And before all of the Trump supporters dismiss this article out of hand because of, you know, NRO, try actually reading it and refuting the facts.
Why does a "billionaire" (fraud) have to involve himself in these nickel and dime schemes?
Trump’s Multi-Level Marketing Telecom Endorsement Is Another Example of His Terrible JudgementIn an interview with the Wall Street Journal last August on the subject of his relationship with ACN, formerly the “American Communications Network,” Donald Trump was unequivocal: “I do not know the company. I know nothing about the company other than the people who run the company,” he said. “I’m not familiar with what they do or how they go about doing that.”
That was a surprising statement, given that, from 2006 until he announced his presidential bid in 2015, Trump was easily ACN’s most famous unofficial spokesman. For nearly a decade, Trump appeared in promotional videos touting ACN’s “revolutionary products,” he devoted an episode of NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice to ACN’s “revolutionary” videophone, and he earned millions of dollars giving speeches at ACN events as recently as early 2015. Introducing ACN executives Greg Provenzano and Mike Cupisz on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011, Trump said: “They run a company called ACN, which I know very well.”
Why, then, after a nine-year relationship, is Donald Trump so eager to dissociate himself from ACN?
Founded in 1993 in Michigan (it moved to North Carolina in 2008), ACN is a telecommunications company that relies on multi-level marketing: An ACN sales agent — or “Independent Business Owner” — receives a commission for selling an ACN product to a new customer and recruits that customer as a new sales agent, thereby securing commissions for that person’s sales, and so on “downline.” As the company advertised in a promotional video, “The key to ACN’s remarkable business opportunity is the power of residual income. Rather than receiving a onetime commission for acquiring a new customer, you receive a percentage of your customer’s monthly bills for as long as they continue to use the services.”
But a fine line separates multi-level marketing operations from pyramid schemes, as Donald Trump well knows. From 2009 to 2011, Trump himself ran a multi-level marketing enterprise — The Trump NetworkTM — using more than 20,000 recruiters to sell dubious nutritional supplements. The Trump Network has long been accused of being a pyramid scheme.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432709/donald-trump-american-communications-network-multi-level-marketing-boondoggle
