ACN Consumer Reviews - Page 4

CONCORD, NORTH CAROLINA -- The most important part to our company is that our customers simply become our customers without it costing them a penny out of pocket. I strongly believe this is the best company in the world, after visiting numerous networking company events, I made my decision after traveling to the Charlotte International n in 2013. If you are interested in becoming business owner with our company make it your duty to be a part of this event, the training and the people are like no other. My only suggestion is, never think about quitting or listening to people who never took professional part in the industry.

CONCORD, NORTH CAROLINA -- Tapping into the greatest redistributions of wealth in history? (Energy, banking, telecommunications). For only $499? Are you kidding me? This is amazing! Beyond the nature of the services offered, ACN rises above with award winning mentorship. Those who plug into the proven system and work hard win. Those who don't, well… they're always welcome to start working hard when they're ready to start again.

Question 1: When did you but your cell phone? Weeks ago? Months ago? Years ago?
Question 2: When did you pay your cell phone bill? Last month. The month before. The month before that… etc. Every month since you bought it, right? Why not make money off of services you're going to pay for forever anyways? Better yet, why not get your service for FREE forever? (i.e. ACN's Strive For 5 promotion.) Welcome to ACN.

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA -- One of their "seemingly" nice "Dynasty Team" representative who is very active in the business have been luring people promising a hefty return if to join the business. I believe it is a scam to make the business attractive..., to women in particular. This man is inviting women not only to Starbucks or to regular legit meetings. His common practice is to invite women without their spouse or other half to his home and you can just guess how else he moves onto them with wrong intentions. He reimburses them with cash on their credit card IBO charges. Bad representation of the ACN company that is a scam in its own already.

MARYLAND -- I have had ACN for years. In the beginning, the price was $9.95 a month for the first year. Then, the price doubled. Now, my bill is $48.00. The ACN Advantage home is $24.00. I am paying $1.99 for standard long distance plan (which costs .05 per minute to make a Ld call). There are a lot of fees and taxes. So, if you hear about a $24.00 plan, you could possibly end up with a $48.00 invoice.

When I call someone, my name doesn't always come up. People who have Xfinity, shows me as someone else. When I asked ACN about it they didn't have a logical explanation. Customer service chat room is not that great. It took over 15 minutes for someone to answer the following question: "Is there a fee to use *77?" Time to check out another carrier.

BRANTFORD, ON -- I signed up with ACN from a friend's referral in March 2013. Tired of big companies nickel-and-diming me to death I looked into it. Dude who came told me it was contract for 1 year. I said "no, I'm not signing a contract for a year, what if I don't like it?" He said, "not a problem I'm sure we can make it work. If you don't like it I will take care of it for you." So I agreed and signed on. Paid $114 for modem to run my internet and phone line through. Dude told me I will get $100 Visa card back and really it's all paid for, no loss. Neglected to tell me to register online so I can receive the $100 Visa card before first 48 days are up. So I missed the Visa card. Tick me off.

Our first month of service from ACN was horrific. They said they were using Ma Bell lines and that the switch would be easy, it wasn't. The modem kept dropping and we were left without phone or internet for days at a time. My son's worked it through with an ACN tech on their cell phones and he walked them through a procedure that will reset their modem. Worked for a week, next time we had some rain or wind, boom...lines down again for 3 days before we could get a tech on a phone to help us fix it. We tried resetting the modem, didn't work.

Finally get a tech on the cell phone and he says we need a new modem. Another week goes by and we finally get the new modem, get it set up and internet and telephone working fine. I look at calendar and realize we are paying $38 for internet, $38 for phone and have only been able to use them for 2 weeks out of a month.

So I call and complain that I am being charged full usage when I didn't get usage for half the month. I give them the dates the lines went down, when they got fixed, and I repeat this to two different people until finally I get a credit of $38 on my account. I ask about the taxes and am told that it will forward to my next bill and taxes will automatically be included in the credit. So I wait.

21st of the month is when they take the money from my bank account totaling $86/month. They take $98 this time so I call them up to find out why. Can't get through to them. Every time I am on hold, music playing in background, I get cut off and busy signal comes on. I dialed them three times to get someone and kept getting nothing.

So I go online to the chat feature and finally get someone to talk with. I am wondering who I am speaking with because they don't sound particularly smart and keep giving me the same responses. Nothing is making sense. So I explain the problem...overcharged...not given the credit I was promised and I wanted my money back.

Once I give the chat person the total I was over charged...she says it will come back on my next bill. I say to her, "that's what I was told the last time and you overcharged me an extra $10 for a late fee on a bill that is paid the day after I am invoiced through automatic payments." She keeps repeating the same statement. So I ask her... "Are you a robot?" No answer. I think their chat feature is computer software set up to only respond to specific questions.

Next day I call ACN again, wait on "forget" for 20 minutes until finally a real person comes on. I explain everything again and they say they will credit me the overcharges. I asked about the taxes and say to them, "I don't want the credit on my account because I can't trust them to follow through, I want the credit put back in my bank account just like they take it out. They tell me I will get all my money back and everything will straighten out.

Next week I find a $48.00 credit on my account which is great but what a hassle to get it back. I still don't get the full payment because I was charge the full 86 (supposed to be 43) and then charged an extra 10 bucks for late fee, plus the taxes on all of that. Meanwhile, we are almost 3 months into usage of ACN products. Every month I call and complain to them about my invoicing. No results, just same stuff... "it will be credited on your next invoice" and I am practically yelling into the phone that they keep saying that, but it's not happening.

Fast forward to September. My landlord is selling the house, I got to move and I end up living with a friend. I call to cancel ACN and am told that I will be charged $112.00 for breaking the contract. I argue with them and say I'm not paying it because it's not like I have a choice here. I cannot transfer my account to my friends house so I have to cancel. I get no results from ACN Canada customer service.

I call up my sign-up dude and explain the situation. He says he will look into it. Never heard from him again until I call him up 2 weeks later and ask what is going on. He starts to argue with me that I need to take my account with me and put in another line where I am staying, this will stop the contract breakage. I start to remind him of our conversation at the start of all this and say that he's lucky I stayed on because I didn't get my 100 Visa card either. Anyway...he starts trying to get me to give him my friends numbers so he can bother them with a call, that might stop my cancellation fee. Total **!!! I hang up.

I call ACN and tell them I'm cancelled and not to take anything more out of my account until I get a final bill from them. OMG! They take $46 dollars one week before they are supposed to, then proceed to take another $56 and $48 1 week later. I'm totally pissed now. I call sign-up dude again, start to rave into his ear and tell him I calling Better Business Bureau and Consumer Affairs Canada if this doesn't get solved immediately. I put it right back into his hands, give him all the data from March onward, the overcharges, the figures I've come up with for taxes charged on late fees I never had, extra charges. I'm freaking on this guy. He says he will take care of it.

Finally I get satisfaction and am told that I will get a $48 dollar credit to my account and that is the end of it. I accept because I'm tired, and don't want to mess around with them anymore. I print off my return shipping label, package their modem and ship it off to them. I mailed it October 14, 2013 Canada post, with signature required and receive an email from Canada post on October 21 telling me ACN received the modem and signed for it October 18, 2013. I'm happy, they are happy, I am walking away from all of this and never using them again.

But wait!!! I get an email end of October saying they haven't received the modem yet. I return the email and give them the tracking number telling them they have it...look around again for it. Nov 12 I get another email stating they have not received the modem and that this was my 2nd notice and they will bill me $65 for unreturned modem. That wasn't hard to clear up as I still had the email from Canada post, which I knew I would need to keep to prove I returned it, and once I got through the lines to a real person, he was personable and helped me clear it up.

My recommendation: ACN is not a good service. There are problems with the modems, the lines don't react well and you get static and noise through the lines. Billing is terrible and I don't think real people actually man the chat lines, if they are real they don't speak English well enough to solve problems efficiently.

They deliberately not mention taxes to you so they can keep the tax after they play with their books and take your charges off and do all kinds of sneaky little things like that. They demand automatic withdrawal, which is always bad and I will never do it again. You have control over what they take out, when and why until its already gone. Then you have to pull teeth to get it back. It's just not worth the mediocre modem and telephone service they provide. They use Bell Canada lines and there is no reason those lines should be that full of static and dropping all the time. It's their equipment. Terrible stuff. I would never recommend them to anyone.

I'll tell my ACN story without intentionally making ACN look bad, just so you can judge for yourself what it is like to be involved with this organization. In early 2010 I was recruited by a family friend whom I respected. He had just joined through another man that was a friend of his, whom then became my "upline mentor."

He had been independently wealthy, but not because of ACN. In fact, he hadn't profited yet from ACN in the year he had been in it. From what I gathered, his previous business was no longer profitable so he turned to multilevel marketing business opportunities. He told me that he and his wife had unsuccessfully sold health-food chocolates through a multi-level company, and had now switched to ACN which they thought was better.

I had been told by my friend to show up to this guy's place to look at some cars. But after some verbal probing, my friend admitted that this was just a ruse to get me to sit in on an ACN prospects meeting. Out of respect for my friend, I attended. There were about 6 people who showed up to the "personal business reception" (meeting) I was at.

Nobody was even remotely interested in the proposal besides me, even though I personally thought it was an interesting business opportunity. I didn't sign up right away and went to some more formal meetings before signing up. I was pressured to sign up before the end of the month based on the "promotion" they were running. Turns out, they have a promotion every month and just use that as a tactic to pressure recruits into signing up. They apparently want you to feel like time is running out so that you have to join now!

I signed up anyway and got qualified by purchasing a video phone under a two-year contract and the $30/month "business assistant" and a new cell phone. The video phone didn't really work very well and couldn't dial basic phone numbers, so I couldn't use it, even though I was locked in paying an additional $40/month for two years! My mentor tried to get it to work and he couldn't fix it either. That made me lose confidence in ACN's so-called "flagship product" the video phone. It simply didn't work. How was I going to expect people to use this in place of their current home phone if it doesn't even work? Never got the answer to that.

Next came the nuts and bolts of being an ACN rep--recruiting. At this point I was told to draw up a list of everyone I know and call them and invite them to my house for weekly recruitment meetings. I told my mentor even before signing up that I didn't know many people because my family doesn't live in this state and I haven't lived here very long, and that I was concerned I wouldn't be successful in ACN as a result. He said not to worry because I know more people than I think (so he said).

This is where things started to go downhill. I was only able to get a few people to show up to meetings, and half of them were confused as to why they were even there. Nobody in any meetings showed even a remote interest. My mentor and his wife put a lot of effort into helping me with this, but they succeeded only in alienating the people I knew.

He'd tell me to give him their number so he could call them, and I advised him that probably wouldn't work based on what I knew about the people in question. He said he knew what he was doing and told me to follow the "system" and never judge people ahead of time based on whether I think ACN would be right for them. He tried calling a few people and they were annoyed by his approach and told him to leave them alone.

I continued to be positive and was not deterred by initial failure. I continued going to the weekend meetings and was discretely talking to people at my day job about ACN trying to get them to meetings. My co-workers quickly caught on to what I was doing and began making fun of me at work about my involvement in this "pyramid scheme". It got so bad that even after I stopped talking about it, they continued to make fun of me about it, creating awkward and inappropriate situations for me at my work.

I told my mentor this and he told me I need to find a new job. I guess he didn't realize this was my livelihood and I couldn't just up and quit. Once he realized that most people I knew were broke and didn't have any extra money to spend on ACN, he said, "No more broke people." I didn't really know what to do about that because I only know who I know, which I told him that from the beginning.

While this was going on, my mentor was still actively recruiting others in addition to me. One guy he signed up at the same time as me, but that man decided to get his money back a couple days later. The only other person the guy who sponsored me brought to a meeting was his friend who was such a severe alcoholic that he had to leave the meeting early to go get a beer. My sponsor then stopped participating in ACN altogether after that. But I still held strong, not giving up and stayed positive as my mentor kept telling me to do.

There was one prospective recruit that I was hoping to get signed up under me. She was very open to it at first, but apparently read about it online and determined it was a scam. She then got frustrated the next time I called her and told me to stop hassling her or she would report me. This woman was my own mother.

My roommate made fun of me from the beginning, and even tried to belittle me during some of my meetings to embarrasss me in front of my guests and mentor. I began to think the people I knew were just mean-spirited, but then I realized this was just how people naturally reacted to multi-level marketing and what they viewed as pyramid schemes--and they are highly skeptical, negative, and unhelpful as a result. Everyone who was in ACN that I talked to, even my mentor, told stories about how people they knew had done the same things to them. It's something everyone has to deal within this business apparently.

I had tried to improvise and do things that I felt would optimize my chances of recruiting people, but invariably whatever I did my mentor told me was wrong. Even when he did it his way and the outcome was worse. He kept saying to trust the system, which I continued to do to no avail.

When I watched him present to my recruits, it was like watching a robot with a plastic smile. It was the same formulated sales pitch over and over and to be honest, it felt like a sales pitch from a sleazy car salesman. He'd spend 90 minutes on something that should only take 30 minutes and the people would be squirming in their chairs while eyeing the door just waiting for him to stop talking so they could leave. Meanwhile he would be continually be going over mundane details pointing to figures on a small sheet of paper that no one could really read clearly from the distance they were seated. It was just plain awkward in my opinion.

My last hope was to get my girlfriend to sign up under me. She had a big family and a lot of business contacts which would have been a great asset with a lot of potential. Unfortunately she was convinced by her friends and family not to join, and we broke up soon after.

When finally the people I thought I could count on most to join didn't, I became incredibly frustrated and disheartened and was tired of wasting all this time just to lose more and more money. I had my mentor telling me one thing and everyone else telling me another, and I was trapped in the middle and forced to absorb the strain from both ends. I think my mentor caught on once he realized that even my own girlfriend wasn't joining, and he stopped contacting me. Probably as much cutting his losses as it was him realizing I was done with him and ACN.

I did ACN for about two months actively. During this time I was pressured by my mentor and his wife to go to weekly and quarterly meetings. The weekly meetings became pointless once I was no longer able to get even one person to go with me. The quarterly meetings were huge seminars held in other states that cost $150 to attend, plus transportation and hotel. Even attending one of those meetings would cost me as much as it did to join ACN! And they wanted me to attend 4 of these per year!

Fortunately I didn't waste any more of my money by trying to attend these meetings, but my mentors always attended. I can only imagine how much money they spent on those things. That explains why they were so committed, and quite frankly, desperate, to make this business work. It's pretty transparent and sad once you see it for what it is and realize what is actually going on inside these people's heads.

When I joined initially I was under the impression that this would be part time and not cost an arm and a leg. It became clear as soon as I joined that this was a business of desperate people doing anything and everything they can to make this work, including not setting the correct expectations and using outright deception. I remember finding out about the $150 annual fee after investigating ACN online, and I told my sponsor about it in front of my mentor. My sponsor was shocked and said to my mentor, "You didn't tell me about that fee!"

The truth is they never tell you about it because why would you join with all these extra fees? The fees are almost unending: $499 sign up+ $150 annual fee + $40/month video phone + $30/ month website membership + 4 expensive seminars a year + the cost of marketing materials + the cost to attend weekly meetings and paying for your guests entrance fees, etc. And if you want to just cancel, cut your losses, and get out...you guessed it...another fee of $200 for early cancellation. At least I know now how ACN is able to stay afloat. They charge for everything!

Now imagine them being honest and telling you before you join about what you ACTUALLY would have to pay and what you can ACTUALLY expect? But of course they don't tell you about any of that because NOBODY WOULD JOIN if they told the truth about their business. So they resort to typical unethical sales tactics and do little more than paint you a mental picture of a pie in the sky that is waiting for you if only you would just "stay positive" and keep feeding money and time into this system.

Looking back on it, I think ACN is one of those businesses that you are either too smart or too dumb to get involved in. Too smart, in that you will not join because you will see up front how difficult it is to be successful. Too dumb, because you will not join because you think everything is a scam and don't really understand a complex business model. But either way, most people won't join. And those that do join are now left to contend with all the people who will not join for the reasons stated above.

I knew that there was no guarantee that I would make money in ACN, and I was prepared to lose all the money I put in, and I did. The business model still makes sense to me on paper, but unfortunately this is a people business, and people are notoriously difficult to deal with when it comes to this sort of business. I realize now that there are some people who should NEVER join ACN because it is not right for them. You need to know a lot of people (preferably with money), and you need to be very sociable and a good salesman.

It's unfortunate that the only qualifications to become an ACN representative are a heartbeat and a credit card, because so many people like myself continue to be lied to, manipulated, and then tossed to the side. Then to add insult to injury, they are told they failed because they gave up and were just too negative. But with all that is stacked against you when you join, most people would give up, otherwise continue to lose more and more time and money.

I am fortunate because I was able to absorb this financial loss and move on. I never signed even one person up, so I didn't have anyone upset at me after they lost their money like I did. My mentor, based on what he told me, had a long list of people he got to sign up but whom never made any money. And by "never made money" I mean LOST their money.

What's odd about that is he really didn't make much money off of them, so he really just wasted his own time. Like most multi-level businesses, most of the money he brought in went to those way above him in his upline. I recall one of the first meetings I attended where my sponsor showed up in his fancy sportscar and had got not one, but TWO speeding tickets on the way in. That's a few hundred dollars in fines right there.

Then when I was at his house a few weeks later, a process server showed up and gave his wife three more photo radar tickets he'd accumulated. This guy was clearly leaking money like a sieve due to his own personal indiscretions. I drew the conclusion that someone who is that financially reckless would probably do anything to make that money back, even if his business practices are just as reckless. Now this guy was just one ACN rep, but he was the one I ended up with. I'm sure other ACN reps have had better and worse experiences with their mentors.

It's now a year after I joined ACN and I've not heard back from my mentor since we initially stopped contacting each other. I am still trying to find a way out of the $40/month video phone service and I'll probably have to pay $200 to cancel early. So a year later and I am continuing to be drained of my money due to ACN. But hopefully I will soon be done with ACN entirely and can move on with my life.

Please note that I have been 100 percent honest about all this. Clearly I do not like ACN, but I didn't have to call it names and be belligerent toward the company or my sponsor. I figured if I put my honest and accurate account of my experience then people can read this and judge ACN for what it really is, rather than being influenced by a bunch of negative rhetoric.

ALABAMA -- My husband joined ACN to help his son who had been introduced to program by a so-called "friend." We spent $400 we could not afford. Upon joining, after paying money, neither my husband or his son were any longer able to reach the "friend." End result, this "friend" drives an Escalade provided by the company and receives large sums of money because he is toward the top of the scheme, endorsed by Donald Trump by-the-way, while we all scramble just to make our car payments as a result of this fraudulent company with its highly unethical monetary predators.

The company is unethical in its dealings, and has poor equipment and no service.

BRAMPTON -- I love to be part of ACN and am really thankful to my neighbor who show me this business. And if you are planning to change your life or have big dreams that you can't achieve with your current earning, then GOD answer your prayers. Don't think. Just join and work hard.

NORTH VANCOUVER, CALIFORNIA -- Worst internet service provider! I regret transferring with them. Modem/router with pay, Paying too much and when you are calling them weekend no agent available to fix your concerns. Recruiters are the only one who benefited but not the customers itself!!! Nightmare with ACN.