Monthly Archives: November 2014

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Bill Keep’s Open Letter To Warren Buffett On MLMs

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Now that Pampered Chef, the multi-level marketing company owned by Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has a new CEO, MLM expert and dean of the College of New Jersey School of Business Bill Keep is hoping to get some support in setting clearer standards on what is or is not a pyramid scheme.
To do that, he’s published a letter that he sent to Warren Buffett earlier this year, with no response, possibly hoping to get the attention of the Pampered Chef CEO Tracy Britt Cool.

“I ask that you consider, as an owner of an MLM company, the value of having clear and public standards that differentiate a legal MLM from a pyramid scheme,” Bill Keep wrote in the letter, dated August 25, which he tweeted today. “Should you conclude that such standards are important to protect consumers and investors, I ask that you publicly address the issue.”

Bill Keep: No standard for what separates MLM and pyramid schemes
As Bill Keep and others have explained before, when you’re trying to figure out if a company is a legal MLM or apyramid scheme, the central question is whether their revenue comes from primarily from selling goods or from recruitment. But more sophisticated pyramid schemes also make some amount

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Zeek Rewards CEO Pleads Not Guilty To Scam

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A North Carolina man accused of being the mastermind of an $850 million Ponzi scheme pleaded not guilty Thursday to multiple federal charges of fraud and conspiracy.

     Paul Burks, the founder and CEO of the ZeekRewards penny auction site, was arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Cayer at the federal courthouse in Charlotte. In late October, a grand jury indicted Burks on charges of wire, mail and tax fraud, and conspiracy.
     Burks said nothing during his brief appearance in court. His plea was entered by his attorney, Noell Tin. If convicted on all of the charges he faces, Burks, 67, faced 65 years in prison and a $1 million fine. At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Cayer released Burks on $25,000 bond. No trial date has yet been set. Burks company and its Zeekler.com auction site was shut down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in August 2012, after the agency concluded it had sold $850 million in unregistered securities.

     Prosecutors say Burkes and his conspirators ripped off as many as 1 million investors with promises of big returns and what ultimately turned out to be bogus investments. Burks, who had been accused of pocketing as much as $10 million in investors’ money, agreed to

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