Multilevel marketing mayhem
If you've ever wanted to quit your job, set up a generic website, and almost certainly fail to make money by sending people spammy emails, this is your chance
Have you ever thought about starting your own business with just your phone and internet? Do you want to explore the world while you work? Are you looking for the complete solution to build an online business with just a laptop and cell phone? If so, there are a number of websites out there that purport to offer the opportunity to follow your dream, and they all happily tell you so using identical language and visual styling. Even the testimonials from those who have allegedly experienced success with these business ventures are frequently duplicated from website to website. Needless to say, caution is advised to anyone inclined to pursue one of these “online businesses”, which are part of a multilevel marketing scheme and vanishingly unlikely to net most participants a decent income.
The identical sales pitches and testimonials make it easy to find a large set of these sites, since all one has to do is type the repeated text into a search engine. For the sake of this analysis, the general purpose scraper for infinite scroll websites discussed in this article was used to automate DuckDuckGo searches for several of the repeated phrases. DuckDuckGo was used rather than Google for this task due to higher quality of exact-match search results, ease of automation, and relative lack of promoted content interrupting the search.
This search process yielded 96 distinct websites that contain one or more of the search phrases. 93 of these 96 sites resolve to the same IP address, 157.53.227.1; the remaining three sites are excluded from this analysis as potential false positives. The sites are hosted by Landingi, which bills itself as a "No-code Landing Page Platform for data-driven Digital Marketers". The cookie-cutter MLM sites are presumably samples of the "landing pages" that Landingi provides.
The MLM websites all have a similar workflow, which basically consists of asking for your email address. Should you acquiesce, the email address you provide will receive multiple emails a day, most of which contain invitations to watch some sort of webinar. It doesn’t really matter which site you sign up for, as you’ll receive the same set of emails, and you will likely continue to receive them until the heat death of the universe. Occasionally, the sales pitches in the emails get disturbing — for example, one recurring email lists suicide rates for several well-paying careers, and suggests spammy email marketing as a superior alternative. (It isn’t.)
Should you decide to pursue an “online business” of your own via one of these sites, you will be directed to a form asking you to pay $149 to “join a community of online business owners” or something to that effect (in others words, set up a spammy MLM website of your very own). Based on reports on Reddit and elsewhere, this set of websites is an onboarding mechanism for the Kangen multilevel marketing scheme, and participants (most of whom will never see a cent of profit) will sooner or later be asked to cough up considerably more than the initial $149.
In a final disturbing twist, the publicly viewable HTML source code of most of these MLM sites contains what appear to be API credentials and personal email addresses. I attempted to reach out to Landingi to notify them of this issue, but they seemed unconcerned and informed me that it was a deliberate choice on the part of their customers. (This seems unlikely.) In any event, those who are inclined to pursue this questionable form of online entrepreneurship should be aware that, in addition to the risk of financial loss, there is also a very real risk of having one’s personal information compromised.
This research was originally published in abbreviated form in this thread on X.
Reminds me of those 10 sites I found that should be illegal spammed out on TikTok lol. Hilarious post and very well done. They always have these mlm types saying pay me 149.95 and I’ll tell you how you too can make a bundle. Which is them telling you to send out the same emails saying for 149.95 they’ll tell you how to make a bundle. Sort Earl Sheib, he’ll paint any car for 29.95 lol. Loved this post. Great work!!!