Avoid it avoid it avoid it! And make sure your friends and families don’t get trapped into it!

The reason I uploaded the video where I mentioned the investments/schemes to avoid specially for the expats in the UAE last week was that a dear friend of mine got trapped into this multilevel marketing (AKA Pyramid Schemes) and was under the delusion for the longest time that what he is doing will eventually make him rich! The way these companies of multilevel marketing works ruthlessly wastes time of even many decent and educated individuals – let alone the less privileged ones.

This particular friend tried to convince me for years to at least join his colleagues for a session over a cup of coffee which I had been politely denying for at least 2 years – but then one day I thought, I will waste my 1 hour to see their side of story, so I went ahead for the meeting in order to later confront him (my friend) when I would decide otherwise. So a meeting was setup at a local coffee shop where his college came to meet me and tried to sell me the idea – the plot which I knew was being executed the same way I had in my mind! The idea was to be part of their team and start selling random exorbitantly priced products which are at least 4-6x expensive than their counterpart branded products available in the market such as water purifying filter, expensive watches, vacation rental deals etc.

I politely decline to join and again asked my friend to stop being the part of this company as well – Oh and by the way, the company name he worked for is QNET! I don’t take names on YouTube – but I want you to be educated of such things specially on newsletter. Months passed by and then the pandemic struck! Things went by as they were and then this company started selling another idea – Work from anywhere and work 24 hours at your own pace and liberate yourself from financial worries – There was no dearth of slogans they put forward to woo innocent people!

Anyways, during the pandemic, again my friend asked me to join a zoom session and as I was extremely bored during the lockdown, I thought why not to attend and start another conversation in order for him to stop getting further drowned! The session was really awkward with motivational speeches of some alleged bigwig of the company without any substance of what the business model is. At the end of 1 hour session, again the same coffee shop persuasive technique came into picture which means to be part of this network where you need to buy certain over priced products and ask others in the network to buy from your own reference as well. Apparently, this was the plot, to trap as many people as you can to buy such products / services from the company which are over priced and make your commission on the way. As they are selling some tangible products / services – the business model somehow gets legitimacy but in reality, its all ponzy scheme targeting innocent jobless OR financially less aware people who not only waste their money on this company but also waste their time and ruin their relations with friends and family over such deals.

My friend went to an extent that he time and again went to attend the session this company had to offer in places like Malaysia and Thailand! All on his own expense offcourse + paying for the event fees etc. After so many years, now my friend has stopped talking about this “business” of his – I am not sure if he is still involved in this as I always try to stop him from it, so he might have stopped discussing with me. Or may be he has already realized the time and money he has lost in a gone case.

Anyways, point here is to make sure not to get involved in companies like QNET if you want to progress in life and in case you find people in your circle wasting their time in such schemes – try to confront them politely as they are being brain-washed! Please note that these type of companies are everywhere – India, Pakistan, UAE, KSA etc – but their target market is the south asian expats mostly from the GCC countries which are relatively affluent.

This is only one of the points from the video I posted earlier – I did not discuss this story in the video & kept it for this newsletter. Do watch the video out in case you are curious about more such cases.

Last week’s videos which were uploaded on YouTube in case you missed:

Keep hustling 🙂