It’s likely that you have come across Surge365 through an email list, on social media or got it recommended by a friend or family member.
Is Surge365 a scam? The reasons why you’re here is because you have want answers right so, that’s what I’m going to provide for you within this Surge365 review.
First and foremost I must commend you for actually doing a bit of extra research before committing to joining Surge365. For all you could have known, the product could be a major scam so the fact you’re here right now, researching whether or not that’s the case is a pretty smart move on your part.
To be fully transparent with you, I am personally not a member of Surge365 so I can assure you that I will not attempt to sell you it unless of course it’s worth investing in.
What I will aim to do is provide you with an unbiased 3rd party look at Surge365 that will hopefully help you to make the best decision you can in the end.
PRODUCT NAME: Surge365
OWNER/S: Scott Tomer, Chris Cokley, Lloyd Tomer
TYPE OF PRODUCT: travel membership MLM
PRICE: $199 – $499 + $63.54/month
SUMMARY: Although it isn’t official, there is a pretty big chance that Surge365 can be regarded as a pyramid scheme and a scam because it does show a fair few big red flags.
The fact recruitment is literally the only way to make money with the company, the owners shady past is another problem, it’s really expensive to join and of course the really low chance of success for MLM’s as a whole are the main reasons why I wouldn’t recommend Joining Surge365.
FINAL RATING: 1/5
RECOMMENDED: NO!
WHAT IS SURGE365?
Surge365 is a travel discounts based MLM company founded by Scott Tomer, Chris Cokley, Lloyd Tomer in around late 2014. On the surface Surge365 may look like a decent company but, the truth is one of its owners, particularly Scott Tromer, worked within and founded another MLM in travel niche called YTB International which was far from being legally clean.
In 2008 YTB was called out as being a pyramid scheme by the California Attorney General Jerry Brown. This in turn led to Scott and the company as a whole changing their business model to not act as a pyramid scheme.
After that incident and over the next 5 years YTB started to lose money and eventually had to file for bankruptcy in 2013. So, at the very least Scott’s track record isn’t the greatest when it comes to organising an institution previously so, it’s hard to trust his expertise in another institute.
Then again I have found that many are calling surge365 a rebranding of YTB, which honestly isn’t that hard to believe but, I can’t definitively state that as fact.
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SURGE365 PRODUCTS
Surge365 doesn’t really sell any tangible products within their site, all they offer is a membership to a travel portal that’ll give discounts on specific holidays, hotels, cruises and so on.
As for what areas are covered in that area, it includes the following :
- Vortex technology – Get paid when people buy a cruise, ticket, or book a hotel on their platform.
- Your Personal Travel Agency – This is your personal travel portal that you’ll be referring people to. It’s kind of like a duplicated site, I guess.
- Share the Surge Business – A suite of business tools that allows you to mentor people you recruit into the program, along with access to other bonuses and commissions.
So what’s offered isn’t anything that’s not been offered or done before by other travel based MLM’s like worldventures, Goodlife USA, traverus or just your normal everyday free portal to join.
HOW DO YOU MAKE MONEY WITH PRODUCT?
As is the case with pretty much all MLM businesses there are 2 ways to make money with them, Surge365 being no exception.
1. The first method is by directly selling the product to other individuals and in return make a commission for the sales
2. You make money through your recruits and downline, by getting residual income by following and meeting certain criteria as well as make money through bonuses and incentives due to meeting company set goals.
HOW TO GET STARTED
If you want to join Surge365 , there are 3 different membership levels to jump in at according to their documentation :
- Vortex : $199 + $63.54/month + taxes where applicable
- Vortex Membership : $299 + $63.54/month + taxes where applicable
- Vortex platinum : $499 + $63.54/month + taxes where applicable
All of the membership options seem to be very expensive whilst the platinum doesn’t even seem to offer anything significantly more valuable than the other levels.
When you consider the profit margins within travel based business aren’t great, the larger membership costs also mean that affiliates that recruit a ton will be able to make more profits than those who don’t and I mean a lot more.
COMPENSATION STRUCTURE
If you want to join Surge365, it’s imperative that you learn the compensation plan. In this section I’ll only be covering the plan quite briefly by going over the more important elements (for beginners) so, if you’re genuinely looking to join Suege365 for some reason, you really should study it.
Recruitment Commissions
Everytime you manage to recruit an individual under you, you will get paid a specific fee, which of course will be dependant on the membership rank they sign in at.
You’ll be rewarded $30 for every new affiliate you recruit and $50 per recruit if you manage to bring in at leat 3 affiliates within 30 days or have recruited and maintained 7 affiliates (team builder) over time.
Residual Commission
You can also earn income in the form of residual commissions whenever your recruits and their recruits and so on, manage to to sell the membership levels too. This is in the form of a unilevel structure which in this case seems to allow affiliates to earn infinitely horizontally and vertically.
If a member is a team builder level and another affiliate is bought into your team anywhere within the unilevel structure, they’d make $20. If a members team has recruited 7 new recruits, they will earn $1k bonus.
Once a member recruits 30 affiliates and becomes a regional director they’ll be eligible to earn $70 for personal recruits and $40 for any other recruit anywhere within the unilevel structure.
If a member becomes a National Team Builder, which would be to recruit 100 affiliates within their team, they’ll earns $80 for every individual they’ve recruited personally and $50 for every other member recruited.
Generating 100 downline members will also allow members to earn a $10k bonus.
There are other bonuses and incentives that Surge365 offer too but I won’t be covering them here. However, if you still want to understand the other elements to the plan, either click here to check out the pdf file or watch the video below.
THE NOT SO GOOD THINGS
Recruiting IS Essential For Succeeding With Surge365
Going off of Surge365’s compensation plan, to me it is very clear that the only way you’ll really make good money with the company will be through recruitment and not through making sales from the portal.
I did a bit of research and found that on average a travel agency doesn’t make much money from selling their tickets. The majority of their profits tend to come from upsells in the form of selling food, drinks or entertainment therefore, at most you’d generate a 10% commission from a single sale, primarily when it comes to selling cruises.
Flights on the other hand may at best generate a 3% affiliate commission.
On top of that, considering how expensive holidays can be, it won’t be easy to make any kind of regular sales within the market with Surge365’s portal therefore, the only logical way to make money with the company will be through recruitment. In fact that’s pretty much the only way to profit.
When a company literally only allows you to make profits through recruitment alone, it should come off as a massive red flag so yeah, if you want to join Surge365, you better start getting good a recruitment.
I’d personally suggest skipping the opportunity entirely because it literally is mandatory you know how to recruit if you want to succeed, which of course is one of the clearest sign a business opportunity may be a pyramid scheme.
Scott Has A Poor History In The MLM Scene
As I mentioned above one of Scott’s previous MLM’s was exposed as working like a pyramid scheme back in the day, resulting in him making a few changes so, the fact he was able to create a company trying to fit into the grey area of the MLM market goes to show he isn’t necessarily the most trustworthy of individuals to work with.
And, considering how even Surge365 shows characteristics of a pyramid scheme with mandatory recruiting necessary for success, shows that Scott’s past isn’t really ‘past’ him yet.
It’s Really Expensive To Join
The membership costs are honestly really expensive as you’ll always be required to pay a one time fee and a consistent monthly fee thereafter.
If you do join and want to maintain your membership for the first year, you’d need to invest at least $900 and as much as $1.1k.
Of course the monthly fee means you’ll need to invest a further $760 every year. It’s a pretty heavy investment for an MLM that doesn’t even ask you tell you sell very many real products.
Most People Will Probably Fail
Although Surge365 doesn’t openly show off their income disclosure statement, having reviewed and seen many tens of different statements, I’m pretty sure the rate of success is unlikely to be great.
Generally only the top 5% of members tend to make around $1k/month whilst an even smaller 1% of members tend to make a full time income in the $2k+/month range.
Of course I can’t completely validate these stats considering Surge365 aren’t transparent enough to show their income statement but, I highly doubt the stats mentioned above are too far off from the real numbers.
THE GOOD THINGS
I guess the only major positive I can say about the company is that they do offer discounts for members but, besides that I can’t really say there’s any other positives to point out.
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IS SURGE365 A PYRAMID SCHEME/SCAM?
Although it isn’t official, there is a pretty big chance that Surge365 can be regarded as a pyramid scheme and a scam because it does show a fair few big red flags.
The fact recruitment is literally the only way to make money with the company, the owners shady past is another problem, it’s really expensive to join and of course the really low chance of success for MLM’s as a whole are the main reasons why I wouldn’t recommend Joining Surge365.
MY PERSONAL RECOMMENDATION
I personally will always recommend against using a MLM business model to make money, not because you can’t make money through it (you totally can) but, the system has always seemed shady to myself and is kinda synonymous with the likes of a pyramid scheme or scams (MOBE and Digital altitude).
Instead I prefer working with something created through ones own means and is ultimately dependent on yourself and your work ethic alone.
This method I’m talking about is affiliate marketing.
The reasons as to why I recommend it over MLM based structures are because
– there is no need to recruit constantly
– it is a legitimate method that has been working consistently and continues to grow as more businesses want individuals to promote products
– and because it is free to start up, no unnecessarily large start up funds needed.
The service I recommend is Wealthy Affiliate. It’s free to sign up to and will get you set up and ready to start your affiliate marketing journey within minutes, as it did for me when I begun my journey.
If you have any questions that you would like to ask me regarding Surge365, feel free to do so in the comments section below and I will get back to you as soon as I can. If you have your own thoughts about Surge365 and would like to talk about it, again feel free to do so in the comments below!
Thanks
Amhil