l was invited to join Empowr inside one of the websites where people can advertise MLM opportunities and get leads for free. Of course that is where l find programs to review some of which are still in the pre-launch phase. Memories of the first make money online opportunity that screwed me big time aka Empower Network came to my mind. I don’t regret it though because it led to the creation of Avert Scams.
What is Empowr?
It is a social community combining activities that you would ordinarily find inside stand alone websites such as FB, Pintrest, Google Communities or Traffic Exchange sites. It promises to give its citizens (subscribers) 97% of the profits made inside the community. It was formed by former owners of the famous ‘Fanbox experiment’ which now redirects people to Empowr website. Let’s hope they learned some lessons from weaknesses of Fanbox.
Once you join, you watch videos on how it works and you are assigned a success coach to help you succeed. The success coaches call themselves ‘volunteers’ although helping others is listed as one of the way of making money inside the community.
Its motto: ‘To empower people by enabling opportunity, hope and influence’.
How Empowr Works?
- You can promote your own products and services to the community.
- Buy products being advertised by other community members.
- You can use it for blogging on any topic within Emporw’s Terms and Conditions.
- Send personal messages to members and make your offers.
- There are also videos to watch and music to listen to.
- There are opportunities to network with others.
- Become a success coach and help others succeed.
- Sponsoring – Help others sell their products and earn a commission.
- Share content then get paid for views and according to posting frequency, quality of posts.
What l liked about Empowr.
- It Empowers its citizen to earn a share of the profits generated say from advertisements.
- There are many ways to make money with Empowr.
- Training on how the program functions is provided for free.
- You can get started for free before you commit yourself.
- Success coaches will assist you with direct support and tips on how to earn more money.
- It is an established business with years in the industry since the era of Fanbox.
- You can use the same social time you waste commenting on cat memes on other platforms to earn some income.
- Purchasing of products is not mandatory as in most MLMs.
- The opportunity is available world over.
- There is real money generated from advertising to outside clients.
- It channels some profits to good cause by supporting charities.
- It uses your location to hook you up with people around you in real life.
- The website interface is quiet intuitive and status updates are in real time.
What l didn’t like about Empowr?
As always, before l visit any website l use Similar web to check for information that no-one can lie about. After checking all the other essential metrics, l was curious to know the main sources of traffic to the website. PayPal and Fan Box caught my eye.
Now, how can PayPal send so much traffic to Empowr? The answers is obvious, when you make payments using PayPal you are redirected back to the website from which the payment was initiated. Now, l knew that what ever is happening inside this community there are a lot of payments by members to Empowr.
- Success depends on how helpful your success coach is which is the major weakness of most MLMs – you join the wrong team you are doomed.
- When you incentivize the sharing of content, it removes the social aspect of the platform as people perform tasks to increase potential earnings.
- The website directs most of your activities for instance ‘
You did it! Now click right to build trust with someone else..
- How much you can potentially earn and by engaging in which activities is not clear.
- PayPal account is debited when ever you engage in activities that cost more than your credit balance which may significantly reduce your earnings. (Choose the option to pay for expenses during cash out).
- Your payments are instant yet it takes almost 3 months for you to cash out the money. So l will get my my $20 after Christmas – talk of providing ‘hope’ that one day you will cash out.
- It will take some time before you can receive regular payments.
- Just like other social platforms, if you don’t exercise due diligence when signing up, invitations will be automatically send to ALL people on your email list by clicking on the wrong icon.
- Some ways to earn money are a bit confusing, for example you need to spend money to increase your power level so that you have more ‘potential’ to earn more money. This implies that you can run a loss.
- You can join the community using fake details which puts citizens at risk.
- There are complaints by people who got hooked up inside Empowr and were latter scammed. l hope it will not become a hunting ground for evil people.
- Lots of misleading statements;
You can advertise for free and pay latter means you will pay double and you will earn less from your activities.
You get free ad credits – they are only free when you don’t use them.
Emporw Training and Tools.
- There is a free learning center inside the community for new members.
- Training videos will show you how the system works.
The videos are clear and in bit sizes which are easy to consume.
Empowr Mobile App
Is an android based application on Google Play which allows you to perform simple tasks on the go.
Emporw Compensation Plan.
It has six power levels with sub power levels. Each power levels has got sub-power levels namely Basic, First Degree, Second Degree, and Star. Just like in any MLM, the high you are up the pyramid the more you will earn. You can pay to get to the next level. They improve your earnings through a multiplier effect on earnings.
Surge Earnings – when many advertisers buy ads at once leading to a sharp increase in revenue.
How does Emporw Make Money?
- It charges transaction fees on sales.
- From advertisers including its own citizens.
- Citizens pay subscriptions.
- 2.9% Ad platform fee paid monthly.
Is Emporw a Scam, Pyramid Scheme or Legit Program?
Well, there are a few issues with unexplained PayPal deductions and challenges with cashing out money. If this is intentional, then one can safely label it a scam. However, if it is operating and sticking to its TOS then it is a legit program. You can not call the program a pyramid scheme although the compensation plan rewards people who are high up the ladder. There is however some resemblance of other legit social platforms on which people pay to advertise. The concept is also similar to traffic exchange programs in which people are paid to view and click on advertisements. l hope it is NOT another Fanbox experiment.
If such a program collapses, you are left with levels, points, ad credits and trust while your ‘real’ money was siphoned from your PayPal account — just thinking aloud. If there is democracy, please let me cash out any money that l earned when ever l want. Unfortunately, spending hours transfixed on a computer everyday sharing cat memes is not the best business model when you want to create wealth online.
Share your opinion or experience with Empowr with others in the commentary box below? l have initiated the dialogue.
Hello,
While I’m very sorry to hear about your experience on empowr, your feedback is important to us as empowr constantly strives to improve our products, services, and overall customer experience as much as possible.
empowr is a free platform that has been carefully designed to enable people to build and monetize (which means earn from) a large network of fans, starting with no outside capital. Users (called citizens on empowr) can earn via a multitude of knowledge-based roles, including from the views of their photos, videos, status updates and blogs.
If you’d like to learn more or if there is something we can do to help improve your experience here, we are more than happy to assist you with any questions or concerns you may have about the site and/or your account.
Thank you again for your feedback.
Thank you for getting in touch. l am still a member of Emporw and will be updating my review as time progresses.
Thank you, so many folks are being ripped off from these people. They need help from someone.
Empower is a rip-off, they work it where it shows you have money in your account but unable to receive any for various reasons. Then they take money out of you credit card and offer to give you back one half if you are good.
Why is it that when I’ve earned a balance of say $3,400.00 and 2 min later I’m down to $2.920.00? Its been over 3 month and I have NO money that I can cash out. When I hover over earnings in “blue” all that money for that days had been used for advertising and other fees. Why is it that winning a bid money is taken from PayPal (real money) and when someone pays for a product we listed, it goes to our earning. That is not fair at all. Not sure how people really make any money here but there is something fishy.
Scam Busters, Thanks for writing the review. I am new to empowr, and am taking a very cautious approach with it. Do you have any updates since your August 30 update? Thanks, River
Hi River, thanks for the heads up. l will be updating the review soon. As you can see from the screen shot below, l have ‘earned $450’ but when l try to use it to buy anything it says l must use my own ‘real’ money. So l am waiting for the ‘maturity date’ and l see if the money will buy anything inside the community. The catch is, you NEVER know how much you have spend through you actions and actions of others. On the cash out day, you may find out that you ‘spend’ $445 so l only earned $5 for all the efforts. Expenditure is never disclosed until the final day. So many people are liking my ‘profile picture’ yet there is no picture … lol.
Thanks for the update!
You are most welcome.
Empowr is a worldwide scam . Nearly every fan coming on board is unaware of how this really works . Less than 1 % will ever make any serious money here . They bring in thousands of people worldwide every week like me who spend anywhere from $ 50 to $ 2000 ( $ 1500 in my case ) before they realize that they have been taken . I had over $ 25 K in matured money in the account which is absolutely worthless , in fact I would have to reattach my PayPal account to bid . If you sell anything , the proceeds go into your funny money account which you will never see . At the same time you are responsible for sending the sold item out to the buyer at your expense even though you will never see the money . When you complain they shut down your account like they did to me . MASSIVE SCAM INVOLVING MILLIONS !
Thank you John for taking your time to share your experience with Empowr. l am sorry to learn that your account was closed. Worse still, you will never get to know how much you ‘spend’ until on the cash out date. You are lucky if you are not found owing.
I just got off the phone with PayPal, and they will refund all money they took from my paypal account, and also they will “Flag” empower to be investigated. If you want to get some of what Empowr calls “Justice,” Then call Paypal, and get your money back, but also tell them to flag Empowr! This is happening to a lot of companies, even those that are not scams, but marketing ad companies. PayPal is keeping all their money and getting the Security and Exchange Commission to prosecute them for wire fraud and other fraud scams. It’s good when what Empowr seems to call “Democracy,” shows what a real democracy does to creeps that rip off peoples dreams!
I agree with Carole Morin, a victim reporting from another scam site. I had my account deleted, for whatever reason, I got the I’m sorry you are not happy email from Cara. Conveniently they kept my sales of personal items, so they can send it to 3rd world end users perhaps, but that is not “Justice,” as they claim. These are arbitrary unilateral ways to steal money that skew criminal theft by created an aura of tort action to authorities. I wonder if a class action exists yet to stop these thieves. I called it monopoly money, but they say I had 14,000 dollars in it, and I did have several hundred in sales there about. Most people couldn’t get paid I read in the posts, so I was pointing them to my weight loss coffee product where I get paid every Friday, and it was nice to recruit from people looking to get paid.
I would love to sue these (*^*%)^ as it seams they create prima facie fraud, because they state that you do not have to pay ad platform fees with your money, at a 50% loss of potential revenue, which Carole technically points out is ZERO! Fraud is “intent, with justifiably relying on their promise, and when they terminate, this proves they had no intention to pay. I’m sure they are a deep pocket, where is a litigator? I’m considering a qui tam or other litigation myself. Looks like a cash cow seeking an owner.
Thank you for sharing your negative experience with Empowr. l will never link my Empowr account to PayPal or Credit card. l hope you will recover your real money siphoned from PayPal account.All the best.
Now I’m getting very confused. I enrolled with Empowr 1 1/2 months ago. From this and other posts, I see many negative comments, yet I also see a few positive ones. I see a Kenyan earning through empowr and making a Paypal withdrawal through a legit bank. So, how then is Empowr a scam and not a scam at the same time?
This is just a review and the action that you will take is entirely up to you. There are lots of scams which paid a few people just keep it going. Now that you are already a member, don’t forget to come and tells us your experience.
I was cancelled today. Here is the email I received. http://prntscr.com/dhh5kc
I did not complain about anything.
I am also attaching my earnings as shown on the leaderboard. http://prntscr.com/dhggvr
I cannot get a response from them. They just upgraded me to second degree red this morning, took $7,500 and then cancelled me later this morning.
Thank you Marilyn for sharing your experience with Empowr. Sad to learn that they chucked you out after accumulating so much ‘money’.
The thing is paypal work hand in hand with empowr. You can not get your money back by opening a case with paypal it mysteriously gets closed by paypal. If empowr has stolen your money it is with the help of paypal. Think about how much paypal receive each day from their partner emoowr? Paypal have a very clise relationship with empowr. I would not be surprised to learn they have an agreement in place.
It is clauses in Empowr’s terms and conditions which prevent Paypal from refunding you your money. Most companies do have such agreements.
Dear Scam Busters,
Is it not yet time you share with us about your cash out experience with the Empowr? I thought as a matter of fact (going by the date of your initial post and given the 3-month maturation period for cash-out) that your earning should have matured by now and that you should have had your first cash out and then share with us here how it all went with you.
I for one cannot afford to continue spending hours in front of computer every day, hoping and waiting for bulks (earnings) that may never come to fruition. I recently joined the Empowr network. I hope I have made right decision. We really need a confirmation from an uncompromised individaul.
Thanks
Brandon
Reply
Thank for inquiring Brandon. Just visited my account and l have $200+ matured earnings. l will have to download an app to receive my ‘security cash out key’ then l will see if l can get ‘real’ money out. l will keep you updated.
I too have been scammed by Empowr, but happily just to the tune of just short of $29.00. I checked off the request to take any payment from my Empower funds FIRST and to notify me of any necessary payments..well, they did not they deducted my PayPal account..did not send the merchandise, changed my Success Coach 5 times in 30 days obviously because I kept asking to have that money refunded to my PayPal account!
Today I was told the case was closed, the money was refunded into the Empowr Account and that was the only way it works. So, No money refunded, No item received, and No option. I’ve started a dispute about this with Pay Pal and they will have to give me a pretty damn good reason not to refund my money from this dispute. I’ve been with them for over 14years.
I’ve noticed other inconsistencies about their site also, like they allow their citizens to sell the same item even 5 times each getting a different bid, and notifying you about winning even if you still have it sponsored. It takes too much time trying to figure out which of the five bids did you win.
My “spidey” sence told me to close the PayPal account and I’m so glad I did because all they did for over a month of my asking for a refund and them sending me I’m sorry letters, they still tried to UPGRADE me to the next level but couldn’t because I closed my PayPal down. HURRAY!!!!
Now they have the nerve to tell me I’ve lost money ?? and they will be selling shares. Guess that’s supposed to be a dangling carrot?
Yes, it’s a scam and I’ll lose my $29,00, but I will report them to Security and Exchange Commission, send a few Citizens a notice of this being a scam and FIRE them first.!
If anyone knows another agency to file a complaint ( I have all my emails from them) please post it here.
Thanks Bette