Coastal Vacations Scam Home Business Opportunity
Late in 2007 I received a friendship request on YouTube. He was recommending that I watch his video promoting Coastal Vacations. According to this video, Coastal Vacations was an incredible home business opportunity which could make you a lot of money. The man in the video seemed to be making a lot of money. He was getting a lot of traffic with his website and a lot of calls from interested people. He appeared in the video, selling things to people over the phone. The trouble was, in his video I did not see him sell a single vacation. Instead, he was selling the Coastal Vacations home business opportunity. Coastal Vacations seems to have the earmarks of a pyramid scheme or scam.
An online search turned up plenty of people who had bad things to say about Coastal Vacations. PRWeb claims that Coastal Vacations director Dean Marino is a respected businessman, and that scam artists in the home-based business were lone operators. Marino claims that the business attracts both honest and dishonest distributors. Apparently he helps new people in the company who have been defrauded by bad sponsors. He detailed five different scams which these sponsors use to take the money and run.
However, there seem to be significant problems with the way this business is set up. New salespeople are required to pay outrageous sign-up fees, and then are required to pass the full amount of their first two sales to their sponsor. So they have to make three sales to even have any hope of making their investment back.
It seems like the Coastal Vacations "home business opportunity" is awfully prone to scams. Where are these sponsors' supervisors? Why aren't they being watched and controlled? Why are the new people supposed to be held responsible for figuring out whether or not they're being victimized?
Although several companies named Coastal Vacations have been accredited by the Better Business Bureau, none of them appear to be the home based business opportunity. Search as I might, I could find absolutely no references on the web about where the Coastal Vacations headquarters were, or who owned or founded the company. It would seem that sales reps habitually give people the run-around when they ask these questions. When asked, they simply state that Coastal Vacations is run by a board of directors, and that the members are the owners of the company. They do not reveal the names or addresses of these owners. According to the Coastal Synergy Group website, Coastal Vacations is an association with "no centralized office, no corporate entity or legal department." This, they claim, "allows the business to operate with very low overhead."
So what on Earth has Coastal Vacations got to hide? Why does a legitimate business need to conceal the identities of its principal operators. Why has it got no home office? The lack of these features equals a lack of accountability. It becomes very easy to blame individual distributors for flaws within the company "structure" or lack thereof.
The father and son team Matthew and William Webster discovered some very unsavory facts about Coastal Vacations when they joined the Multi Level Marketing business. The fact of the matter was that 95% of those who joined failed to ever generate a single sale. Despite this fact, the Websters are still apparently with the company. Instead of denouncing it, they describe themselves as a team with a rare success story.
This all points to Coastal Vacations being a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme, if you're not aware, is an illegal business in which the majority of the profits come not from the sales of a product or service, but from the sign-up fees paid by new salespeople.
At the very least Coastal Vacations is a Multi Level Marketing scheme or MLM. MLMs are inherently unfair because the people on the bottom rung get a bad deal, while the people on the top of the pyramid (since all MLMs have a pyramid structure, whether legal or illegal) get a lot more money for a lot less effort. Very few people can climb to the top of the pyramid. There simply isn't enough room. So it isn't an equal opportunity business.
If we are complacent, bad business practices will continue to proliferate. It's up to us to take action against people who seek to take advantage of us.
I recommend that you do not join Coastal Vacations. If you have joined, and feel that you've been defrauded, the best course of action is to contact the Better Business Bureau about your distributor. You can also call the Attorney General for the state your distributor is registered in. Also, contact the Federal Trade Commission.
