Scam Types dot Com

Agloco is a company run by the same team that previously ran AllAdvantage before it crashed a few years back. It seems to sell itself as a pay to surf program, despite the fact that it has been around for about a year now and no-one has earned a penny from it yet.

Whilst it is free to join, and use their toolbar, it most definitely seems to utilise a multi level marketing style of recruitment, despite the fact that there are no sign-up fees. Hence my interest and decision to see if Agloco is a scam.

Fraud

My understanding of why AllAdvantage failed is that they paid a fixed hourly rate to internet surfers for the hours they spent online using the company’s software. As you may expect, this led to all sorts of fraud, such as automated bots that could surf 24/7.

 Agloco has seemingly learned from the mistakes of the past and changed the payment method but this is another contentious issue right now as you will discover further down the page.One reason why Agloco may be perceived as a scam is that the model seems quite simple and, for surfers who dive in and sign up without reading all the TOS and other information on the official site, disappointment may well follow.

Deceptive Marketing

With the pseudo-MLM recruitment plan, associates are often over enthusiastic, or even deceptive in their personal marketing of Agloco - something I have witnessed myself on some webmaster forums I visit. For that reason, Agloco often gets portrayed as a scheme where you simply surf the net for a few hours a month and receive a load of money for doing so.

In reality, it is a little more complicated than that, and certainly not quite so straightforward. Working on the pyramidical principle for earnings means that only those who got in early and/or have the means for acquiring huge numbers of direct or indirect referrals will have the potential to earn the big bucks.

John Chow

Somebody like John Chow, who runs a money making blog and also has a tasty backlink from the Agloco site, stands to do well as he is in the top 0.001% of members in terms of referrals. For Joe Average, I would imagine potential earnings are minimal by comparison.

If you are wondering why I am italicising the word ‘potential’ with regard to earnings then it is because no-one yet knows what the earnings will be. To understand why that is we need to look at the not-so-simple model behind Agloco -

Step one is, obviously, signing up to Agloco. This involves submitting personal details for which they would appear to have a suitable privacy policy. Following this, you should download their viewbar and install it, only the viewbar has been in final beta since at least the end of last year! (However, I believe I read that John Chow is using a beta version that doesn’t rack up any usage hours so that may mean it’s general deployment is now imminent).

Step two is to surf the web to accrue credit in the form of hours spent online. Irrespective of how many hours surfing you put in each month, this will be capped at the maximum of 5 hours. (The Agloco TOS interestingly states that this can be changed at any time and varied according to your country).

Step three : the ‘credits’ you accrue from spending time online, plus further credits from your referrals, will be converted at a later date into cash or shares in Agloco. At this time there are no firm figures being quoted for how payments will be evaluated, only that Agloco will take 10% and will only pay members when the business is making a sustainable profit.

Some people will perceive that as meaning the company is being managed well and is looking to avoid the mistakes of AllAdvantage. Others will wonder when the day of profit will actually come.

Shares

Did you notice I crossed out the word ’shares’ a couple of paragraphs ago? This is because Agloco originally said they would issue stock and let the company be owned by the members. This still seems to be their goal with a possible floatation on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) still being mentioned on the official site. However, as different countries have different laws on securities, Agloco have wisely decided to quell such conversation due to possible legal complications. It will be interesting to see if Agloco does ever float now as that, for me at least, seemed to be the biggest part of their appeal.

If Agloco do give shares as a form of payment then this may have ramifications - the average user with their viewbar installed will have been surfing the net for many hours. In fact, with the delays in payment it may well be many hundreds of hours. When they finally receive their shares will they not be tempted to sell them straight away to get some cash? If so, the laws of supply and demand will cause the share price to drop, thereby devaluing the remaining members’ shares to, potentially, next to nothing.

Advertising Revenue

Whether members are paid in shares or cash, another valuable point is the fact that the revenue of the company from which they receive their earnings is derived from advertisers who are paying to feature via the viewbar. In reality, how many marketers are likely to want to pay to have their adverts viewed by paid to read surfers anyway??

Finally, back to some important points, some of which are in Agloco’s Terms Of Service -

• They can terminate membership at any time (does this mean moments before paying you?)
• They can vary the allowed hours of surfing at any time
• They can vary the value of those hours of surfing at any time
• They haven’t given any firm indication whatsoever of when payments will start

All in all, does this mean Agloco is a scam?

I think not. There is nothing to pay out so the potential financial loss is zero, whilst there is a chance that some will make significant amounts of money should Agloco be successful.

It could be argued that surfing and recruiting is time consuming and they would be fair comments, and time is money after all. Therefore, I would suggest that your decision on whether to join Agloco should be based on your thoughts about it’s potential vs the value you place on your own time.

My personal opinion then is that Agloco is NOT a scam but I won’t be joining up either.

Verdict : FLAWED