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For Unbiased Information You Can't Get Elsewhere ...
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This is one of a few examples of Business Opportunity Watch
Reviews which are available for the public to view on the public section of the website. The
reason for making a small sample of the reviews freely available is to help potential customers decide
if they want to subscribe, and also to communicate some matters of general interest arising in the case
of some of the reviews. All the other reviews are available only to
subscribers.
A zero score or a low score means that in our opinion the business model or the investment model has flaws and/or that we have found inadequate evidence to back up claims about earnings, sales, profits etc. It doesn't mean this evidence does not exist and it doesn't mean that the opportunity is a scam and it doesn't mean that the promoters are unprofessional or dishonest. Questions arising are normally contained within the body of the review, and readers who are interested should contact the company with these questions and/or questions of their own. |
Review from Business Opportunity Watch Reviews
Issue 31 September 2009
INCOME4LEARNERS
30 North Street
Ashford
Kent
TN24 8JR
www.income4learners.com
- Extract from sales copy
- Review
- Your feedbackExtract from sales copy:
INCOME4LEARNERS Shows You How To Put A Virtual ATM in Your computer That Will Spit Money At You 24/7 .....How a Simple "Idiot Proof" System,
(Designed Specifically for People Who Don't Know a
Keyboard From An "On" Button)
Can Pay You Day After Day For The Rest of Your Life!You Don't Need a Website!
You Don't Need a Product!
You Won't be an Affiliate!
You Won't Be Joining Any "Programs"!
You'll Keep 100% Of The Money You Receive!
You'll Be Paid Directly!
SO ARE YOU INTERESTED?
I'll tell you exactly how my system works and how you can use it to make yourself money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the rest of your life, and I'll give you all this information for FREE!
Review:
It's a good rule of thumb that if advertising copy contains more than a couple of exclamation marks then you should look at it especially carefully because it may not be all that it seems to be.
That's certainly the case with Income4Learners, set up three months ago in June 2009, which looks far too good to be true.
The advertising concentrates on the fact that "nearly everybody" will buy this offer because there's a free e-book you can download which explains this wonderful money-making system. Yes, the ebook is indeed free, but that's nothing to write home about because all it contains is sales material to try to persuade you to pay $47 (that's about £30) for a collection of 26 ebooks about Internet Marketing. In other words, the ebook contains the sort of information you would normally find on the sales page of a website.
The person who runs Income4Learners says in the ebook that his name is Chris Tucker. This may not be his real name, though. Whoever it is certainly seems keen to avoid being identified, as there is no company name and address and the website is registered under a privacy arrangement.
The ebook contains details of the 26 ebooks which make up the collection. It lists them at their retail prices and concludes that "The entire package above has a combined retail value of a staggering price of $1,056.79 and comes with FULL master re-sell rights!"
Anyone who has tried to sell ebooks with re-sell rights knows that the retail value means nothing in real terms because the ebook soon becomes as common a muck because all the people who have purchased it try to sell it in competition with each other and quickly realise that they have to substantially discount their prices in order to make sales.
Oddly, the ebooks listed in the free ebook are not the same ones as the ones which are shown in the short video on the face of the site.
I quickly checked the sales prices of a few of these eboooks on the Internet. Page one of Google for each book revealed the following prices:
Fast Track Secrets to Internet Marketing
- Retail price $47 according to Income4Learners
- This book is available for free download at www.the-work-at-home-millionaire.com
$7 Dollar Secrets
- Retail price $47 according to Income4Learners
- You can buy this for $7 from the author's site at www.7dollarsecret.com
AdSense Business In-A-Box
- Retail price $37 according to Income4Learners
- Available for $9.70 from the author at www.adsensebusinessinabox.com
Craigslist Marketer Pro
- Retail price $9.76 according to Income4Learners
- Available for $1.95 from www.tradebit.com
eBay Pro
- Retail price $37 according to Income4Learners
- Available for $1.99 from www.tradebit.com
Google Adwords Primer
- Retail price $37 according to Income4Learners
- Available for $6.99 from www.theplrstore.com
The Secrets to High Website Conversion
- Retail price $47 according to Income4Learners
- Available for $10.70 from www.viralebookads.com
Of course, if you were making lots of sales then you could be earning a nice income even if your average sale price was only about $5. It's unlikely that you would be making a lot of sales, though, for the following reasons:
1. Every one of your customers then becomes your competitor because they are selling exactly the same thing you are trying to sell. This is business suicide.
The same nonsensical type of arrangement was marketed in pre-internet days in a hard copy format, commonly known as part-work schemes. A number of these schemes went the rounds for several years (e.g. The Key to Success and Wealth) and we received several complaints from people who had lost money.
2. Marketing will be difficult. You are unlikely to get a good posiition on Google, ceause you will be competing with everybody else who has bought it. Some people seem to have been sending out mass emailings, but there are two problems with this. Firstly, you would have to be careful who you bought your list from to ensure that it only contained the names of people who had opted to be on the list or else you would be in breach of European law. Secondly, most people who are already on any email mailing lists will already have been emailed about this, so you would probably get a poor response rate.
The only people who are likely to make money out of this are:
1. the promoter - who receives $47 from everybody who buys directly from him, and $10 from the $47 paid by everyone ordering from your link, with you receiving the $37 balance; and
2. websites which have their own mailing lists of people who trust them. One such is www.onlineglobal.org. I had a look into OnlineGlobal because the BOW member who asked me to look at Income4Learners said that OnlineGlobal had recommended it to her.
Here's what OnlineGlobal (www.onlineglobal.org), which appears to be a UK site, says about their site:
Welcome to Online Global. We provid (sic) our customer with advice and impartial reviews on selected internet goods and services, such as gadgets, health diet advice, e-books, gaming systems, Loans, Game Cheats, travel and car insurance.There are a few problems with this:
So why do we do what we do? Simple – to help you separate the scammers from the genuine article. All we ask is that you help us help you, if you find anything of interest on the internet e - mail us through our contact page, and we will put to the test for you. You sent us some great stuff that we reviewed and have put on our site for you to use.
We are looking at Making Money on the internet, as we had floods of e mails from skint lads and lasses who wanted to make extra money and Beat The Credit Crunch.
We’ve found a few great money making systems, and listed the ones with which we have actually had the most success. Rest assured all of the money making reviews that follow will make you at least £1000 per week extra, and anyone can do it!
Firstly, how can they claim that their reviews are impartial when they have commission links to the opportunities they recommend? Surely, that makes them rather partial? In fact, it even seems that Income4Learners could be Online Global's own scheme - see the letter below which we sent to the company to ask them about this.
Secondly, they are promoting schemes which are illegal in the UK, such as Liberty Wealth Club and YourNetBiz.
Also, Online Global has had first hand experience that certain types of schemes are doomed to failure - because they have recommended them in the past and they have failed - so you would have thought they would have learnt by now.
We had a number of questions for OnlineGlobal, so we wrote to them as follows:
- How can you claim on your website at www.onlineglobal.org that your reviews are impartial when you have commission links to the opportunities you recommend? Surely, that makes your reviews rather partial?
No doubt there is some proper explanation for this because, as you probably know, misleading marketing communications are an offence under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 and the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008.
- Regarding your promotion of Income4Learners, although the style of writing on Income4Learners is very different to the style of writing on your own site, certain other facts suggest that your company may have close links with Income4Learners. For example, Income4Learners is run from the same address as your company. Also, I received an email from your company sent from globalreviewteam@googlemail.com and the subject line was “Hi BOW Have you seen this site?” and I received an email from Income4Learners from incomeforlearnersadmin@googlemail.com and the subject line was “Hi Bow Thank You For Registering with Income4Learners” and both emails use the same font and both offered an unsubscription option from www.aweber.com where the first 26 digits of the 39-digit reference were exactly the same.
Can you explain this?
Because both the Income4Learners website and your own website at www.onlineglobal.org are registered with the privacy registrar company DomainsByProxy.com, it is impossible for users to tell who the real owners are. Can you provide any evidence to reassure readers that you are not the owners of Income4Learners?
- Did you know that it is a requirement of European law for commercial sites (which your site clearly is, due to its paying links) to declare on the site the name of the legal entity (e.g. individual person, limited company, partnership etc) and address of who owns it?
- If you are a genuine review site, as you claim to be, then why do you have a large number of other review sites, as follows:
www.redbuttonreviews.co.uk
www.live-thedream.net
www.bluetreereviews.com
www.beatingthecrunch.co.uk
www.gamingsecretsonline.com
www.bestofreviews.com
www.createrealmoney.com
To me, all these other sites which promote (almost) the same business opportunities makes it seem that your business is more to do with pure advertising rather than genuine reviews. Please comment.
- In addition, there are several other sites which contain a lot of the same text as reviews which appear (or have appeared in the past) on your site at www.onlineglobal.org.
For example, www.greendayreviews.com, registered to Nick Wooton of Cannock, carries a review of “Best on eBay” which is very similar to the review you carried on your site, and carries the same results except that one of the names has been changed. Your site gives the results from “3 of us” as: “Paul - $2225 = £1103.60 in the bank, Danny - $700 = £343.80 in the bank, Martin - $620 = £308 in the bank”. Greenday reviews has changed the name of the second person from Danny to Mark.
Another site at www.onlinereviews.tv, registered to Peter Overton of Charing in Kent, carries almost identical text to yours for their review of “Best on eBay” with exactly the same financial results from the three testers and “our reviewer” Gary.
Yet another site at www.onlinebettingsystems.co.uk is registered to Nicholas Wootton of Cannock. This appears to be the same person as the registrant of www.greendayreviews.com even though his surname is spelt differently. Again, the review gives the same 3 results from the three testers and “our reviewer” Gary.
The final site I found at www.quickmoneyreviews.co.uk, registered to WR Marketing of Milton Keynes again carries a lot of the same text for their review, although “our reviewer” is called Keith this time, and the financial results of the three testers, Paul, Mark and Martin, are a bit different.
Can you please explain?
- Did you know that Passport To Wealth, which you promoted on www.onlineglobal.org in the past and which you appear to be still promoting on www.bestofreviews.com is illegal in the UK because it is required to comply with the Trading Schemes Regulations and it doesn’t? It’s actually a criminal offence to promote a non-compliant scheme.
We rated Passport To Wealth at Zero out of Ten in the May 2009 issue of Business Opportunity Watch not only because it is illegal in the UK but also because it costs $997 to join (about £680) and most people would lose money because they would struggle to recruit more than two other people, and you have to recruit more than two other people to earn any money.
- I am very puzzled about how you yourselves manage to earn massive amounts of money from everything you recommend on your site. This isn’t just now - it seems that you have been doing this for some time, because eighteen months ago your site said the following:
6 Month Millionaire
www.theresmoneyinmypc.org.uk
“$2,582 in sales one weekend”
One Very Simple Idea
“We ran this site for 2 weeks, and made over $18,000”.
This site is now dead.
Paid Surveys Etc
“We did over 4000 surveys between 3 people in 1 month and made over £80K in a month and guess who we were using???? PAID SURVEYS ETC”.
Paid Surveys Etc no longer appears on your site. Have you stopped doing it? If so, why? And how did you manage to earn £20 a survey when the going rate for a survey is more like £1 to £5, and rather than paying cash many companies award points redeemable against goods in a catalogue or gift vouchers?
Paid Survey Program
“We did over 4000 surveys between 3 people in 1 month and made over £80k in a month and guess who we were using???? PAID SURVEY Program”.
Was it just a coincidence that you received exactly the same results as with Paid Surveys Etc?
Today, your site still says that you are earning large amounts of money e.g. “our total profit from direct sales was $40,877 in less than 10 days” (YourNetBiz) “by the end of week one we had earned over $3400” (MyWorkFromHomePro) and “we sold 468 in the first week that made us $18720 in less a week” (Income4Learners).
Obviously, if you are claiming that you are earning such large amounts of money, then this is going to encourage people not only to join the various schemes, but also to join them through your links, because everyone knows that in recruitment schemes you stand more chance of making money if you can latch onto the coat tails of somebody else who is successful.
But, in case there may be any readers who may be sceptical, can you provide any evidence of these very high earnings?
What’s even more puzzling is why, if you are earning such a lot, are you not registered for VAT? You would certainly seem to have breached the thresholds requiring registration, but there is no indication on any of your sites that you are registered.
- In an effort to sort out the mystery of who is behind OnlineGlobal, I clicked on the link for Liberty Wealth Club, a multi-level scheme which is glowingly reviewed and recommended by your site. This led to a recruitment page for Liberty Wealth Club from Gary Meadows.
I also clicked on the link for an opportunity to get training for how to make money online called Online Success For Beginners at www.onlinesuccessforbeginners.com, which your site recommends highly as “one of the Decades Best thought out Projects on the Internet”. This site asks you to pay £141 as a one-off payment or £47 a month for three months to receive a training package. Online Success For Beginners says that it is run by “Gary Meadows, Marion Herbertson and Tranque Fuller - three top internationally recognized Marketers”.
On the About Us page of your Red Button Reviews site it explains how the site came about as follows:
“Red Button Reviews was first launched on February 27th 2007 after a trio of budding internet marketers were each scammed out of £500 on first the Money Making system they ever tried on the internet. ...
But something really good came out of this. ...
The 3 people that had been scammed decided to start researching online money making opportunities, and then one by one they would try out the most popular products that they kept hearing about to see whether of not they were scams or not, and then tell as many people to stay away from that SCAM as possible.”
Is it the case, then, that Gary Meadows, Marion Herbertson and Tranque Fuller are behind all your review sites?
Also, I searched the three names on Google, but I could see nothing to suggest that these people are regarded as “top internationally recognized marketers” as claimed. Can you please point me towards some information to support this claim?P.S. Another mysteriously similar "impartial reviews" site has also turned up at www.atozreviews.co.uk, with a link to Gary Meadows' own "YourNetBiz" mentor site.
Rating:
●●○○○○○○○○
(amended from its original rating of zero - see below)
BOW Notice: A zero score or a low score means that in our opinion the business model or the investment model has flaws and/or that we have found inadequate evidence to back up claims about earnings, sales, profits etc. It doesn't mean this evidence does not exist and it doesn't mean that the promoters are unprofessional or dishonest. Questions arising are normally contained within the body of the review, and readers who are interested should contact the company with these questions and/or questions of their own.
Feedback Received from Income4Learners 31st December 2009
Three months later, we received the following reply to our letter:
Marian Owen
I have just tried to call you on the number you gave out and it went to answer machine. Is this even a real review site.
I helped build Income 4learners with Chris Tucker and now work on after sales support and I can assure you there is no scam involved. We are proud of our product as its one of the only products on the Internet that offers a real after sales service. WE MAKE OURSELVES RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR I4L TEAM.
We challenge you, please, if you want to review the product, try it out first. I notice that you have written negative reviews without ever trying income4learners, basically you are just making assumptions and therefore not in a position to write a review.
We see in fact you are charging people $3 for a full review, and in our case they are paying you for a case of libel
Income4learners was built by a reputable company that has built such products as yournetbiz.
We advertise on sites like Redbutton because they are cheap and effective. They are in no way linked apart from the advertising. Your review and i use the term loosely, is not just about the product but mostly about the sites its advertised on.
For your information we have added a review on how it works. I have put a no nonsense description below.
Now, to resell i4l we give you a link to your very own copy of our product. This has your paypal email address embedded in the code. So when you made a sale, 37 USD will hit your paypal account instantly.
The product is $47, you get $37 each time and 10 dollars from each sale comes to us for dealing with all the support and helping to sell your books When you buy i4l you get over 200 e-books to resell. They are yours and we have no connection to them.
After joining income4learners you enter your pay pal address in our system and you are then given a unique link that you can advertise and send out. This link will be your income4learners pages, if you click on the pay pal button It will open the I4L Paypal screen but as soon as a customer pays the money in, its instantly sent to the pay pal account you put on the system.
They then enter the system and put their paypal details in the system and so the cycle continues
Don’t worry, its all done automatically and is very easy to use.
All details can be found in the Members area and you also get a step by step marking guide to get you going. We have over 2530 members and are growing every day; some of our members are bringing in around 30 new customers a day.
We would like you to try the product and deliver a fair review. I4L is what it is, a simple and effective reseller package.
Regards
JD & Chris Tucker
Income4learners Team
BOW Reply to Income4Learners Feedback of 31st December 2009
Thanks to Income4Learners for their reply. It's good to know that the company prides itself on its after sales service.
It's also important that Income4Learners states that they have no links to the various "review" sites like Redbutton. Customers would otherwise assume that they do have links, because as soon as you give your email address to download the free Income4Learners ebook, you receive an email from "The Income4Learners Team" with the address of 30 North Street Ashford, followed by a stream of emails from "The Review Team" at the same address, promoting the various offers sold on the review sites such as Redbutton and Online Global, including Income4Learners.
You also start to receive emails from Gary Meadows promoting YourNetBiz and his Jeremiah2911 Team.
A number of questions about Income4Learners remain:
The absence of this information breaks the Ecommerce Regulations.
Obviously, if the Income4Learners website displayed the ownership details it is required to display by law, then it would have been clear that it is not owned by the person or persons who own the various review sites at www.onlineglobal.org, www.redbuttonreviews.co.uk and www.atozreviews.co.uk.
In addition, if BOW were to promote Income4Learners, then of course quite a few people would be likely to join it because our judgement is trusted because of our impartiality and our experience. So we would certainly be likely to make money with it. But that would hardly be a fair trial.
We originally rated Income4Learners at zero out of ten, in the absence of any reply to our letter. Because "JD & Chris Tucker" stated three months later in their email of 31st December 2009 that they have no links to the various mysterious and confusing review sites, we have now upped this rating to 2 out of 10. We can't rate it at more than this because of the problems referred to above whereby all your customers become your competition, and the consequent depressive effect on the volume and price of sales.
__________________________________
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Or would you like to comment even if you haven't tried it?
If so, please send us an email. Your feedback will then be posted here anonymously unless you tell us that you want your contact details included.__________________________________
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