Most business opportunity specialists and practitioners are indeed legitimate. Most business opportunity sellers really do care about their customers and the buyer. However, it is a wide known fact that many Biz Op companies are fraudulent and will lie just to make the sale.
The Federal Trade Commission is now onto this and has proposed new rules to prevent this from harming consumers. Below is a copy of the proposed rules that would prevent business opportunities salesman from lying about the amount of money that a potential buyer will make;
Proposed section 437.5(d): False earnings claims
“As noted throughout this NPR, the making of false earnings claims is the most prevalent problem in the offer and sale of business opportunities. Proposed section 437.5(d) would prohibit sellers from misrepresenting, directly or through a third party, the amount of sales, or gross or net income or profits a prospective purchaser may earn or that prior purchasers have earned. This prohibition would complement the Rule’s proposed earnings substantiation requirements detailed in proposed section 437.4. Thus, both unsubstantiated and false earnings claims would be prohibited by the Rule.”
The Federal Trade Commission has done a whole series of studies on business opportunities and taken all the data in their databases to determine how best to solve this problem of fraud. Ethical practitioners in the business opportunities sector will be glad to know that those that give business opportunities being bad name now have new laws can rules to prevent them from doing so. Will this stop all the fraud? No, indeed it won’t, as there will always be unethical practitioners in any type of business, however it is a good start in separating the honest businesspeople from the fraudsters. I hope you will consider this in 2006.
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