How Lyoness takes its members for fools with and in “Asia/Arabia“!

If Lyoness is “reorienting” itself and focusing on Cashback, what have they been doing during the past 13 years? Why hasn´t Lyoness publicly responded to these questions?

In the course of the continental start of the Asian-Pacific region, the booking discount “Asia Pacific” was launched with an extreme long booking period from July 17, 2012 until January 2014.

Premium members had the opportunity to book member advantages to the Asian loyalty program from fully paid purchases, as well as from prepaid or partially paid voucher purchases. The prepayments were supposed to bring advantages to members from the purchases of customers that had been adjudicated to them on the Asian market.

Sounds great if you think about the population figures in Asia, but that´s not the case. There is no real purchasing group in the Asian region. Neither are there enough Lyoness members there, nor is there a retailer where potentially existing customers could shop using a Lyoness Cashback Card.

Thailand´s case exemplifies this: In a country with over 68 million inhabitants, one would assume that there are enough shopping locations. At least that´s what Lyoness sold. It stated that buyers and retailers represented an unlimited potential in the populous countries of Asia and that this would result in similar earning opportunities.

But there is no purchasing group in Thailand. A Lyoness Siam Co., Ltd. exists, but it is only an alibi start-up to be able to present a local representative office to the deceived customers. The offices of the company are located in the shopping mall called Central World, No.999/9, Suite ML1711, 17th Floor, Rama 1 Road, and Bangkok 10330. The office is almost deserted and, according to the mall´s information center, only sporadically staffed. All visitors/customers wishing to have access to one of the many offices in the building are registered by the mall´s central information office and receive an “access card” for the mall´s office area for the duration of their visit. A look at the registration list for Lyoness visitors proves that the rooms are almost never used.

The Central World Center (formerly the World Trade Center) is the largest shopping mall in Southeast Asia and the sixth largest shopping mall worldwide. It has more than 600 shops and gastronomy establishments on an area of 550,000 m² and a shopping area of over 187,000 m².

It is surprising however that none of these many shops is a Lyoness partner company or accepts the Lyoness Cashback Card. One cannot shop with the Lyoness Cashback Card in any of the vast variety of shops there and therefore one cannot generate retail sales there to benefit the investors in Europe.

The same case applies to the other shopping malls in Bangkok, like Siam Paragon, Siam Discovery Center, MBK, Siam Center or the Emporium Shopping Mall, where no retailer has a connection with Lyoness.

The list of retailers that cooperate with Lyoness is limited to – believe it or not – 25, in all of Thailand! But we´re not talking about known or large business here, only about really unimportant small retailers and small businesses without any recognition.

The contact details of these retailers are not even displayed on the retailer list presented by Lyoness, so that their role as “authorised dealers” can be questioned. In any case, it is extremely improbable that these bars, yoga schools and beauty shops could generate anything near to a retail volume that could be distributed among the investing members in Austria. Obviously the low price level also doesn´t help in generating returns from sales volumes that could be distributed among the credulous investors in Europe.

The lack of a local Lyoness purchasing group becomes evident by the fact that all payments in Thailand do not go to Lyoness Siam but that the settlement is carried out by Lyoness Group AG, Grazbachgasse 87-93, 8010 Graz, Austria.

The suspects probably knew this all along, but sold Asia to their members as a large shopping community in which profit would be generated by the purchases of countless Lyoness members at an unlimited number of Lyoness authorised dealers.

In Dubai, an office is maintained in the Emaar Business Park, Building 4, 6th Floor, P.O. Box 390490, Sheikh Zayed Road Dubai, United Arab Emirates. On the website “Lyoness.com/ae“ the legal notice names Lyoness Europe AG. On the name plate on the spot, you find the name “Lyoness Management GmbH”, located in Graz. This office is also only sporadically staffed as a postal drop off point.

The shopping situation in the UAE is similar to the one in the Asian region. For instance in “The Mall”, a shopping mall of gigantic dimensions with a total of 1 million square meters and 1,200 businesses in Dubai, you can only find 1 shop accepting the Cashback Card, the “Pink Panther Store”. The lady that has been working there for three years now was thankful for the explanation on the meaning of the “Lyoness Cashback” sticker in the entrance, as according to her, nobody had ever made a purchase with it.