iGenius, is an online education company which purports to empower people to take control of their futures. They do this by offering tools and education programs for trading Forex, Equities and Crypto markets. On top of that they also have an MLM referral program so you can make money telling your friends about it!

So far this is sounding extremely similar to iMarketsLive, who changed their name to IM Mastery. Could this be just another name change? We’ll find out in our full review of iGenius

How Do You Make Money With iGenius

To find out how we’d be making money, we looked the official iGenius opportunity page.

The first thing we learn is that the focus of iGenius is signing up new customers, and keeping them. They’ve decided that traditional advertising is not for them so instead they pay their iGenius Distributors, referral fees for signing up new members.

iGenius Bonus Plan

In traditional MLM fashion, iGenius have a complex system of paying distributors, which they call the iGenius Bonus Plan. There are several ways to earn commission, which we will look at below:

Fast Start Bonus - If you enroll a new distributor in your downline, then you will be eligible for a one off signing bonus. The amount of this bonus depends on which package the person signs up for. You can also earn a bonus if people in your downline upgrade their iGenius subscriptions. The amounts payable are shown in the image below:

Rapid Fire Bonus - you will get $25 every time someone you personally enrolled pays their monthly subscription. So if you happen to join, then the person who enrolled you, will probably do their best to keep you paying the membership for as long as possible, regardless of whether or not you are making any money from the system yourself.

The official opportunity page doesn’t go into much more detail after this point, but they do list the ‘other ways to make money’ with iGenius. We found a few active members were kind enough to share more detail, so we used what we could find to continue. This includes this copy of the iGenius Bonus Plan

Top Up Bonus - If you have 4 personal enrollments actively paying their monthly fees, and you earn less than $175 per month in iGenius commission, then they will pay the difference. This is so that you can have your own subscription for free.

It doesn’t end there! If you have 12 personally enrolled customers who are active and pay fees for 4 consecutive weeks, then you will earn a guaranteed commission of $500 for the 4 week period. iGenius wants you to keep your customers active and paying fees every week.

Binary Team Commissions - Before we go into detail about the iGenius system, we’d just like to point out that several MLMs use a binary downline structure in their bonus plans. The best way to explain it, is with the following diagram:

As we can see, you have 2 legs, a left and a right, and each member in your downline also has 2 legs. While this may resemble an ancient Egyptian structure, they will assure us it isn’t one.

The key to earning commission and advancing through the ranks in any MLM binary system, is balance. You need to maintain similar volume on each side of your downline.

iGenius is no different. The iGenius Binary Bonus system is shown below:

As we can see, the key is to keep balance in your iGenius downline. It’s important to duplicate whatever you do on one leg, on the other. You can only earn a maximum of 50% of your commission from one leg. This means your payment will always be based on the volume generated by your weaker leg.

Advancing through the ranks is pretty straight forward. All you have to do is personally enroll more people on each leg and grow your Group Volume (GV). Your GV will include points generated by people enrolled by others in your downline. So if you enroll a friend, and they enroll someone else, both their spending is part of your GV. As your GV grows, you can earn higher levels of commission. When you join you can earn 10%, but this will grow to 20% if you successfully climb the ranks.

It’s important to remember that you can only earn 50% from each leg, so your income is based on the GV from your weaker side. The surplus GV is rolled over and retained for as along as your remain active in iGenius.

This could be seen as an incentive to build your weak side and earn all the money that is ‘stored’ on the other leg, or it can be viewed as a dangling carrot to keep you active when you’re not earning much.

Things get a little more complicated once you reach the rank of ‘Presidential Ambassador’. to advance beyond this level, you have to have iGenius Presidential Ambassador legs. All this means is that you need to have people in your downline who have also reached the Presidential Ambassador rank with iGenius. It becomes an incentive for the upline to favour particular people in their group to help them reach this rank.

iGenius also has weekly and monthly ‘paylocks’’, on their binary commission. This sets a maximum you can earn in any week (or month) from your iGenius binary downline. If you generate more PV in any given pay cycle, then it will be rolled over to the next one.

It may seem strange to set an upper limit on your earnings, after all if you consistently generate more than the pay lock amount, then you’ll never use your rolled over volume. We’re sure it will make more sense later, so we’ll keep going.

Generational Match Bonus - like all MLMs, iGenius will pay you commission based on ‘generations’ in your downline. If you achieve the rank of Global Executive with iGenius, then you will eligible for the Generational match bonus

The Generational Match Bonus is shown as ‘check match generations’ in the iGenius commission table. As we can see it starts off with just 1 generation and increases to 5 depending on your rank. Depending on your rank and GV you can earn up to 10% on 5 generations in your downline.

X4 Bonus Pool - All you have to do to qualify for this, is purchase an Elite membership from iGenius, or generate 1000 worth of Personal Volume (PV).

iGenius will pay 1% of all their volume as a bonus to distributors who earn ‘shares’ in the X4 Bonus Pool. Shares are generated by selling 4,000 worth of GV in either new or upgraded business. In other words iGenius pays 1% commission as a bonus to active members who have sold a lot of new memberships in the current 4 week commission cycle.

X8 Bounus Pool - This is very similar to the X4 bonus, except it involves sharing 3% of the overall volume and to earn shares, you need to generate 8,000 worth of new or upgraded GV

NDAU Bonuses - NDAU is a cryptocurrency developed by iGenius. The member video we watched explained to us how it was created by crypto experts who had made the ‘world’s first adaptive cryptocurrency’. Allegedly it is designed to be a superior long term store of wealth.

To get an idea of how well it’s performed, we looked at the annual chart for NDAU to February 2023 as shown below:

NDAU Price Chart — Source: Coin Market Cap

It appears the ‘long term store of wealth’ has halved in value over the last 12 months. Perhaps the experts didn’t make this cyrpto as adaptive, as they thought they did. Maybe a better long term store of value would be just keeping your savings in the bank

Are iGenius Distributors Making Money

We found an interesting quote in the IGenius opportunity page, which claimed that 80% of members are ‘just happy paying customers’. This is of course just MLM code for ‘80% of people join the business opportunity just be paying customers’.

If you believe that 4 out of 5 people join a business just so they can be a customer, then you are more trusting than us. If you believe that this is some cover up to try and make excuses for the fact that 80% of IMarkets Members earn nothing, then we agree with you.

Why Is It difficult to Make Money With IGenius

The problem is not unique to Igenius. The fault lies within the MLM business model. In his book, Multi-level Marketing Unmasked, Jon Taylor found that 99.7% of people who join direct selling companies end up losing money. Despite what you hear in the sales pitches, it is highly unlikely that you will make money from any network marketing company.

The reason is because MLM is a system designed to sell products to customers. When you sign up to a MLM business opportunity, you are in fact a customer. The MLMs have no intention of making you a business partner. The goal is to make profit when you spend money.

Is iGenius an Illegal Pyramid Scam

Even though MLMs closely resemble pyramids, they are not illegal. The technicalities date back to a 1979 Amway ruling. To the best of our understanding, Amway managed to word their documentation in a way that bypassed the pyramid scheme laws. This opened the doors for other MLMs to do the same.

While the paperwork may make them legal, that doesn’t mean that MLMs are ethical. If you join any MLM, you have to realize that the only way to make money is if people below you are losing money

We looked at the 2018 FTC Business Guidance for MLMs. This explains when MLM participants are acting in a way that is misleading or unlawful. Examples of breaches include pressuring downlines to purchase products, and making unsubstantiated claims about earnings potential.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below, especially if you want to share your experiences with iGenius

Are you wondering if you can make money in an MLM? Check our our list of mlm reviews before you join. If you find one that’s not on the list, let us know and we’ll do our best to write a review