Toyota Autocenter (toyota-autocenter.com): Reviews and Signs of a Pyramid Scheme
Today someone sent me a link to a tempting offer: make a pile of money and buy a Toyota at a big discount.
So let’s take a look. The site is designed quite decently, the domain inspires a certain amount of trust, and the slick texts promise staggering income. But as we all know, the only free cheese is in a mousetrap. I decided to dig into toyota-autocenter.com a little, look for information, reviews and opinions, and write my own review.
Those who are used to trusting everyone and everything rushed to sign up at once and are already figuring out how to spend such untold riches (I’ll buy my wife some boots :-) The promises on the home page really are impressive: “in just three simple steps” get $70,000 for a Toyota, plus $15,000 or more for every new “manager” you bring in. The launch is set for July 20, 2013, and in the meantime you are invited to “start building your network of managers all over the world today”.
What a couple of minutes of searching revealed
After a bit of searching online, everything becomes clear right away.
A blogger nicknamed sleepy_mouse even wrote to Toyota’s representative office, and the reply was that “this organization has nothing to do with Toyota, either in Russia or anywhere in the world, and the company’s own security service will investigate”.
Toyota’s representative office replies to the blogger sleepy_mouse
And a user nicknamed kotoryi puts it like this:
Even WebMoney Advisor has started getting negative reviews of toyota-autocenter.com:
The blog’s readers didn’t sit idle either. An official Toyota dealer in Ukraine replied to an inquiry that it had no information about such a site. And the project’s own support team admitted in correspondence: “We are not an official representative of TOYOTA MOTOR” – supposedly it’s just a fan club of the brand.
After that, the site was rewritten too. In June the home page said that “TOYOTA AUTOCENTER has developed a program to promote the Toyota brand”, and now it’s an “Online Club ‘AUTOCENTER’ – an association of business people who prefer TOYOTA cars”, and the logo has been replaced with a homemade one.
The “entry fee”
And indeed, if you dig around toyota-autocenter.com, item 11 of the FAQ talks about an “entry fee” that will be announced a few days before the program launches.
The “entry fee” item from the FAQ section
It’s no accident that they kept quiet about the price at first: it would immediately have cut the number of people willing to promote such a “freebie” for nothing. As it is, a search turns up freshly minted “managers” at every turn, telling everyone about the project – with their own referral link, of course. Later this FAQ item was removed from the site as well.
How the scheme works
After the launch on July 20, the terms were finally published, and everything fell into place:
- Entry costs $75. For that money you get a “club product” – a set of 40-odd e-books and video courses about making money online, with resale rights. Readers noticed that much of this material is freely available online anyway.
- The product money goes entirely into bonuses. The site states plainly that “all 100% of the funds” are distributed through the bonus program: $25 goes to whoever invited you, and $50 is split among the “senior managers” higher up the chain. Not a cent is spent on the “product” itself – it’s simply a fee for a place in the chain.
- A matrix of three. To move from a “class E office” to “D”, you have to bring in three paying people, then three who have filled their own offices, and so on up to class “A” with the promised $3,000. To reach “A”, you need around 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 243 people below you who each paid $75 (that’s $18,225). And for each of those 243 to reach “A”, you’d need 243 × 243 = 59,049 newcomers.
- “Even without selling anything”. That’s a quote from the product page: bonuses are promised even to those who never sell a single book. So the payouts can only come from the fees of the next participants.
- The car comes later. Those $70,000 for a car were moved to the “AUTO” program, starting “in autumn 2013”, and details about it are “temporarily not provided to avoid unfair copying”.
- As many sign-ups as you like. The FAQ honestly says you can create an unlimited number of accounts from one computer. Handy for “recruiting” the missing members of your own trio.
The first $25 payouts via Payeer really did go out, and happy reviews about them immediately appeared in the same WebMoney Advisor. It’s a classic: pay the first ones so they bring in the next.
Signs of a pyramid scheme in this example
- A well-known brand that the project has nothing to do with.
- Income is promised for recruiting people, not for selling goods to real customers.
- The “product” is just for show: its price goes entirely up the chain.
- The entry fee is hidden until the last moment, and the texts on the site change on the fly.
- Deadline pressure: you have to join the bonus program by July 28.
- Nobody knows who is behind the project: no company, no address, no names – only a feedback form.
- The promised sums ($70,000 “in three steps”) are out of all proportion to a $75 fee.
How it all ended
Update, December 2013. It all happened even faster than I expected. The last news item on the site is dated August 8, in October the site was already down, and now there’s a GoDaddy parking page in place of the “club”, offering to sell the toyota-autocenter.com domain. The “AUTO” program promised for the autumn never appeared, and the money stayed with those who came first. Judging by the comments, some readers only managed to sign up, while others had already invited friends and stopped them in time.
How to check a project like this
- Write to the official representative office of the brand the project refers to. An answer of “we have nothing to do with it” settles the question.
- Use whois to see when the domain was registered, and the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org to see how the site has changed. This “club” rewrote its texts as it went along.
- Ask yourself where the money for the payouts comes from. If the answer is “from new participants”, it’s a pyramid scheme, whatever it calls itself.
- Look for reviews away from the project’s site, and check who is doing the praising: it’s often “managers” with their own referral link.
- Don’t pay for “entry”, “activation” or “a place in the program”. Honest work doesn’t require a fee for the right to work.
But we all know how these pyramids end, and it’s not a happy ending. Remember the best-known one in our part of the world, MMM – its famous TV commercials with Lyonya Golubkov once promised easy money too. And the biggest one in the world was Bernard Madoff’s fund.