Silvio Spangl was a Lyoness promoter for nine years. He rose to President, Lyoness’ highest distributor rank.
As part of his leadership, Spangl focused on growth of Lyoness across the Americas. He claims to have had over 250,000 distributors in his downline.
Last year Spangl left Lyoness. As part of legal efforts to get Lyoness to pay him for his position, Spangl recently gave two interviews with BE Conflict Management.
Spangl’s first interview was uploaded to Be Conflict Management’s YouTube channel on April 23rd, 2021.
Part two was uploaded on April 27th, however there seems to be some time difference between the two interviews (I think the first one was shot much earlier).
On why he left Lyoness, Spangl claims he began questioning the company in 2018.
[1:32] When you do a simple math based on all these clouds, for example, this cloud system was changing so many times.
[2:35] When this cloud business started rolling, there was one concept and then they changed it into another concept.
To enterprise cloud then business and that, it changed so many times that hardly someone could understand it anymore.
I think the biggest problem was that people lost focus because nobody knew anymore, “OK what is the focus now? What is our product?”
I think shopping volume is eventually the last priority on the list. And if we don’t have shopping volume then this whole thing is turning into a typical, how people would say, pyramid.
So this is the reason (in) 2018 I started thinking, “How should we move forward?” Because this can not exist much longer the way how it was existing.
It eventually turned into (a) money collecting club every few months.
Last year in May I decided I had no guts to support something like this. I jumped out.
Spangl maintains there’s no animosity towards Lyoness founder Hubert Freidl from his side.
Since leaving the company however, Friedl has sent Spangl several ominous sounding messages:
Spangl describes Friedl’s messages as “weird”.
BehindMLM published its first Lyoness review in May 2012.
The first time this happened I added Lyoness to my review list and when the time came went over their site to start my research.
A few hours and a massive headache later, I closed my browser window and gave up.
I concluded that Lyoness had put so little thought and effort into the coherency of explaining their business, that it simply wasn’t worth my time to try to understand the business model.
I retrospect it was much easier to dissect Lyoness’ MLM opportunity back then.
You had a cashback shopping network, which was essentially a front for an “accounting unit” scheme.
Over the years I’ve revisited Lyoness. And each time things have gotten more and more confusing. Shopping units, shopping vouchers, cloud positions, the failed eCredits crypto scheme, real-estate returns… on and on it goes.
Spangl claims Lyoness’ frequent migration from one shiny ball to another was a large part of his decision to leave.
[8:31] I think the biggest problem in this whole business was that, either Hubert or the whole leadership on the corporate side, they were not able to focus on one thing for longer than 3 months.
It was changing all the time. All the time something new. Now let’s do this, let’s do that.
It’s absolutely without any plan.
And now the latest plan with (the) stock market and and and and… I mean it’s such a delusion because this company is light years away from stock market.
Initially I thought Lyoness was getting into trading, but rather the company is floating going public.
And, against a backdrop of a cashback platform nobody is pushing, that potential listing is being used to continue soliciting investment.
Spangl goes on to describe Lyoness’ selling of virtual shares.
[9:48] What I don’t understand you know, at least in the US and I think in Europe it’s not different, if you want to present and sell some shares or future stocks or however they call it, something has to be done. It has to be prepared.
And selling shares ahead of time and you don’t even know … there’s no one paper about stock market or preparing or licenses or whatever.
This is a gigantic process to get a company on the stock market. For me it sounds pretty illegal.
Indeed, be it in the US or elsewhere, selling unregistered securities is illegal.
But hey, give it a few months and once money has been handed over and virtual share allocation has been recorded somewhere, that’ll probably be the last anyone will hear of it.
Then there’ll be some new ruse to pitch to new potential investors.
Two other interesting tidbits from Spangl’s interview are that
- Lyoness was recently fined $23 million for tax fraud in Turkey; and
- Hubert Friedl has cut employee salaries by 20% to pay for the Feb 2021 Italian pyramid scheme fine.
How much Spangl made participating in a fraudulent investment scheme for nine years, or how much he sold his position to Lyoness for, isn’t disclosed.
Looking forward, Spangl remains skeptical about Lyoness’ future.
[11:06] The fact is this entire community shrunk to (a) minimum. I still have a lot of friends in America, I get a lot of information (about) what’s going on.
When I see what Career levels after this new system where you need just a half volume for basically (the) same career level.
I mean this is peanuts what is coming in for the company on one side. And the number of active marketers is, it’s so small, it’s so tiny that I don’t think it can survive much longer.
Spangl claims leaders still in Lyconet are in denial because they are being “manipulated”.
[12:20] I know it very well because those Presidents who are still in the business, they will tell you only the best of the best.
Whatever I’m saying they will say, “OK this is a lie”. So people don’t have a possibility to get facts about (the) reality of what’s really going on backstage.
In negotiating his exit from Lyoness, the company reserved first right to buy Spangl’s position.
Lyoness purportedly exercised this right but as of yet hasn’t paid Spangl for his position.
Spangl describes his exit contract from Lyoness as a “mafia contract”.
The “blackmailing document” prohibited Spangl from promoting any MLM related business for 20 months.
Spangl says he signed anyway because he wanted out.
After the contract was signed, Spangl claims Lyoness and Friedl ghosted him.
Seven to eight emails were sent with no response. This prompted Spangl to eventually pursue legal action.
To that end Spangl has engaged BE Conflict Management as part of his legal representation.
Update 29th March 2022 – BE Conflict Management’s YouTube channel was terminated in mid March.
As such previously available linked to cited BE Conflict Management YouTube videos have been disabled.