Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the detractors of
Southeast Asian multi-level marketer Qnet and its controversial founder
and chairman, Vijay Eswaran, came out in force. Our story Selling a Better Life
attracted a great deal of attention, almost all of it positive and much
of it overtly heartfelt. But a few voices echoed the dark allusions of
fraud and shady dealing that have dogged this company almost since its
inception.
These voices were heard last month – but not in our own Comments section. Crusading financial journalist Sucheta Dalal, co-publisher of personal investment and business news site Moneylife and a prominent blogger, has campaigned against MLMs in general and Qnet in particular for a number of years. Her stories start out from the premise that Qnet is a scam, with headlines such as “QNet, the MLM has resurfaced in India; will people be duped again?” on November 11, and “QNet, the MLM company, has no answers to Moneylife’s simple questions” on November 20. It also appears in her Twitter feed, in comments such as “Its pathetic how Qnet is leading people to financial ruin” on December 12.
She even aired the suggestion that Qnet paid Forbes Asia
to run our story: “Several Qnet dealers pointing to Forbes endorsing
QNet!! Waiting for #Forbes to clarify! is it paid news or real?” on
November 19. A genuine concern in India, where stories in mainstream newspapers are in fact sometimes for sale.
In fairness, fans and foes of Qnet tend to agree on one thing: the purpose of our story was to ‘endorse’ Qnet, a motive that never occurred to any of the people involved in its reporting, research, editing, fact-checking, and production.
In particular Dalal has locked horns with Qnet’s head of corporate affairs, Zaheer Merchant, in a volley of charges and replies over everything from the legality of Qnet’s business model to basic facts on whether meetings between them did or did not take place. Words in this dialogue waged in cyberspace include bribe, liar, threatened, untrue, scheme, Ponzi, pyramid and so on.
The back-and-forth between them became so contentious, with Dalal’s fervid denunciations and Merchant’s icy denials, that we extended an offer to both to use this column, Eastern Exposure, as a neutral site. We promised Dalal we would publish her questions verbatim and demand straight answers from Qnet; we promised Merchant we would publish his explanations verbatim. And we would let the readers decide.
Regrettably, Dalal refrained from taking part. She also opted to not identify self-professed ‘victims’ of Qnet who, she says, came out in one of her for-pay seminars in Mumbai a few weeks ago. Merchant did the opposite; his reply to Dalal’s charges is below.
But first, an observation on reporting in the age of the Internet. The charges against Qnet, we found, tend to originate in apocryphal, anonymous or debunked sources. They then find their way into Wikipedia or news blogs, which are then cited as fact. For example, it’s widely reported that Eswaran was arrested and jailed in Jakarta in 2007, but far less often that the charges were ruled as spurious and dropped.
Publication of our story would, we expected, attract solid, credible information on Qnet’s misdeeds in our Comments section. More than 20,000 readers and 157 comments later, this has not happened.
Letter from Zaheer Merchant to Forbes Asia, responding to charges in Moneylife, its Comments section. and in Sucheta Dalal’s Twitterfeed.
“We reply to Ms. Dalal’s various carges and assertions:
Qnet has changed its name several times.
Companies change their names frequently for reasons such as branding, variations in lines of business, and marketing. In our case, this was done for strategic business purposes. When Qnet was founded in 1998 it offered only one product, commemorative gold coins. As the company added more products to its portfolio and the e-commerce platform evolved, the name GoldQuest was no longer suitable and it was changed to QuestNet and then shortened to QNet. Hundreds of companies all over the world have done the same sort of thing.
Disparaging information about Qnet must be accurate, because it’s in the Wikipedia entry.
We strongly dispute the credibility of the Wikipedia entry on Qnet. But we can’t do much about it: Wikipedia’s policy does not allow a company representative, a PR agency or anyone with a stake in the matter to edit entries. We have lodged a complaint with Wikipedia administrators about the heavily bias of the entry and a debate has been opened up on their ‘Neutral Point of view’ noticeboard, that you can see here. -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard/Archive_29#Qnet_ltd Please also note that Wikipedia is not considered an authentic source of information. Wikipedia is a public forum where anyone, even you can edit an entry. Unfortunately this has led to numerous quality problems for the portal which its founder Jimmy Wales admits himself. This has been acknowledged by leading media including the New York Times. You can read these two articles on the subject.
Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04seelye.html?pagewanted=all
QNET invited journalists to Hong Kong in what was basically a bribe.
While the company was being investigated in Chennai, we experienced a significant amount of negative media exposure, especially in the newspapers in South India. Hence, in order to set the record straight and be able to provide a true picture of the company, we invited different publications to bust the myth that we were a fly-by-night operator with no credibility.
Journalists from several publications accepted this invitation and visited our Headquarters where they met with the global managing director of QNET and other senior officials of the company, visited our international customer support centre, our logistics facility from which thousands of products are shipped globally every single day, and also our training centre to watch an IR training in progress. They asked us questions in an open forum and we were able to respond to all their queries and concerns.
We fail to see how a simple invitation to review the entire operations and efficacy of the same can be termed as a “softening” process or any kind of a ‘bribe.’
Qnet never met with Sucheta Dalal, one of the founders of Moneylife.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/donaldfrazier/2012/12/18/followup-on-the-news-internet-spat-breaks-out-over-qnet-and-multi-level-marketing-in-india/
These voices were heard last month – but not in our own Comments section. Crusading financial journalist Sucheta Dalal, co-publisher of personal investment and business news site Moneylife and a prominent blogger, has campaigned against MLMs in general and Qnet in particular for a number of years. Her stories start out from the premise that Qnet is a scam, with headlines such as “QNet, the MLM has resurfaced in India; will people be duped again?” on November 11, and “QNet, the MLM company, has no answers to Moneylife’s simple questions” on November 20. It also appears in her Twitter feed, in comments such as “Its pathetic how Qnet is leading people to financial ruin” on December 12.
Can nobody be trusted? Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In fairness, fans and foes of Qnet tend to agree on one thing: the purpose of our story was to ‘endorse’ Qnet, a motive that never occurred to any of the people involved in its reporting, research, editing, fact-checking, and production.
In particular Dalal has locked horns with Qnet’s head of corporate affairs, Zaheer Merchant, in a volley of charges and replies over everything from the legality of Qnet’s business model to basic facts on whether meetings between them did or did not take place. Words in this dialogue waged in cyberspace include bribe, liar, threatened, untrue, scheme, Ponzi, pyramid and so on.
The back-and-forth between them became so contentious, with Dalal’s fervid denunciations and Merchant’s icy denials, that we extended an offer to both to use this column, Eastern Exposure, as a neutral site. We promised Dalal we would publish her questions verbatim and demand straight answers from Qnet; we promised Merchant we would publish his explanations verbatim. And we would let the readers decide.
Regrettably, Dalal refrained from taking part. She also opted to not identify self-professed ‘victims’ of Qnet who, she says, came out in one of her for-pay seminars in Mumbai a few weeks ago. Merchant did the opposite; his reply to Dalal’s charges is below.
But first, an observation on reporting in the age of the Internet. The charges against Qnet, we found, tend to originate in apocryphal, anonymous or debunked sources. They then find their way into Wikipedia or news blogs, which are then cited as fact. For example, it’s widely reported that Eswaran was arrested and jailed in Jakarta in 2007, but far less often that the charges were ruled as spurious and dropped.
Publication of our story would, we expected, attract solid, credible information on Qnet’s misdeeds in our Comments section. More than 20,000 readers and 157 comments later, this has not happened.
Letter from Zaheer Merchant to Forbes Asia, responding to charges in Moneylife, its Comments section. and in Sucheta Dalal’s Twitterfeed.
“We reply to Ms. Dalal’s various carges and assertions:
Qnet has changed its name several times.
Companies change their names frequently for reasons such as branding, variations in lines of business, and marketing. In our case, this was done for strategic business purposes. When Qnet was founded in 1998 it offered only one product, commemorative gold coins. As the company added more products to its portfolio and the e-commerce platform evolved, the name GoldQuest was no longer suitable and it was changed to QuestNet and then shortened to QNet. Hundreds of companies all over the world have done the same sort of thing.
Disparaging information about Qnet must be accurate, because it’s in the Wikipedia entry.
We strongly dispute the credibility of the Wikipedia entry on Qnet. But we can’t do much about it: Wikipedia’s policy does not allow a company representative, a PR agency or anyone with a stake in the matter to edit entries. We have lodged a complaint with Wikipedia administrators about the heavily bias of the entry and a debate has been opened up on their ‘Neutral Point of view’ noticeboard, that you can see here. -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/Noticeboard/Archive_29#Qnet_ltd Please also note that Wikipedia is not considered an authentic source of information. Wikipedia is a public forum where anyone, even you can edit an entry. Unfortunately this has led to numerous quality problems for the portal which its founder Jimmy Wales admits himself. This has been acknowledged by leading media including the New York Times. You can read these two articles on the subject.
Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/weekinreview/04seelye.html?pagewanted=all
QNET invited journalists to Hong Kong in what was basically a bribe.
While the company was being investigated in Chennai, we experienced a significant amount of negative media exposure, especially in the newspapers in South India. Hence, in order to set the record straight and be able to provide a true picture of the company, we invited different publications to bust the myth that we were a fly-by-night operator with no credibility.
Journalists from several publications accepted this invitation and visited our Headquarters where they met with the global managing director of QNET and other senior officials of the company, visited our international customer support centre, our logistics facility from which thousands of products are shipped globally every single day, and also our training centre to watch an IR training in progress. They asked us questions in an open forum and we were able to respond to all their queries and concerns.
We fail to see how a simple invitation to review the entire operations and efficacy of the same can be termed as a “softening” process or any kind of a ‘bribe.’
Qnet never met with Sucheta Dalal, one of the founders of Moneylife.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/donaldfrazier/2012/12/18/followup-on-the-news-internet-spat-breaks-out-over-qnet-and-multi-level-marketing-in-india/
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saya tadinya mau spekulasi bergabung agar menjadi kaya. tetapi sekarang jadi ragu, karena memang terlalu mahal harganya. bayangkan alat biodisk yang hanya 1,5 juta kok jadi 7,5 juta kalo di ranggalawe klaten
BalasHapusTetap hati2 bro,...
BalasHapusAmezcuaBiodisc harganya memang 7,5 juta dan hanya dipasarka oleh QNet Ltd., yg 1,5juta itu biodisc palsu. Itu produk dari bisnis jaringan yg namanya MCI. Mereka mencoba meniru biodisc di awal beroperasi, sekarang MCI mengganti nama Biodisc menjadi Bioglass karena Qnet telah membawa kasus ini ke Kepolisian atas dugaan Plagiat. Silahkan googling untuk detail dari MCI.
BalasHapusTidak semuanya dari perusahaan yang anda maksudkan itu gan, bisa jadi dan sangat mungkin mantan member Qnet sendiri yang menjualnya untuk melunasi UGD-nya yang belum lunas.
HapusKomentar ini telah dihapus oleh pengarang.
Hapusdasar orang rasis ......
BalasHapusdimana-mana cerita kejelekannya aja
gak tau mana bagusnya .....
yang punya blog cacad ... hahahahahaha
Bagus itu bagi kata member seperti anda, apa anda menyangkal apa yang dituliskan dalam blog ini?
HapusMenghina sudah makanan hari2 org seperti anda dan antek2nya, so buat saya cool aja :(
selamat sukses semuanya…..
BalasHapusboleh dong sy share pengalaman sy bergabung di questnet (dulu Gold Quest trs berganti nama Questnet lalu yg terakhir Qnet).
Sy bergabung tahun tahun 2008 melalui team amoeba trenggalek. Sy membeli produk Biodisc yg transaksinya melalui team amoeba trenggalek, krn menurut leader sy, IR baru tdk boleh online posting sendiri, dan semua urusan komisi, administrasi, pengambilan produk hrs melalui team. Bahkan email yg tercantum dalam TCO sy merupakan email pegawai team amoeba, sehingga korespondensi dengan perusahaanpun hrs melalui team. (menurut leader sy itu merupan aturan team yg harus dipatuhi.) Dengan tanpa mengenal lelah, tdk peduli waktu, sy bekerja keras merekrut downline. semua agenda team sy ikuti siang dasn malam. semua perintah leader sy jalankan. walhasil 3 bulan kemudian sy menjadi leader dgn downline +- 300an org.
2 bulan kemudian sy mengikuti v-kon di malaysia. di sana sy berkenalan dgn banyak team dr negara lain. sy juga mencermati semua sistem dan operasional perusahaan. sepulang dr v-kon sadarlah saya bahwa apa yg sy jalankan di bisnis ini tidak sesuai dengan apa yang sy dapat di v-kon.
sepulang dr v-kon sy juga ditunjuk menjadi presenter dlm presentasi besar, motivator training, bahkan sy jg yg menyusun kkonsep training dan presentasi.
Berbekal pengetahuan sy, sejak itu sy mulai mempelajari website questnet agar sy bisa posting online sendiri (tapi sy malam didamprat habis oleh leader sy). sy jg semakin mencermati sistem penjualan produk yg selama ini tdk pernah diterangkan oleh para leader. dan banyak hal lain yang sy lihat dgn mata kepala sy sendiri antara lain :
1. banyak org dimotivasi hasil besar (dengan filosofi NEKAD) sehingga menjual, menggadaikan hartanya utk bergabung.
2. yang dihadirkan ke presentasi adalah orang2 lugu (maaf… rata2 berpendidikan rendah)
sy memiliki fakta dan data (KTP) dari ratusan org yang gabung dapat membuktikan itu semua
3. bila ternyata yang gabung kemudian putus asa, maka mereka akan semakin dibinasakan (krn kalo dibina membuang waktu, tenaga dan ngrepoti leader/timnya)
4. semakin lama semakin banyak sy menyaksikan teman2 sy yg kemudian mundur krn sdh kehabisan modal utk biaya operasional rekutmen dan presentasi. banyak dr mereka terjerat hutang.
5. ternyata harta (rumah mewah, mobil mewah dll) yg dimiliki oleh para leader hanyalah Kamuflase belaka. mereka mendapatka itu semua dengan cara KREDIT (dp murah, angsuran ringan, jangka 5 tahun) mereka lakukan itu semua agar keliahatan SUKSES.
6. yang benar2 kaya hanyalah tim inti amoeba yang memang telah menjalankan bisnis sejak bernama Goldquest. (tidakpercaya …..? investigasi ke kantor qnet terdekat, atau tanyakan lsg ke leader yg bersangkutan.)
saya kemudian mulai memberikan pencerahan kepada rekan-rekan sy, sontak sy dikucilkan, difitnah dan bahkan dimaki-maki sebagai PENGKHIANAT.
maaf sy menulis ini sambil meteskan air mata karena teringat sahabat sy yg rumah tangganya hancur, usahanya bangkrut (krn para leader meminta loyalitas dan totalitas hanya mengerjakan sistem quesnet ini)
setelah sy sering berselisih paham dengan leader sy, sampai2 sy dituduh menggelapkan uang pendaftaran org yang mau gabung. NAUDZUBILLAH MIN DZALIK mudah-mudahan mereka diampuni. demikian pula saya.
KESIMPULAN :
1. perusahaan internasional macam apa yg berganti nama 3x dalam 10 tahun?
2. Pabrik pembuat produknya hanyalah perusahaan keramik kecil (meyer) yg omzetnya baru naik setelah bekejasama dgn vijay iswaran.
3. tidak ada satupun lembaga sertifikasi internasional di Eropa (krn pabrik meyer kan di Jerman) yang memberikan pengakuan mutu. seperti CE/ISO/TUV dll.
4 seandainya perusahaan ini benar, mengapa cara kerja tim amoeba yg sarkasme, melecehkan profesi laiinnya.malah dilegalkan oleh perusahaan
silakan dipikir sendiri………….
maaaf mengganggu pikiran dan waktu anda semua