The Federal Trade Commission and Nevada Attorney General's office filed a federal complaint on Thursday accusing the financial training company IYOVIA of operating a multi-level marketing scheme that scammed consumers, particularly young people, out of more than 1.2 billion dollars since 2018.
The company — which was formerly known by names including IM Mastery Academy and IML, and rebranded last November — billed itself as a platform that could teach people how to make money by trading on the foreign exchange, cryptocurrency, futures, and stock markets.
In social media posts, people involved with the company heavily promoted it as a means to financial freedom — touting luxurious lifestyles and six-figure incomes, the FTC said. "Trading can be your ticket to wealth and success," one salesperson allegedly wrote in an October 2023 Instagram post.
The complaint alleges that while the company claimed that customers could get rich by purchasing its financial training courses — which could cost anywhere from a hundred to few hundred dollars each month, in addition to other "add-ons" services — "subscribers have lost substantial sums of money trading financial instruments, on top of the hundreds if not thousands of dollars they paid IML."
IYOVIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company's founder, Christopher Terry, one of the defendants in the suit, described the company on an archived version of his website as "a cutting-edge online educational platform" that introduces customers to financial marketplaces.
The instructors who taught these courses often lacked formal financial training or accreditation — and obtained trainings from Youtube videos or the company itself, The FTC said. Most of the instructors "are salespeople masquerading as top-notch investment professionals," the complaint alleges.
One instructor allegedly doctored his trading results — and the company covered up the allegations because, the complaint says, "If not handled properly, this will be a public reputation nightmare," the company's director of education, product development, and regulatory compliance wrote in a message described in the complaint.
In addition to financial courses, the company also offered subscribers the chance to participate as salespeople, earning commissions by recruiting others into the fold. The FTC says these tactics were a "multi-level marketing scheme" that resulted in the vast majority of salespeople losing or earning very little money.
In 2022, according to income disclosure statements included in the complaint, around 80% of the company's salespeople made less than $500 a year. Ninety percent of people who signed up for the company's trading courses had dropped the services within six months, the complaint said.
'A massive scam'
The company operated "a massive scam that has harmed hundreds of thousands of consumers in the United States and worldwide," the complaint alleged. "Despite direct knowledge that many consumers were losing money trading, and that consumers who purchased the Business Venture were also losing money, IML chose to keep marketing the Trading Training Services and the Business Venture using unsubstantiated, misleading, and dishonest claims."
"The breadth of this scam is remarkable," Christopher Mufarrige, the director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. The agency declined to comment further, citing the active litigation. The Nevada Attorney General's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
IYOVIA focused its marketing efforts on young people, particularly young Black and Latino consumers, the complaint said. It added that in 2017, France's financial markets regulator issued a public warning that the company was targeting young people, including high schoolers, and several salespeople were arrested by the Spanish National Police in 2022 for, among other things, trying to recruit adolescents.
"That's the great thing about network [marketing]... They keep making new 18 year olds everyday," Christopher Terry, the company's founder, once wrote to an associate, according to the complaint.
"Young adults can be a very susceptible population to a marketing pitch to dump the 9-to-5 job and really obtain financial freedom," said Bonnie Patten, the Executive Director of the nonprofit organization Truth in Advertising, which has investigated IYOVIA's claims.
"What IYOVIA and the defendants named in this complaint were doing was scamming consumers out of hundreds of millions of dollars on a pitch that they could earn financial freedom, when it was all just a lie," she added.
The complaint said that at least 21 international government agencies have issued warnings about the company, and that Canadian law enforcement has taken legal action.
Terry and his wife, Isis Terry, the company's chief financial officer and co-owner, received at least $20 million from the business, the feds alleged.
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