cause them to lose money, and damage their relationships. On the Zurvita website, you’ll find a story about how Mark and Tracy Jarvis founded the company in 2008 to glorify God and create an environment where people can win. No one forms an MLM company to help people. They create an MLM to get people to help THEM make money! What You Need to Know about MLM. Every MLM sells the dream of making money and winning prizes. The chance to make money is dangled like bait to attract people into the business. It isn’t real. It’s just a dream. Selling the Dream. Selling the dream is the only way an MLM can sell $5 worth ofprotein powder for $50. Selling the dream is why Zurvita earns $100 million in revenue each year while 95% of its Consultants lose money. Once a person believes the MLM is the ticket to a better life, they will eagerly pay $500 for a starter pack. They will also willfully signup to spend $100 a month to have over-priced products auto shipped to their home. They will even chase after their friends and family members, trying to recruit them into the business. Then a curious thing happens. The Honeymoon Ends. A month or two after joining an MLM, they realize instead of MAKING money, they are SPENDING it! They thought the opportunity would bring money in, but it only takes money out. Friends and family avoid them. They maxed out their credit card. Boxes of protein powder are cluttering up the living room. It’s humiliating. They feel like a failure and blame themselves. MLMs know that most people will quit within a few months. That’s why they immediately try to get as much money as they can out of a recruit. The Crazy Thing About MLM. MLM companies like Zurvita expect you to PAY them for the privilege of selling THEIR products and making THEM money. If you want to sell Zurvita products, you must first pay the $35 enrollment fee. This fee is non-refundable. If you want a website, Zurvita will rent you a clone website for $12 a month. You don't own it. You'll be encouraged to purchase a starter pack which could cost up to $500. You'll also be encouraged to enroll in monthly auto-ship for $70 to $100. That's the crazy thing about MLMs. You end up spending a ton of money just so you can sell their products. The truth is, you can apply to be an affiliate for Amazon right now for FREE and sell everything they carry. It won't cost you a dime. If you were an affiliate marketer, there are thousands of companies you can sell for. None of them will ask you for money. They'll pay YOU! Click to Discover a Proven Path to Financial Independence! What You Need to Know About the Zurvita Opportunity. Zurvita is a typical MLM. It generates $100 million a year in revenue, while most of its Consultants lose money and friends. Much of the $100 million in revenue comes from the sale of products to the Consultants in the form of a Builders Pak ($500), a Quick Start Combo Pak ($300), a Zeal Quick Start Pak ($250), or Wellness Pak auto-ship Options($70 - $100 per month). When a new Consultant buys any of the starter packs listed in the above paragraph, she has only 3-days to change her mind and get a refund. After that, she owns them. The Attorney General in every state requires a 3-day cool-down period. It’s the minimum refund period allowed by law. To get a refund from Zurvita, you must follow Zurvita’s detail refund policy to the letter. Product Loading? From reading the Zurvita’s policy on refunds, you might conclude the company has every intention of loading up its new Consultants with an expensive starter pack and Wellness Pak auto-ship options. This comes dangerously close to product-loading, an unethical tactic that is forbidden by the DSA Code of Ethics. Membership in the DSA requires Zurvita to have a 12-month buy-back policy to prevent distributors from getting loaded with more products than they can reasonable sell. Zurvita does have a 12-month buy-back policy on some things, but NOT the starter packs or Wellness Paks, which are probably the most expensive things a new Consultant will purchase. Because Zurvita encourages recruits to buy the expensive starter packs and conveniently neglects to tell them they have only 3 days to change their minds, it looks a lot like product loading. What You Need to Know. Zurvita is a typical Health and Wellness MLM.The Health and Wellness niche has massive competition.Most Zurvita Consultants never earn a profit.Many Consultants spend more on products than they earn with the business.There is only a 3-day refund period on Starter Paks and Wellness Pak Options. If you buy it, you’re probably stuck with it. Zurvita Does Not Play Fair. On the surface, Zurvita is all goodness and light, but start digging into the details, and the truth begins to look much darker. As a member of the Direct Selling Association, Zurvita is required by the DSA Code of Ethics to provide all the information a person needs to thoroughly evaluate the business opportunity. Unfortunately, the information Zurvita provides is scattered across several company documents, mislabeled, buried in fine print, and fudged to look better than it is. There’s a reason Zurvita doesn’t make it easy to find the information you need. If people knew the truth about Zurvita, no one would join. The illusion of opportunity is key to recruitment. Like every other MLM, Zurvita is dependent on recruitment; without it, the company will collapse. What Does a Genuine Sales Opportunity Look Like? Before you can fully appreciate the predatory nature of MLM, it would be helpful if you knew what a genuine sales opportunity looked like. I’ll use affiliate marketing as an example because that’s what I know. Through my FREE coaching, I’ve taught people how to be successful affiliate marketers for over 5 years. Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to make a full-time income with your strengths and the things that interest you most, like hobbies. An affiliate marketer can sell any product they want, and there are millions to choose from. If one product isn’t selling, an affiliate marketer can switch products and be back to making profits in minutes. Affiliate marketers don’t sign contracts, and they don’t have to buy products or enroll in auto ship. An affiliate marketer doesn’t have to jump through hoops or “qualify” to be paid the commissions they earned either. Also, affiliate marketers don’t chase after friends and family trying to talk them into buying expensive stuff they don’t want, don’t need, and didn’t ask for. As an affiliate marketer, your customer finds you. And your website makes money 24/7. An affiliate marketer doesn’t try to recruit people into their business. Instead, they build a new money-making website or add a new revenue stream to an existing website. Besides a laptop or PC, and an internet connection, an affiliate marketer, can build a 5-figure business for about $50 a month. Affiliate marketing is a simple, stress-free business. Read Why Affiliate Marketing is Better than MLM. How Multiple Levels Exploit the Rank and File. Now that you know what a genuine sales opportunity looks like, we can dig deeper into Zurvita. Zurvita has 14 levels in its compensation plan. That's is a lot of levels. The more levels an MLM has in its compensation plan, the more it exploits the sales force for the benefit of the company and the few highest-ranking salespeople. A direct marketing company where a salesperson can earn a fulltime income through retail sales will only have 4 levels, or less, in the compensation plan. When there are 4 levels or less, the salesperson earns most of the commission. However, when a direct marketing company has more than 4 levels, the commission is split among the multiple levels above the salesperson,although those people had nothing to do with the sale. The more levels there are in the compensation plan, the more the commission is shared. A few people at the top of the sales force earn commissions from thousands of people in their downline. When a salesperson must share commissions with a dozen people above them, they cannot earn a full-time income from retail sales alone. They are forced to try to build a downline too. Purveyors of False Hope. MLM is known for selling false hope to people who can least afford to lose money. The more financially desperate a person is, the more vulnerable they are to the MLM sales pitch. The people who succeed with MLM are the owners of the company and a few at the top of the salesforce who got in early and who may also have sweet-heart deals with the owners. Occasionally, someone climbs through the ranks, but it’s rare. Failure with MLM is inevitable for most people. It’s just a matter of time. How to Succeed with Zurvita. While failure with Zurvita is inevitable for most people who try it, according to the Zurvita Income Disclosure, a few do succeed. Given the odds, there are basically two things you must doif you want to succeed with Zurvita. Fund your business out of pocket until it’s profitable.Recruita ton of people. If you are starting at the bottom and you don’t have experience in an MLM, you’ll need to learn how to recruit a vast number of people and howto manage, inspire and motivate them. Until your Zurvita business is cash positive, you’ll have to fund it out of pocket. This could take years and cost tens of thousands of dollars. You’ll also need to recruit a ton of people. Imagine the population of a small city in your downline. MLM has a huge turnover. Most people quit within a few months of joining, very few last more than a year. Every month expect 30% of your downline to drop out. To grow your business, you will need to recruit faster than people are quitting. This will take a lot of energy and skill, plus a system for feeding leads into your recruiting machine. At its heart, recruiting people into Zurvita means selling them the dream of opportunity when there really isn’t an opportunity and convincing them to spend money they can’t spare on over-priced products they don’t need. After you have funded your Zurvita business out of pocket for a few years and recruited enough people to populate Yazoo, Mississippi, you’ll have a business you don’t own and can’t control. Zurvita can take your business away from you any time it wants, or they could go out of business, or be shut down by the FTC for an infraction you had nothing to do with. Beware the Zurvita Compensation Plan. On the first page of the compensation plan, Zurvita claims in large text that their “generous” plan has “multiple income opportunities.” However, later in the plan, in small print at the bottom of the page, it states, “Zurvita makes no guarantees or projections of income.” It also states; “Your success depends on your efforts, commitment, skill, leadership abilities…” These are perhaps the truest words in the entire document. Unfortunately, this statement puts the blame on you if you fail instead of blaming how Zurita has rigged the game. The purpose of the Zurvita Compensation Plan is to convince you the business opportunity is real. It’s how they lure people into purchasing expensive starter packs and signing up for auto-ship costing $100 a month. The Zurvita Compensation Plan is not a legal document. It’s a hypothetical assumption of what might happen if you play the Zurvita game. Mostly, the Zurvita Compensation Plan is an illusion that sells the dream. Beyond the first few pages that show how to get started as an Independent Consultant, the Compensation Plan becomes a dazzling show of cash prizes and awards. And it’s confusing. Why the Zurvita Compensation Plan is confusing. Confusion makes your logical mind shut down.Before you can understand it, you must speak to a Zurvita Consultant who will try to talk you into buying a $500 Builders Pak and enrolling in auto-ship. Like the compensation plans of most MLMs, the Zurvita Compensation Plan is intentionally confusing. Confusion shuts down the part of the brain you need to make the right decision. When we are overwhelmed with confusion, we naturally chose the path of least resistance. It’s like when your checkbook needs to be balanced, but it’s such a confusing wreck you just give up, eat pizza and pray your checks don’t bounce. Confusion is the first goal of the Plan. The second goal of the Plan is to seduce you with images of cash prizes and awards, so you will falsely believe you can make more money with Zurvita than it will cost you. If you believe you can make a $25,000 bonus as shown in the Zurvita Compensation Plan, you won’t hesitate to join, buy the $500 Builders Pak and enroll for $100 a month Wellness Pak on auto-ship. THAT’s the purpose of the Zurvita Compensation Plan. The Zurvita Income Disclosure. While the Zurvita Compensation Plan creates the illusion of what you MIGHT earn in the future, the Income Disclosure shows what people actually earned in the past. The Zurvita Income Disclosure will show you what your odds of success are, but you must look carefully. The most recent Zurvita Income Disclosure linked to the main website is for the year 2016. Respecting Zurvita’s copyrights, I won’t show the disclosure on this page. However, if you click here, you can open the disclosure in a new tab and follow along as I guide you through the numbers. Now would be a good time to remember how much your clone earned working a part-time minimum wage job. Working a minimum wage, part-time job, your clone earned $580 before taxes. With the Zurvita Income Disclosure opened in another tab look at the row labeled “Percentage of Consultants.” According to the Zurvita Income Disclosure; 11.6% earned an average of $11 a month.78.1% earned an average of $51 a month.4.1% earned an average of $316 a month.2.9% earned an average of $488 a month.2% earned an average of $900 a month.1% earned an average of $2,037 a month.<1% earned an average of $4,054 a month.<1% earned an average of $6,274 a month<1% earned an average of $19,152 a month. These monthly income averages are BEFORE taxes and expenses are deducted. Did you notice that only about 4% of Zurvita Consultants earned more than a part-time minimum wage job? We don’t know what it costs various consultants to run their business each month, but we do know that to qualify for overrides, they must be enrolled in Zurvita’s auto-ship program. Auto-ship costs a minimum of $70 a month. When we deduct $70 a month from the average monthly income, we see; 11.6% lost an average of $59 a month.78.1% lost an average of $19 a month.4.1% earned an average of $246 a month.2.9% earned an average of $418 a month.2% earned an average of $830 a month.1% earned an average of $1,967 a month.<1% earned an average of $3,984 a month.<1% earned an average of $6,204 a month<1% earned an average of $19,082 a month. Now that we have deducted the minimum expenses from the average income, we can see that only about 2% of Zurvita Consultants earned enough to live on, assuming they did not pay taxes on what they earned. When you consider that the Consultants surely had more business expenses than we are accounting for here, it’s realistic to assume only 1% or less earned a full-time income. Estimating that only 1% made a full-time income may be TOO HIGH because Zurvita fudged the numbers to make them look BETTER than they are. In the first line under the chart, it says, “This chart depicts the amount paid out to active Zurvita Independent Consultants.” An active Consultant is one who “qualified” to earn commissions and was paid. That leaves out a LOT of people! Look at the top line of the chart, where it says, “Total.” That shows the number of Consultants in each rank. When we add up all the numbers, we see the total of ACTIVE Consultants is 18,261. Notice that only 104 active consultants out of 18,261 earned a full-time income. [35 National Directors + 27 Presidential Directors + 42 Ambassadors = 104] By counting only ACTIVE Consultants, Zurvita makes it look like a higher percentage of people made money. What about the Consultants who tried to make money but failed? Zurvita ignores them. In 2016, Zurvita had 40,000 Consultants in its sales force. When we adjust the numbers to show the percentage of ALL Consultants, we get these figures; 95.28% Earned Nothing or lost money.1.9% Earned an average of $246/month.1.3% Earned an average of $418/month..9% Earned an average of $830/month..4% Earned an average of $1,967/month..09% Earned an average of $3,984/month..07% Earned an average of $6,204/month..1% Earned an average of $19,082/month. Only 1.6% of Zurvita Consultants earned more than a part-time minimum wage job. According to 2019 Federal Poverty Guidelines, the poverty level for one person in the lower 48 states is $1,040 a month. Only .66% of Zurvita Consultants earned enough to support themselves above the poverty line! Less than 1%. Only 104 Consultants out of 40,000 earn a full-time income with Zurvita. Zurvita and God The love of money can bring out the worst in people. The founder of Zurvita, Mark Jarvis, evokes God in his business principles and links from the Zurvita website to Zurvita Ministries, a non-profit organization said to take "the vision and values of Jesus to the streets." Jesus made his views about profiting from religion clear when he drove the money-changers from the temple. I respect people who integrate their faith into their daily life in a healthy way. However, I have seen first hand how some people use God as a tool to manipulate others for personal gain. The Last Word on the Zurvita Opportunity. When we started this journey together, Zurvita promised you the opportunity to earn an income and to leave a legacy for your family. But, after a closer look, it’s clear Zurvita doesn’t deliver on that promise. While Zurvita earns $100 million a year, most of its consultants earn nothing. Worse, they are captive customers paying money to Zurvita. We'll never know how many go into debt chasing the Zurvita dream. I understand your desire to make a better life for yourself, and I admire your ambition, but Zurvita is not the answer. Zurvita’s business model is a throwback to the 1940s. We’re in the 21st Century now. Business is moving online. Learn to tap into the power of the internet and you'll never worry about money again. The internet is probably the most significant opportunity in the history of the planet, and it never sleeps. Billions of dollars change hands online every day. With the right training, coaching, and support, anyone who can write an email can create an internet business. You can literally sell to the world from the comfort of your home, all day, every day. Your best investment is always to invest in yourself. You have strengths, passions, and interests you can turn into a rewarding internet business if you only knew how. Take time to think about what you enjoy. What if you really could make a living doing what you love? The internet is THE opportunity. If you’re ready to invest in yourself and to take advantage of a genuine opportunity, I’d be happy to coach you for FREE. There are some expenses involved in building an affiliate marketing business, but they aren’t much. Other than a computer and an internet connection, you can get everything you need for about $50 a month. Play to win. I’ll show you how. If you want my help at NO COST, go here and sign up. Related Articles: Why Affiliate Marketing is Better than MLMThe Heartbreak of MLM If you found this article helpful or if have insights or experience regarding Zurvita, please leave a comment below. Thank you.