Doe ons allen een plezier en geloof die ACNr"SS NOOIT !!!
Nog wat voorbeelden over deze 1e klas SUCKERS !!
Ga er maar voor zitten want deze is pittig !!
http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/acn.htm
Finland
ACN claimed to have 278,000 customers in Finland, the greatest success they have had in any country. Suddenly, ACN is gone from Finland and all their customers are sold to someone else. And what happened to the distributors who were going to make their fortunes selling ACN services in Finland? They were each given a one-off payment of a few euros for each direct customer they had and then told to take a hike (or, in Finnish "takke a hikke"). You can read about the retreat here and here. Why would a company with 278,000 customers suddenly decide to go out of business? Here are some possibilities:
ACN really did have 278,000 customers in Finland and decided that more money could be made in the short term by selling the customers to another phone carrier.
ACN executives were lying about how many customers they had in Finland and decided to get out before anyone found out how badly they were really doing.
ACN could not pay the bills from their bandwidth wholesaler and handed over the customers as payment.
ACN was about to be prosecuted for their illegal pyramid scheme activities and thought that it was time to get out with all those $500 payments from distributors before some court ordered them to pay the money back.
California
ACN sells energy in the USA. California is the largest energy market in the country (and in the top ten in the world). Does ACN sell electricity in California? Not since they ran away with their tail between their legs in 2001. Read something about this here.
Pennsylvania
It was a long time ago in 2000 and only a few breaches of the law were verified, but ACN were transferring customers without telling them and overcharging some others. Why am I not surprised that people who act like crooks once acted like crooks. Read about the fines here.
One of the euphemisms used by pyramid scheme promoters is to call what they do "network marketing". The latest one of these scams to come to my attention is a network to sell the network - a pyramid of little telephone companies. This is not really a new idea. It must have been well over ten years ago, but I remember sitting in a bar with an Amway big pin who was telling me about this marvellous new idea that one of his friends had come up with. It was to buy a few thousand dollars worth of mobile telephone calls and to then resell them through a multi-level marketing scheme. Having a product got around the pyramid-selling laws, and by the time the bottom layer of suckers figured out that there wasn't much money to be made out of a small share of a finite quantity of product the top man would have banked several multiples of his initial investment and moved on to better things. Nice crime if you can get it.
A friend and I have been working for some time to establish an organisation to assist scientists and engineers who have been retrenched, downsized, outplaced, outsourced and otherwise thrown on the scrapheap to find useful work fitting their qualifications and experience. Many, perhaps most, of these people lack the marketing and organisational skills necessary to find new jobs or to work as consultants, so we are setting up the infrastructure to identify business opportunities or problems and then provide ad hoc project teams with the appropriate mix of skills. My friend was offered a deal which would provide reduced phone bills to members of the group (always a useful thing to people who no longer have well-paid jobs), free calls between members of the group (communication and peer support is something these people need) and also some income to fund the operation. Does this sound too good to be true?
Well of course it does, but it was worthwhile spending some time to see there was some possibility of there being a benefit to the group and its members. It took very little time to show that there would not be, as the offer was to join a pyramid scheme.
This particular scam goes by several names in different parts of the world, but always manages to use the acronym "ACN". It seems that the "C" stands for "communications", but that may not always be the case. In Australia and the USA, as examples, "ACN" is the complete company name.
I should point out here that ACN have done all the legal work necessary to make sure that their pyramid scheme is not classified as such under Australian laws. The most obvious one is that a major part of any distributor's income is supposed to come from something called "Customer Acquisition Bonuses". It is illegal in Australia to obtain payment for recruiting anyone into a multi-level marketing scheme, so you only get the bonus when someone whom you have recruited (or someone under them in the hierarchy) recruits someone. As it costs $500 to join the scheme, these bonuses could be quite substantial, but you are protected because the pyramid grows one level removed from you. You also have to get (within 30 days) and retain a minimum number of customers otherwise you don't get paid at all. Those customers would want to be big telephone users as well. Because it is easier for the telephone company, all the bills for lines at my one address are combined on the one statement - my home telephone, the telephone and fax lines for my business, the telephone for the Australian Council Against Health Fraud, two mobile phones, and a dial-up internet account for emergency use when the cable broadband is out of action. If I were to hand this over to an ACN distributor they would only be able to claim this as one account, and for all that business they would get abut $10 per month commission. The advantage to me as a telephone consumer would be that I would lose the loyalty discount that I get now, and with ACN's "cheaper" rates I would pay something like $50 per month more than I pay now.
You might think that the possibility of more expensive phone bills as a consequence of handing over your account to someone offering cheaper phone bills might be a disincentive to join. This is not a problem, as distributors are forbidden from mentioning that ACN can save money for people who switch their accounts. Just think about that for a moment - people trying to sell a system which offers nothing to the consumer except the possibility of cheap phone calls are not allowed to mention cheap phone calls in the sales pitch. As I said, ACN has some good lawyers. As I also said, nice crime if you can get it.
Not being allowed to mention the product is just one of the restrictions on how distributors can go about marketing ACN, but before I get onto that I would like to point out why such a policy might be enforced, as it seems to promote deceit in the sale process. Here is a scene from a promotional slide show used by ACN to tell people about the company.
Leave aside the question of why a company which started in business in Australia in only November 2004 would need such a large and glamorous head office, I would like you to closely examine the signage on the top of the building housing ACN in Australia (the rectangular sign at the top of the photograph is actually on the building behind it). Note how the electronics manufacturer Teco has the next building in the street. Now look at what ACN's Australian office block looks like at night from the other side of the Pacific Highway. Note that Teco is still next door in one street and how the sign which appears at the top of the photo in the slide above has white writing on a purple background. Also note the two quite attractive neon signs belonging to the insurance company ING, who just happens to be the major tenant in the building. Comparison of the two photographs will show that when ACN wanted to pretend that Number One Pacific Highway, North Sydney, was their office, they very carefully removed the ING signs from the photograph. Is this dishonest? Of course it is. Was I surprised? No, I wasn't. Yes, ACN does have a small office on Level 11 of the building. They might be skating as close as possible to the edges of morality and the law, but they are not stupid.
The suggestion was made that maybe the signs could not be seen on the building in daylight. This is just the sort of obfuscation one expects from liars and defenders of deceit, as no rational company would pay huge amounts of money for naming rights and building signage if it could not be seen by the tens of thousands of commuters who stream past the building each day in cars, buses, trains and ferries. Here is what the building looks like in the daytime. Note how, in altering the appearance of the building in the ACN promotional material, the artist has extended the length of the panel on the roof which holds the sign.
One of the attractions of ACN to me personally was supposed to be that I could offer cheap telephones calls to the clients of my consulting business and therefore attract and keep the clients by offering a bit more. I have already mentioned that the rules would have prevented me from mentioning the cheap phone calls, so marketing would have been a bit of a problem. As other rules prevented me from mentioning anything about ACN (or cheap phone calls) on my company's web site, or in advertising, or on my business cards, or at trade shows, or at any promotional event or seminar unless only speakers from or about ACN appeared, I can only wonder about how I would tell my clients about what was for sale. The reason that I could not advertise in the newspapers or say anything on my web site is that only warm marketing is permitted under ACN's rules. This restriction is applied because friends and relatives are far less likely to complain about failed opportunities and sneaky business practices than strangers are. Did I mention the clever lawyers at ACN?
So why would anyone go into a business where they were not allowed to sell to anyone other than friends or family, not allowed to even mention the business to strangers, and not allowed to mention the only product that the business has to offer? The short answer is that nobody would. The long answer is that nobody would and ACN don't expect them to. These rules are not there to be obeyed, they are there to give ACN cause to terminate contracts, take over all the income streams created by distributors and dismiss the distributors without payment. I have mentioned those clever lawyers, haven't I?
The scout for ACN who was trying to recruit my friend wanted to have a three-way telephone conversation including me. Strangely, for someone working with a large telecommunications supplier, there were suggestions that I should initiate (and pay for) the interstate call and then invite the third party. I asked my friend to ask the scout two questions which were bothering me. The first was to find out the outcome of the eight charges of pyramid selling brought by Industry Canada against ACN's Canadian operation in 2002. The other question was why a multinational telecommunications company (with its own impressive office building in North Sydney) needed to share web hosting costs by having their web site hosted in Canada. The first answer was that was just some disgruntled distributors who were losers and failures who had complained because they had not been able to succeed. There was no answer to the second question. After these questions the scout never contacted me again. I wonder why.
So, can anyone succeed financially selling cheap telephone calls through ACN? The answer is no. (See here for some calculations.) Is an ACN distributorship a legitimate business? No, it isn't, because there is no possibility of making money. Is ACN an honest company which tells the truth about itself and its business? Look at the missing ING signs for the answer to that.
MAW AANPAKKEN DIT SOORT TUIG !!!!!!!!!
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