Academic

Quest Net: A Pyramid Scheme for Developing Countries

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

Modern pyramid schemes often are quite sophisticated in hiding the ball from the participants, mainly by focusing on the mystical qualities of their exclusive products. Quest Net, on the other hand, barely makes the effort to disguise its lack of substance. Take a look at the "Opportunity Overview" page. Judging by the quality of the disclosure, the generic products distributed by Quest Net are not an important part of the opportunity.

The description of the company emphasizes the business opportunity first, and the products are clearly an afterthought:

Our Story began in 1998, with a dream to touch and change lives around the world by harnessing the power of the Internet.

From the beginning, we were committed to providing customers with an innovative business opportunity through an e-commerce platform, like none other before. Nearly a decade later, we can proudly say - We did it!

We have developed an entire range of unique, exclusive and reliable products that are retailed online around the world using our scientifically designed business plan. Our customers have enjoyed the most advanced business tools for almost a decade - simplified online enrolment, a virtual office containing powerful business tools to manage and regulate your business, secure payment options, all fully integrated on an advanced e-commerce platform.

Even as the late 90s experienced the dot com bust with the demise of various headline grabbing online businesses, we have continued to quietly make our presence felt through a stable and steady growth and an ever increasing global customer base.

We started off with a single product, a collectible numismatic coin, that went on to define an entire product range of collectible coin sets and medallions over the next few years. It was only natural to then expand into watches and jewellery that have today developed into a world class brand representing quality, exclusivity and value. With continued success and a burgeoning loyal customer base, we further expanded our product range to include vacation packages, wellness products and state of the art telecom products and services.

In the last nine years, we have grown to become one of the largest and most profitable network marketing companies in the world.

Get the picture?

Success, success, success!!!

What do you do?

Who cares?! We are great at it!

Quest Net has been banned in Sri Lanka, Iran, and Afghanistan. The story of the company in Afghanistan was recounted on Friday's Marketplace, including a protest by Quest Net investors, who shouted "Quest zindagee!" ("Quest is life!") outside of President Hamid Karzai's palace. We even get a feel good story about the Taliban: "There is one group that seems able to stop Quest. When Zaman's friends came south to recruit in Kandahar, the Taliban left a letter on their door. It said: Get out, or we'll kill you. And the 'businessmen' quickly retreated."

Full post as published by Conglomerate on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).