Simplicity-Lifestyle misleading, claims to be what they are not Vancouver, British Columbia

11th of Dec, 2011 by User793020

I looked at many categories trying to figure out which one best describes what this company claims to be, but none of the options really fit so I went with this one. The reason for that is that most folks who will fall for this one are looking for a homebased business or way to make money from home and that is what this company does promise to do: make you money. The claims that they put on their website are that they are looking to help individuals, families and groups "around the world earn extra income and become more successful and balanced in their personal and spiritual lives." They claim to be philanthropic in their basis. The set up is that you sign up, pay them $10, "tag" (sponsor, refer, recruit) 5 people within 11 days who pay the same $10, then according to their website you are GUARANTEED $1000 in return in 45 days. And supposedly you get this no matter if your 5 people "tag" anyone. The only catch supposedly is that there can only be one account per household and per AlertPay account. (When they started out they were using PayPal, but have gotten rid of PayPal and are using AlertPay and trying to add SolidTrustPay as well.) So I signed up and joined back on 9/14/2011, with an estimated pay out date of 10/28/2011. I tagged 6 people actually within the 11 days but because of their strict limit of 5 "tags" per person, I lost one of my 6 to someone else in the program. My agreement with my 6 people was that I would pay their way in the first and second cycles and if they were not able to get their own 5 "tags" that first cycle, then I would also pay for their 5 tags in the second cycle. If this worked as planned, then that would be a great ROI and a sensible plan. They each had said they would do the same for their 5 tags during the next cycle ONCE THEY HAD BEEN PAID. I joined a Skype chat room dedicated to this program and talked with many people who had joined the program. The program says that they have been open since January 2011, but most of the folks in the room had joined in late August or September, so none had personal experience with being paid. That didn't bother any of us, we just wrote it off as being a new company and decided to wait and see what happened when it came time to be paid ourselves. As our "estimated pay out dates" approached we all got e-mails stating that our dates were approaching and that we should expect to receive our payments within 7 business days of our "estimated payout date". This was a little bothersome, but we all said ok, let's wait and see. Then we started receiving e-mails stating that due to the explosion in membership, there was a lot of fraud with folks opening bogus accounts and funding those accounts so that they could get their 5 tags without actually doing the work. This was causing Simplicity-Lifestyle to have to investigate every single account more thoroughly and completely, so would cause a delay in payments also. Slowly over the next couple of weeks that "7 business day" deadline came and went for everyone in the chat room, so we started submitting e-mails to Customer Service with the requested subject line of "7th Business Day Missed Payment" and including our name, membership id # and AlertPay e-mail address in the body of the e-mail like Customer Service had requested. Those who could afford to (or had free international calling) called the Customer Service phone number. I tried this also, but then found out that my calling plan does not include Canada so the calls were costing me 39 cents per minute. My experience (and that of others) with calling their offices were this: you call them, you get some automated system that asks you for your name, then you get put on hold while your party is located. If you are REALLY LUCKY you will then hear the voice of a lady who calls herself Jessica and she will give you some spiel about what is going on, promise to look into your issue and wish you a good day. Most folks got a voice recording instead that gave you the hours of operation and the suggestion that you send in an e-mail to Customer Service for faster service and to keep trying to call. Those lucky few who actually talked to Jessica eventually got paid, but not the promised $1000. Instead everyone got an e-mail stating that because of the wild fluctuations in the stock market over the past 3 months, the payout amounts would vary from cycle to cycle with a maximum of $1000 being possible. Those lucky few who got paid received $500. But then they ran into a problem with AlertPay. Since the original payments to Simplicity-Lifestyle were made through PayPal, AlertPay froze the payouts while they investigated to be sure that there wasn't any fraud going on. But those funds were quickly released as soon as the recipients responded to requests for information from AlertPay and future recipients avoided the problem altogether by renewing their memberships via AlertPay. My sponsor received his money, and sent me the $10 to renew my subscription so I went ahead and did that. Then we both started having trouble with logging into our Simplicity-Lifestyle accounts, so had to submit support tickets to get that resolved. The result was that Simplicity-Lifestyle gave us extra days to get our tags for this cycle. But I still had not received my payment from the last cycle and was only receiving autoresponder messages to my requests for customer service. My last response from Simplicity-Lifestyle's customer service other than the autoresponder message was received well over 2 weeks ago. I have never been paid by them at all. In the chat room I am in, there are about 50 people and maybe 5 have been paid at all. Most of the rest have had the same experience as I have and have written it off as a scam. My latest experience was that on Saturday 12/10/2011 I logged into my back office for Simplicity-Lifestyle and found that one of my 5 tags from the last cycle had disappeared from my list in my back office, but I have been unable to get a response from Customer Service explaining why that happened. I am glad that none of the folks that I "tagged" for this program were responsible for paying their $10 unless they wanted to do so (I paid for 5 out of the 6 that I tagged). That at least relieves my mind that I basically was the only one who lost money and the $60 + fees that I lost I consider a lesson learned. If someone contacts you and asks you to join this program, I advise you to say "no thanks" unless they are willing to pay for your fees plus those of your 5 tags. Then why not? It's their money to lose, not yours and they wouldn't be doing that unless they had actually received a payment or were fairly confident of doing so. I would strongly suggest asking for proof that they had been paid, but even those receipts can be faked with little effort at all. I do know that as of right now the only processor being used for payments is AlertPay.

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