In an email sent out to affiliates, Tradera has announced it is “ceasing all operations effective immediately”.
Tradera’s e-wallet provider, merchant partners and affiliates haven’t been paid. And co-owners Kody Sell and Eastan Harris are in hiding.
Of course Tradera’s closure email makes no mention of any of that. For more we turn to a recent webinar held by former Tradera affiliate Domonique Barbee.
Barbee (right) reveals that King/Queen and higher ranked Tradera affiliates were part of a “royal council”.
As told by Barbee, royal council members
[1:54] meet with the owners every single Wednesday, and we just discuss things to make things better for you all.
The last few meetings some of the leaders … they were just acting irate and acting, you know in a way that was turning the owners off.
Specifically Megan Lynch. She was yelling at the owner, she was talking to him like he was a child, right? And he was getting very frustrated with her.
So why were Tradera’s leaders irate?
[2:26] (On) the last meeting that we had … we had the news broken to us that the (client) price will be raised and doubled.
So instead of $99 it will be $200 to join Tradera.
Immediately after that (announcement), everybody in the council was shocked.
The provided reason for the price hike was that the more users Tradera brought to their undisclosed third-party signals provider, the more they had to pay in fees.
One would think bringing more clients to a company would result in lower fees, but I digress.
[3:07] So after the meeting we had a chat with the royal council with those leaders and there was a lot of arrogance.
One person in particular who you see, she was …
… And I talked to Kody (Tradera co-founder) and the other leaders talked to Kody, and he specifically told me he was not liking those royal council meetings because he didn’t like being yelled at like that.
[3:57] After that I get text from Megan saying “I got into it with the owners”.
After that, all I know is we had communication with the owners through a Facebook page … all I know is on Friday, I was on vacation with my family … I walk in the door and I get a call from ten leaders back to back.
And I knew something was going on. And after that call we had to get on a meeting because they (Tradera) disabled the chat in the call.
They disabled the communication. They blocked the leaders. They blocked me, they blocked Steve, they blocked Selena, they blocked Tiffany. They blocked us.
And then we didn’t get a message saying we got paid. So I’m like, “What is going on?”
Barbee claims she is owed $50,000. She also states this isn’t the first time Tradera has had commission payment problems.
This time around however, things were different.
[5:59] And then I go to the e-wallet and it says, “This merchant has disabled the e-wallet”.
So in my mind I’m thinking like, “OK, Megan probably pissed them off, or whoever pissed them off. They may be having an anxiety attack, chillin’”.
But somebody called the e-wallet and they said Tradera has not paid them.
Barbee claims to have contacted Tradera’s “educators”, only to find out they hadn’t been paid either.
While all of this was going on, Tradera was still accepting new signups and collecting fees.
This went down last Friday. Over the weekend there was no communication from Tradera’s owners.
Barbee states that it was only after all of this played out, that she announced she was leaving the company.
[7:34] I cannot be part of a company where you not gonna talk to me and you’re not gonna pay me my money.
In the aftermath (the past 24 hours or so), Megan Lynch and Domonique Barbee appear to have been feuding.
Barbee claims Lynch is lying to people about trying to recreate Tradera through another company. Lynch has accused Barbee of cross-recruiting.
Barbee denies cross-recruiting but confirms she’s jumped ship for Epic Trading, a rival signals trading MLM opportunity.
The first ten minutes of Barbee’s webinar are relevant to Tradera’s collapse. The rest is a promotional spiel for Epic Trading.
Looking forward, Tradera has dumped their entire forex trading education library on YouTube. The company states it did this as a ‘final contribution to the trading industry and our gift to each of’ their affiliates.
Tradera’s legacy is free, top-tier forex trading education for the world. With this gift, you will never have to pay for proper Forex education again.
Affiliate squabbling aside, I’m not inclined to believe that Tradera raising the cost of access to its signals service to $200 was the result of merchants charging them higher fees.
Like I said earlier, raising fees per referred client the more clients are referred makes no business sense. If anything more clients would result in a discount.
In BehindMLM’s published Tradera review I questioned the retail viability of Tradera’s $99 monthly client membership fee. Given only a three-day refund period was provided, I didn’t believe Tradera stood by their product.
That would certainly have made it difficult to pitch to retail customers. Even more so at $200 a month.
In turn that would mean the majority of Tradera clients were also affiliates, resulting in Tradera operating as a pyramid scheme.
Tradera’s provided corporate address was a PO Box in Texas. The dark horse here is an undisclosed US regulatory investigation.
For now though I can’t verify if one exists. But all of this otherwise just seems strange.
If Kody Sell and Eastan Harris were upset at certain Tradera affiliates, why not just boot them and continue running the business?
And nobody seems particularly upset at losing access to what was marketed as a successful signals service. Did Domonique Barbee, Megan Lynch or anyone else in Tradera actually use the signals?
Or was it the same old sign up as an affiliate, pay $99 a month and get paid to recruit others who do the same pyramid story?
Pending any further updates on Tradera’s abrupt pre-Christmas collapse, stay tuned…
Update 30th December 2020 – Megan Lynch and several members of her downline have filed a lawsuit against Tradera’s payment processor, iPayout.