Complaint Review: DS-Max Cydcor Granton Marketing

A warning to would be employees and customers of DS MAX: This company and its affiliates are one of the most cunning pyramid schemes in the history of the US. They employ lies, brainwashing, peer pressure, and almost every form of employment illegality imaginable to sustain what would otherwise be an unworkable business model.

I did a short stint working at the Westco division (now deceased) and then briefly in "Advertising." I am grateful that I only wasted a short time there, but ashamed that wishful thinking prevented me from acting on my initial suspicion that DX Max is a hoax. From the beginning I wondered how a legitimate company could not only flout the established conventions of business but also violate the most basic laws of economics, history, and common sense.

More specifically I wanted to know how can any business model that requires endless exponential growth just to sustain its existing operations be credible. I also wondered what the long-term implications of DS Max's expansion plan were (expansion rate of a business is supposed to be determined by the market, not by artificial factors like how fast people "build their team").

Over the next 6 months I got my answer. Plain and simple, they lied, cheated, and broke the law. Without this dishonesty, the company could not exist. Some examples: we were not paid for a lot of the time that we worked. Now I know that some people will argue that the time spend training, at the meetings, planning campaigns etc were time that the company was not legally obligated to compensate us for but this is demonstrably false. Its false becuase we all knew that we would be fired if we didnt participate in these activities.

We had none of the licenses required for selling door to door in the county in which we worked and I was told by management that we simply couldnt afford them. We were regularly encouraged to mislead customers about our products and in some cases we were given false information about them ourselves. Ethical standards were insanely low: my immediate manager knowingly allowed a convicted felon (who had done hard time) sell ADT security systems door to door.

At Westco our tax forms arrived so late that we all had to file for extensions, and several times were werent paid at all. One day we came to work and found that we were being kicked out of the building. Apparently the collapse of our division had been in the cards for months but the management had been hiding it from us. I can also attest that I was lied to by the manager about benefits (I was told that there were health benefits and there were none). People in the advertising division (deals in cash) were encouraged not to pay taxes at all, which probably wasnt much of a problem because even some of the most prolific sellers were living well below poverty.

The whole DS MAx business model revovles around employee compansation being about 1/3 to 1/4 what the market value is for such a position (if anyone would be willing to do that sort of stuff at all). Other costs such as gas, phone use, and many unpaid working hours are likewise deflected onto the employees producing further savings. We were not informed of any of this when we started. Basically the company works by funneling these significant savings up the pyramid of DS MAX's bureacracy, giving the managers and VPs all that money that the distributors worked hard for. This was blatant fraud even by the abysmally low standards of corporate America.

The only thing that keeps these people working there is the expectation that they will someday be an "owner". But the company cannot grow forever, and in recent years it has actually started to shrink. DS max is largely ill suited for foreign markets and the domestic market is saturated and perhaps even contracting. Recent divisions have been largely a failure and many managers today are back in their promoting managers office trying desperately to rebuild their franchise.

I saw more offices close in my time there then I saw open. Many customers and former employees are pissed, as are more than few former "owners." More than likely judgement day is fast approaching for this crooked scheme. All we need now is a determined prosecutor, an owner willing to turn states evidence, and a few wiretap authorizations and DS Max executives like Paul Gudreau and Larry Tannenbaum will be languishing in prison alongside Andy Fastow and Bernie Ebbers. For ripping off hundreds of thousands of hard working employees and customers they deserve this....and worse.

Phillip
La Jolla, California
U.S.A.