Muses of Murari

Initially I thought of posting my bitter experiences with GoldQuest/QuestNet, but I decided not to do so for the reason of avoiding pitying myself. Let me give you a short outline of my roller coaster experience with GQ.

A gist of my experience

I joined at a time I was in dire financial crunch. Introduced by a good friend promising a great opportunity in the business by buying a gold coin for 30k rupees and referring people. My school buddy and I invested 60k, bought gold coins and joined the network. Blame it on our ill luck and a series of incidents lead to our investment to 1.8 lacs! Many motivation classes followed, attended a lot of presentations, myself taken some presentations, went to Bangalore and Hyderabad, saw at least 50 people turned negative, tension, frustration, anguish, fatigue creeped in.

Finally I had 30 people under me. Of which, I made only two people to earn 10k each. I put all my efforts to motivate my guys to earn. I worked a lot sincerely to make them earn. By that time, it was too late. All of them showed little interest. I can sense a calmness of betrayal when I spoke to them. I felt guilt. Then again I worked not for myself, but for all my downlines. But nothing worked out as usual. I lost all my interest and finally I quit. I walked away after almost a year of mental turmoil.

We had put in lot of energy, time and money. But what is the result? – Returns of 50k and a bunch of gold coins whose worth not more than 20k and 30 people who I referred directly & indirectly who are yet to see their investment or its returns. And we have some stories to share with the world.

Opinion

Rs.30k is not a big money these days if you are a software engineer. But it was a lot when I was in some kind of crunch time. We roped in a kirana owner, poor fellow, we still repent that we shouldn’t have put him in to this. He had lots of desire to earn money. But no willingness. That lead him down. Then I understood, the greed of people is helping this company to earn and not its business model.

Have you ever saw a business model that breaks even or gives 100% or 200% or even 1000% returns in a single day! This is possible in this model. What you call this? Greed. Even for the so called bullish market till mid of Jan’08, people called it greedy market. You call this hyper greed model?

There are two things I want to put my opinion on. One is the company itself and other one is people who are driving this model. First about the people who drive this model.

The people at the top of the binary tree/pyramid will keep earning no matter who loses. The presentation are held in such a way, that they portray the business as perfectly legal. The people who take presentation shows all kinds of proofs, tell you lot of stories which they themselves are not sure of. That’s how they are trained to do so. Its all about training, motivating by showing the money earned by successful people. Entire business run by one tool : GREED. But it will be never be mentioned as such. Instead, they train all their downlines with good words like success in life, leadership, growth, planning one’s life et all. Sometimes mentioning Honda city, posh bungalow, early retirement will do the trick. They play according to the tunes of the prospects.

Once you are in to the system, you will be puppeteered to do everything in the name of leadership. I heard many said "complete surrender to the leaders/uplines". What the heck? Who are these guys? Are they are enough enlightened in their lives to show us the ultimate path. And also they show the people who left their main jobs to completely spend their time with GQ to new recruits for motivating them to work harder. I saw people the people who quit their main jobs. They are the ones at the top/high level on the pyramid hill.

People will listen for two reasons. Because they have invested and they want returns or at least their investment back. They will also listen when this model works in favor of them. In both ways it is of favor to the company and the people driving it. Few people rake in lacs of rupees per week in this system. Few earn thousands but there are hundreds of people who are given wrong information, lured by greed and stacked with piles of motivational stories and of course with no returns!

People involved in this knows that not every one who enters in to this model, can earn as mush as promised. Yet they seek their friends or relatives. That is because their own monies are at stakes. They want to get relieved soon. And also because due to the sugar coating words of their leaders/uplines mislead them, thinking that they are doing right things to their friends or relatives by giving opportunity of a lifetime. All bullshit.

I was also playing the same tunes but now I repent for all. I took good decision by quitting it. I and my friend lost around 1.4lac by investment/expenses in this pyramid model. Forget the money I lost or I earned or my uplines are earning or company is earning. Look at the ethical side. The innocent, non-informed, gullible people will keep falling for this. People at the top of the tree will continue to earn, but many of the new comers will loose their hard earned money. I am talking about the people for whom 30k is a life time earnings. This drove me not to return to this scheme ever again. Many people I know had quit this business even after earning considerably. The reasons are their own.

Ethical explanation given by the people involved in GQ are one sided. One my friend is into this big time. I asked him lot of times after I quit, about the ethics involved. His answers were only one sided. He told me that they say completely about the business, its legality to risk involved, blah, blah, blah. All these are in papers. I know the truth. Whatever he said hardly happens in reality. Even it happens, it doesn’t happen at all sections of the binary tree. Because the uplines are driven by targets every week, many never tell the hundred percent facts.

These people work in teams. Each team have some thousands of people under them, but hardly few nodes in active state. These nodes are the ones earning money in thousands if not lacs per week. The team lead will organize meets regularly and conduct motivational classes, preach strategies, share success stories, reviewing the number of preys they succeeded et all. Brainwashing sessions I should say!

And about the the company. It says it is 3 billion dollar company. I was told that it was 8 billion dollar when I joined this! the company says what it is doing is everything legal. But look how much it is earning from one product sold. Every week there are thousands of products sold, and the money, involved is simply huge. It pockets lot of money in turn giving peanuts to ladder of referrals. They can’t reap this much of money by directly sell
ing their products to the customers. So they brought this model which actually reaps enormous amount of money to the company and to the handful of top liners.

Just for comparison sake, there are other MLMs like Amway, Tupperware, Modi care, which have better products in hand and their model is better than GQ. In GQ, money involved is big, number of people involved is big and the money lost by people is also big.

Ditch the legality. Just for sake of poor people not loosing their money, this company and its activity should be banned in India as it was done in Iran, Srilanka and other countries. I am not telling this because I lost money or failed to earn money. I am telling this, having experienced things in first hand, more people will loose their monies in days ahead if this model continue to flourish.

For more information on the recent GoldQuest scandal in Chennai, check out at CodeCritic .

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