Financial Times

GoldQuest raising its head again?
By Duruthu Edirimuni
Despite the Central Bank's efforts to stop the controversial multi level marketing (MLM) company, GoldQuest seems to be actively marketing its products again.

The company has sent letters to customers who have lost out on the previous supposedly ‘lucrative marketing scheme’, with an opportunity to ‘migrate’ from their original product to a different product and elevate their positions in GoldQuest’s MLM scheme to a higher rank.

Some bankers said that the large GoldQuest transactions done through credit cards have dried up, but there are several transactions amounting to small amounts in the recent past. “We have informed the Central Bank regarding these transactions and they are investigating them at the moment,” a banker said.

Meanwhile, a Central Bank official said that this scheme too seems to have a lot of ‘holes’ like the first one the company had introduced. The Central Bank will treat the credit card payments as capital transactions because they are similar to the original scheme.

“It also says that the position of the representative will be elevated and this is clearly a pyramid and network marketing plan and it is illegal,” he said. He said that the unit that has been set up to investigate pyramid and MLM schemes is looking into the company’s latest venture. The GoldQuest letter to customers that comes with an application form for ‘migration’, states that the receiver upon buying the product costing US$ 50, ‘will be elevated to the executive level of a qualified independent representative in the company’s compensation plan’.

The letter has instructed the customers to complete the application form with a ‘migration fee of US$ 50’, attach both sides of the credit card invoice copy together with an authorisation letter of the credit card company and return to the company’s Hong Kong QuestNet office. It has also given an option to ‘migrate online’ by filling in the relevant fields. In step five, it has instructed the customers to pay the US$ 50, but has not specified how. However, a customer who had received the letter told The Sunday Times FT that the option is to pay through a credit card.

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