Anyway, Distributor is someone who’s sponsored one person or no one. Star is someone who has someone in his left and right legs. Star 1000 is someone who has 1000 PV… in a ONE WEEK PERIOD. This is crucial. In order for a person to be a Star 1000 for a whole month, he needs at least 4000 PV in BOTH legs for the entire month! Since everyone is recommended 300 PV (used to be 200) per month, that’s 13 people buying 3 cases of juice per month. Or 20 with two cases. Or 40 with one case.

That is ridiculous!

I remember being present when one of my TEAM members was showing a plan, and due to the misleading nature of the IDS, he said, “after 5 people (buying 2 cases per month) get into your business, you’re Star 1000 and make an average income of x per year!”

At that time I hadn’t analyzed the IDS as I have now, but now that I have, that’s just totally wrong. And many other distributors have said something very similar to that. The compensation plan from that angle becomes very convoluted. I’ve looked at many other MLM companies, and most of them pay weekly, but don’t have weekly “levels” such as MonaVie. They have monthly “levels” if anything.

Just something I decided to point out :)

:)

Basically, he just said, “clarify everything with MonaVie customer support and TEAM customer support.”

So… I’m going to do just that. If they don’t respond to me, I know why. If they do, I’ll be sure to let you guys know what their response to my proof is.

Though funny… my sponsor had a good point about MonaVie’s revenue. I misread; Inc 500 shows MonaVie’s 2008 revenue to be $800 million. Of course, there’s no verification of that. Inc 500 is not the IRS. So there is a slight possibility for MonaVie to have made $1 billion in their first 3 years. Slight. But probably not at all.

What he said that interested me was that, “it can be said both ways that neither side can prove their claims.”

So of course my obvious rebuttal was, “but when a company uses its “billion dollars in three years” as a selling point, the burden of proof lays on them because anyone can say they made two billion dollars in two days, but not anyone can prove it.”

And of course he had no response to that.

So I’m going to take his advice and just talk with customer support. We’ll see how that goes.

AA, thanks! I’m glad I could make someone happy lol.

I’m going to try to complain to both TEAM customer support and MonaVie distributor support. I did indeed sign a contract based on misinformation–and I believe I should be compensated in some way for that.

Thank you all for your support.

It’s become pretty obvious that you were mislead on a number of levels – firstly concerning the opportunity whereby you were never informed that the recruitment of other distributors is in fact pyramiding (which I’m sure was in contradiction to the claims the company would’ve have made and which I’ve heard first hand), the misrepresentations concerning the company’s revenue, about the product also with the illegal health claims and no doubt there’s more.

I hope that I’m not being presumptuous in assuming that had these misrepresentations not been made, you may well have not have chosen to invest in the product and may not have pursued the “opportunity” and thus lost any money?

If that’s the case, then to me this would constitutes fraud…

My own friend acknowledges having had his sponsor provided poor business advice (he was taught to recruit other distributors rather than sell the product to customers), misrepresented the earning potential and that he was sold on the product based on the information he had been given (namely the high ORAC and the health claims being made by those in his upline, including Australia’s own Black Diamond and other distributors) and yet, he is still won’t entertain the idea of making a complaint.

I would even like to see him to ask for all of his money back (for tools, products and everything he invested in – of which there has been much) and state all the specific reasons as to why he’s entitled to it but unfortunately, he continues to hold onto the (now feint) glimmer of hope that somehow he’s going to be able to make some of the money that was promoted as being possible for him to earn.

The contract you signed was based on misinformation you received – are you interested in making a complaint to the authorities or even going back to Monavie and asking for a full refund of everything you spent?

I think a lack of complaints from victims is obviously part of the reason why this company has been allowed fester like a cancer – but sadly the nature of the business is that people have been introduced to the business by someone they know, they’ve introduced people they know and I guess that makes it all the harder for victims to complain.

The study enrolled 40 subjects; 13 of them didn’t finish -– that’s a very high 33% dropout rate for a 90-day study. Tables 3 and 4 show that Wellmune had no significant effects on any parameter (incidence/duration of colds, flu, respiratory) in the main comparisons with the placebo group. The only parameter for which they reported a significant effect was the number of work days missed due to a cold among the small subset of subjects that reported having a cold -– there were only 5 people in the Wellmune group and 4 in the placebo group that developed a cold and completed the study protocol. And yet Wellmune did not significantly affect the average duration of a cold. So in other words, Wellmune had no significant effect on the number of subjects who reported having a cold, the number of cold incidents, the duration of colds, or any parameter related to flu and respiratory episodes, and yet the company considers it a positive selling point that there was a seemingly random difference in work days missed due to colds among one group of 5 subjects and another group of 4 subjects. That’s laughable!

Now let’s look at the authors’ conclusions:

“Importantly, none of the subjects from the WGP group missed work or school during the 90-day study. In addition the WGP group’s physical component summary score improved more than the placebo group, and the WGP group had a significantly lower fever score.”

The first conclusion, which they incredulously deemed as “important”, was based on results in a group of 9 subjects that developed a cold; only 5 of them took Wellmune — a subgroup far too small to base ANY conclusions on — and these findings were contradicted by the results for other key parameters.

As for the second claim, the physical component summary score was 57.5 in the Wellmune group and 55.5 in the placebo group. That’s a 3.6% difference relative to placebo -– probably attributable to chance and clinically insignificant in any event. Furthermore, they did not report baseline values, so there could have been differences between between the groups before they started on Wellmune.

As for the last conclusion that the “WGP group had a significantly lower fever score”, that was just an outright lie. In fact, in the results section the authors report (Table 4) that there was no significant difference in ‘total fever’ between the Wellmune and placebo groups. The authors clearly state in the methods section that the p-value cutoff for statistical significance was set at 0.05, which is standard. The p-values listed for the fever data in Table 4 were 0.295 and 0.068 in the intent-to-treat and per-protocol analyses, respectively. Both values are statistically non-significant.

Combine all of that with the fact that Biothera ran the study, and the journal it was published in is a piece of garbage, and you’ve got something that’s barely worth the paper it’s written on — except perhaps to warn people.

I haven’t gone through the details in the article yet but at this point it doesn’t matter what the results show, because it’s not a reputable publication. The other article I looked at that was listed on the Wellmune website featured an introductory editorial review singing the praises of beta-glucans. It appeared in a publication that cannot even rightly be called a journal, despite the fact that it has the word “journal” in its title — i.e., The Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association. http://www.wellmune.com/pdf/glucan-reprint5-2.pdf

This journal is published by the American Nutraceutical Association, which is essentially a mouthpiece organization for the ‘nutraceutical’ industry; and industry that happens to include a wealth of quacks, hacks, and scammers. Needless to say, this rag is also not indexed on PubMed/MEDLINE. The author of the review article (who had the gall to throw in a little plug for beta-glucans as a cancer therapy) is Russell Blaylock, a rather infamous quack/conspiracy theorist and unlicensed physician. If you see Blaylock’s name associated with something, that’s basically a ‘seal of disapproval’ -– a red flag that whatever he’s talking about is total BS. Aside from his whacked out, scientifically-discredited theories about mercury fillings, water fluoridation, autism, vaccines, etc., he’s also a rabid political conspiracy theorist. He made some pretty detestable comments in a recent tirade during a guest appearance on the ultra-right, conspiracy theory-driven online radio show PrisonPlanetTV, hosted by nutjob Alex Jones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gbuk6VBsEk&feature=player_embedded
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Blaylock
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/print?oid=77891

In this article, Blaylock likens the Healthcare Reform Act, which he refers to as ‘Obamacare’, as: akin to Nazisim; draconian; “a eugenics program operating under the cover of a socialist dream”; perpetrated by “the ruling elite” who he condemns as “hardcore psychopaths and control freaks”. It’s hard to imagine a less credible source than this guy. He fits the quack/snakeoil-peddler profile to a tee.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/andy-of-mayberry-shills-for-obamacare.html

This certainly isn’t the caliber of research that would require a budget of $250 million. That claim must be pure BS. In fact, the study in JANA wasn’t even on Biothera’s Wellmune WGP. It was on a product called Imucell produced by Biopolymer Engineering, Inc. (Eagan, Minnesota). And it was a 21-day study conducted in mice, not humans, so this would cost less than $10,000 to execute.

I don’t see that it’s worthwhile to waste our time digging into Wellmune’s research any further than this, unless anyone has further questions.

the saying that the us military helped with the creation of the product mmun and that the canadian forces use 2 or more of the products in my mind should be a no brainer in the common sence field, but then again when you r trusting your upline its hard tonot believe it when your in the business and brainwashed, i was there and done that. but i got smarter since then.