Anyone Here Deal With Or Hear Of These Company's? Seems Like It Is A Pyramid Scam Of Some Sort.... I Have Been Approached By Some Friends Who Are Trying To Get Me Into It... Any Knowledge Or Input?

Why Madebig is a scam in one easy lesson:

1) How can it be a scam - its free isn't it?

Yes if you just signed up as a user and are enjoying the social side of it all.

However, it most certainly is not free if you are an IMA (agent) who signed up last year, often to the tune of around $750 plus whatever else was invested to buy shoppers. Other MLM products have been sold around this, including leads, sales publications and a bizarre monthly charge called "autoship' which really applies to products but TMII have converted into something else entirely.

Recruitment prior to June 2006 was carried out in the form of a pyramid. This is illegal in the state of Oregon and several other states. It explains why the recruitment ended abruptly in the sumer of 2006.

2) The Presidential Leaders are good people and told the truth about the site being bigger than Google one day.

I'm not going to comment on whether they are good or bad people - some of their own responses on their own site make it clear what their motivation is. (One supposedly dropped by here several months ago and dropped thinly veiled threats to some of us but got short shrift and decided to retreat back to a safer haven. In case he or any others get the same idea in the future - beware! Some of us work in the technology field full-time and are not just playing Internet cowboys when we get off our tractors for the evening.)

However, I will comment on the hype that they spread and continue to spread: it really is only hype.

Madebig simply can NOT ever compete with any Internet giants and as we have proved, can not even compete with a new, upstart website like wis.dm which Madebig had a massive head start on.

The reason for that is pure and simple - lack of investment. Your money that you paid out to TMII has obviously not been reinvested into the site - you can see that because of the lack of upgrades, modifications and no sign of improvements you were promised months ago. The money has more likely gone into the pockets of certain people at TMII.

Google, ebay, Yahoo! , Amazon but NEVER Madebig - why? Because they all received investment from venture capital companies. It's a two-for-one deal - it's money to invest in building the fastest, most accessible website AND it's also a vote of confidence that makes my industry sit up and take notice.

Time Magazine recently ran a feature on upstart wis.dm -why? They had received $5 million in venture capital and were led by a known, successful entrepreneur.

3) Richi Roane is an Internet entrepreneur/billionaire/genius!

Millionaire perhaps - thanks to many of you. Entrepreneur? Possibly although his expertise is in MLM (and copying others MLM ideas to be perfectly honest). Genius? Yes if conning people is a genius trait.

Mud slinging? No. Roane's background is in multi-level marketing but his slant is that he used the Internet as a selling tool. He's had other businesses - http://www.defyaging.com was one example, selling "miracle" fountain-of-youth type things that people will try once and then realize they've been had.

He was also involved with Destiny Telecom, a pyramid phone card scam that was shut down in the late 1990's by various states Attorneys General.

Don't just ignore this - find out for yourself. This information is just a Google-search away and if you are truly serious about e-commerce and not risk getting ripped off online, then you owe it to yourself to find out more.

May I suggest that next time you investigate BEFORE you hand over any money though?

Since the above post was originally written, TMII (Transcend Marketing International, Inc.) have changed their business model yet again.

Under the obviously not very expert "Internet entrepreneur" Richi Roane, President of TMII, they now hock 'Madebig Awareness Bands', on behalf of whatever charitable cause their agents can register at the Madebig site.

The bands, an obvious rip off of the Lance Armstrong, yellow bands, are sold by TMII for $2 each. The Madebig agents buy the bands and then sell them to the general public, also for $2.

For every band sold to the agent, they receive so many 'pledges' which may be used to pledge their own cause or another agent's cause on the Madebig site. When each cause reaches 100,000 pledges, Madebig pays the cause $1000.

Sounds great BUT......meanwhile, TMII have raked in at least twice that amount just from selling the awareness bands to their agents. Of the $1000 or more that TMII raked off the top, they also give the cause originator (agent who registered the cause on their website) $416 each time a cause is fulfilled. Roane keeps the rest and also gets the tax deduction on the $1000 he donates because he does it through a separate company called "Grant Wishes Foundation" which sounds like a non-profit but is registered as a business.

Other income streams include having users play games on his website and view ads/fulfill offers etc. They receive a few tokens each time they play or view an ad and can pledge these to causes or use them in a bizarre marketplace where agents compete to rip each other off, selling day to day items such as stamps for more than their face value, albeit disguised by the whole tokens-for-currency issue.

No one can argue that donating money to a good cause is a wonderful thing but when a business simply rides on the coat tails of hundreds of causes, takes more than 50% of the money raised to pay its expenses AND the person promoting the cause, then it definitely deserves more investigation.

Couple this with the past history of Madebig.com, TMII and Richi Roane, particularly surrounding the much-hyped re-launch of the website in September 2006 which led to at least hundreds of people being defrauded of a large amount of money - and you truly need to think twice before:

a) sending any money to this company, even if through a third party that you know (an agent selling you a band) or
b) being a charitable cause that gets associated with a company renowned for running pyramid schemes and defrauding many people in previous years

TMII appear to be struggling lately, having laid off most of their site administration staff since November 2008 and generally abandoning updating their website, Tweets and blog updates more than a few times a month. Instead, they are relying heavily on loyal but perhaps misguided and most importantly UNPAID agents to promote them but the drawback is that their promotions are uncoordinated and appear to be quite amateur.

This is not an up and coming business; involvement in it has benefited only those at the very top of the pyramid and hundreds of people have lost many thousands of dollars by falling for the lies, hype and spin of Richi Roane and his Presidential Leaders, including John Landgon, Terry Lussier, Karla (Roth) Pearson and several others.

I suggest anyone wishing to give to the causes simply contact them directly to arrange a donation and cut out such a useless and parasitic middleman.

Wow, another great post. Thanks for the insight. I'm glad to see they're struggling, let's hope they finally die out and end this ridiculously long scam/dishonest practice.

If you look at the causes that have been set up and are more than half way to the goal of 100,000 pledges, you'll note the overwhelming majority of pledges come from the starter of the cause, usually one of the Leaders or a wannabe leader. Obviously there is little widespread support for these causes from the general population of MadeBig members.

Also, a dirty little secret that's never been discussed by Richi Roane is "what happens to the money paid for awareness bands when the cause is not fulfilled (reaches 100,000 pledges)?"

You know the answer......it stays in Richi's pocket!!!!

Why would anyone ever want to give their hard earned money to MadeBig??????

The Albany Democrat Herald, of Albany, Oregon, published an article on Madebig.com at the weekend.

It certainly sheds a bit more light on the site's checkered past as well as the company behind it, Transcend Marketing International, Inc. (TMII)

http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2009/07/19/news/local/1loc02_madebig071909.txt

There is a new site that has the history and background of Richi Roane's TMII and MadeBig.com

It contains audio recordings of Roane and his Presidential Leaders making all kind of exaggerated claims, as well as documents and videos used for recruitment.

The site can be found at http://www.madesmall.net

That's an amazing resource, thanks for that