BIZARRE: Zeek Leaders Scold Affiliates: COO Plants Seed That, If Company Tells Members To Change Their Preference In Dispensing Toilet Paper, They Should Do It
EDITOR’S NOTE: One of multilevel marketing’s longtime problems is the observation by critics that some MLM purveyors routinely display cult-like behavior that protects the reputation of the “opportunity” at all costs while ostracizing participants who stray from the company line or ask too many questions. Zeek Rewards, which is married to a penny-auction site known as Zeekler and employs a business model that suggests an investment return of between 1 percent a 2 percent a day is possible, already has a considerable PR problem. The “opportunity” did itself no favors in a conference-call yesterday in which company leaders did nothing but reinforce the notion that MLM often is its own worst enemy . . .
UPDATED 3:27 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) On a conference call in which the Zeek Rewards MLM scolded affiliates for everything from not pressing “*6” to eliminate background noises (such as flushing toilets) to bypassing Zeek and calling its attorneys and vendors to get answers to their questions, Zeek COO Dawn Wright-Olivares shared a story that planted the seed Zeek reps should carry out the company’s marching orders without question — or risk public humiliation or banishment.
A recording of the call posted on Zeek’s website early this morning began with a woman delivering condescending remarks to Zeek affiliates that they had to be “coachable” or likely would remain “just over broke” despite Zeek’s efforts to help them make money through the MLM program. The post is titled “Hit *61 and Other Zeek 101 Suggested Behaviors.”
“Did you know that broke people usually don’t listen and follow their leader?” the woman ventured.
She went on to deliver a series of bromides (“If you want things in your life to change, you have to change things in your life”), and then Wright-Olivares came on the line.
That’s when an already-curious call devolved into the bizarre.
As part of an apparent bid to teach Zeek affiliates how they should behave as responsible affiliates, Wright-Olivares shared a story about a pitch she once attended from a top-ranked personal-fitness trainer seeking new clients.
The trainer, Wright-Olivares recalled, began by asking attendees if they were serious about getting in shape — and then advised prospects to go home and to carry out a task that (apparently) would demonstrate their willingness to be coached.
“If your toilet paper flips over and rolls over the top,” Wright-Olivares recalled the trainer saying, “I want you to flip it over so it comes out the bottom.”
Attendees whose toilet-paper dispensing habits were the reverse of the top-rollers were given the opposite instruction — and then everybody was sent home, Wright-Olivares said.
When the pitch resumed, the trainer asked the audience of about 50 people for a show of hands on who carried out the instructions. About 10 people raised their hands, Wright-Olivares recalled.
“Everyone with your hands raised may stay — everyone else I want you to leave,” Wright-Olivares recalled the trainer saying.
“You’re not ready, and I’m not willing to risk my career and my reputation to train you,” Wright-Olivares recalled the trainer saying, noting that the nonflippers were “disgusted” that they’d been dismissed in this fashion.
But the trainer held his ground, Wright-Olivares remembered.
“Look,” he explained, Wright-Olivares recalled. “I just want everybody to be clear: If you’re not willing to listen to me, to go home and flip over your roll of toilet paper, then you’re not going to do a damn thing I tell you to do and you are risking my company’s reputation and you are risking my reputation . . .”
Wright-Olivares then asserted Zeek affiliates were harming Zeek’s reputation by inappropriately calling Zeek’s financial vendors, a country club and attorneys.
“Guys, they’re legally not allowed to talk to you,” Wright-Olivares said of the attorneys. “They’re our attorneys. They’re not your attorneys.”
She went on to fret about the harm Zeek affiliates apparently were heaping on the company.
Is it your intention “to harass the bank so much that they don’t want to do business with our company?” she asked.
Here is the post on the Zeek News Blog, which includes a link to the recording.
Alleged banking issues – check
Blame the members – check
Hackers should be next I think.
Russian Hackers, just like in ASD?
They’re not putting that much effort into the excuse anymore. Seems just ‘hackers’ suffices the masses.
Jim Jones would be proud to have these operatives…!
I forget,
doesn’t upgrading the servers come next, or am I thinking of Just Been Paid ???
I think they already blamed the hackers for some alleged DDOS attacks.
—–
Hi again,
Just so you will know, the recent sporatic downtimes have been caused by a persistent series of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on our webservers by unknown parties whose aim is to cause disruption and make life difficult for our IT guys and you, our affiliates.
Our IT team is working on the problem and we have full confidence they will prevail. In the meantime, until this is resolved, we are adding a 24 hour “grace period” to the ad posting requirement in fairness to our affiliates who have limited access to post their ads and may have encountered an outage when they went online to post their ad.
We know how frustrating these things can be and we apologize for the hassle. There are still people in the world who get their joy by causing pain to other people and right now we are their target.
Thanks for your continued understanding,
Paul Burks
—–
http://www.ibosocial.com/unclejohn/blog.aspx?blogid=79972
The upgrade excuse was used in March already
http://zeekrewardsnews.com/2012/03/upgrades-software-integration-databases/
What bank? No bank name had been released.
I just realized that COO is related to the Zeek head programmer Dan Olivares.
Zeek seems that now they are blaming the affiliates for calling their 3rd party vendors and for the many problems they created. If they had customer service that was worth anything, they wouldn’t have all these problems. Customer service is pretty much non existent. This is a HUGE problem in the field. If I see it, why can’t they?
I also couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw where Dawn said…Peter Mingils asked me to explain what a claw-back was on today’s 4pm training call…here goes “I made it up :) Get the visual”.
Why didn’t she use real words. She could have said something like…”Since we are in the process of moving to another bank, please go to your back office and request your check again”.
And then she said…”Last, it is totally IMPOSSIBLE for the CEO or COO of any large company to field every call and email…and still run the company”.
First of all, CEO’s and COO’s shouldn’t be handling customer service issues. They should have trained staff for that. And trust the me, the ones they have are not trained. I’ve never been able to get an answer from any of their customers service providers. The phone, chat or by submitting support tickets. Her statement is also NOT True. There are VERY large companies, much bigger than Zeek that does an excellent job in customer service.
I guess it’s just hard for me to believe that a company claiming to make millions can’t hire a customer service staff that understands the company and that can help their affiliates.
And I’m dumbfounded as to why they can’t get that d*** website working properly. Now when someone signs up an affiliate, they can’t upgrade. And these are just a few of their problems.
Zeek is one of poorest ran companies I’ve ever seen. I thought the attorneys were suppose to help them get their act together. Obviously not.
I don’t know if Zeek is a scam or not, but I have seen scams ran better than this.
Vicky,
This kind of thing happens in scam after scam after scam. The enterprise must be protected at all costs and at the dismissal of all intellectual honesty. The script from scam to scam varies only by degree.
Zeek sees it, to be sure. It is typical for scams either to take baby-steps to address customer-service issues or to say people are being hired and trained.
The underlying reality OFTEN is that the scammers aren’t accustomed to doing business in transparent ways and are afraid that the hiring of employees will lead to tax investigations and the peeling back of layers of the onion — thus exposing the rotten core that had passed as a “business” for years.
Besides, employees create a cost center. And if the underlying business is a Ponzi, then employees will be paid from Ponzi money. That fact alone ultimately will cause the employees to become witnesses for the government. They will have been paid from illicit proceeds and their jobs will vanish when and if the government moves — as was the reality in the ASD Ponzi case.
If you want to ask Paul Burks a meaningful question, ask him what bank Zeek uses for its payroll account and whether employee compensation consists of a wage — or whether employees are being paid in whole or in part from their “positions” in Zeek or whether they are “independent contractors.”
ASD employees, for example, were being paid in whole or in part from “ad packs,” which really were nothing more than numbers on a screen that created additional downstream liabilities for ASD.
The Zeek reference to “claw-back” is one for the ages. If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny: U.S.-based Zeek purportedly issued checks on one or more U.S. bank accounts and then — out of left field on May 28, Memorial Day and a national holiday — announced the checks had to be cashed by June 1 or they’d bounce.
Then came the purported Zeek “claw-back” in which it apparently sought to capture the checks it purportedly issued on U.S. banks so it instead could pay members via offshore processors. Now comes the effort to blame affiliates.
Like ASD, Zeek appears only to have become concerned about serious lawyering after the fact. Certain affiliates now are spreading a fallacy that Zeek couldn’t possibly be a scam because it has so many lawyers.
Here is one thing the Zeek lawyers/consultants cannot do: unring any bells Zeek rang BEFORE it got all the lawyering. To me, the lawyering looks like a bid to minimize current dangers to Zeek and to set the stage for Zeek to point to its own affiliates as the fall guys.
Zeek, for example, could say: “Look, we had some compliance issues — and we brought in the best minds to deal with them. It’s the affiliates who never got with the program.”
Zeek’s current public statements practically drip of that message, which is why the choice of the term “claw-back” is all the more interesting.
Patrick
Just yesterday someone commented on Behindmlm
I pointed out that Grimes sells a generic compliance courts on mlmcompliancevt.com, and Laggos sells NMMJ to companies featured (and April indeed featured ZeekRewards) as sales brochures. Then I pointed out Gerald “I said ASD is not a Ponzi” Nehra was also hired by ZeekRewards, and he backpedaled furiously.
At least this one knows how to backpedal instead of sticking to a losing position.
Zeekheads just came up with a new excuse: ZeekRewards may be a Ponzi, but the entire Rex Venture Group is not because it has a lot of OTHER businesses feeding it profits.
Of course, they can’t prove it, but they’re offering this excuse at least twice in the past 2 days.
Another point for Patrick’s position: Zeek Customer Support is now claiming that their Grimes compliance course says that a legitimate opportunity can “turn into a Ponzi” if abused by its members.
http://behindmlm.com/companies/zeek-rewards/zeek-rewards-exposed-ofac-ddos-and-compliance/#comment-79031
Havne’t had a chance to verify it on the ZR forums, but I don’t doubt Oz’s word.
“Nothing can cripple a company faster than lack of IT. I’ve seen too many companies SAY they have automation, throw up a site and pretend it’s all in place while they scramble for a cheap, off-shore team they’ve never met and they simply never get off the ground.”
Dawn Olivares- 2012
Actually, I think a cheap, off-shore team would be a vast improvement over the mess her stepson has made of IT.
“Actually, I think a cheap, off-shore team would be a vast improvement over the mess her stepson has made of IT.”
Anyone who refers to themselves (or allows a web site to refer to them) as a “Master Programmer” is incompetent, period.
Zeekler was built on a sh!tty, antiquated technology. It’s no wonder they couldn’t keep up. if there is any good that will come out of this, it’s that they’re all going to prison, including their “Master Programmer”, who had complete visibility into the inner workings of the scam. Madoff’s computer guy was convicted and sent to federal prison.
I don’t think even Patrick could have imagined how bizarre that would turn out to have been
Looking back at that vicky post now – knowing what we know – it’s a riot! Of course they were upset people would call their ‘third party vendors’……no business relationship existed with anyone listed. LOL!
[…] June 5, the company bizarrely planted the seed that, if Zeek instructed members to change their preference in dispensing toilet paper, they should do it to demonstrate how coachable they are. Just days earlier — on May 28, […]
[…] an $850 million Ponzi- and pyramid fraud that once suggested participants should change their toilet-paper dispensing habits if instructed to do so, threatened to ban members who didn’t stick to the […]