Shaqir Hussyin – Wealth Academy – Review

2018 must have been something of an annus horribilis for Shaqir Hussyin. After seeing Empower Network implode the year before, and taking one of his major revenue streams with it, he then had to sit by and watch as MOBE was shut down by the FTC taking another. These blows left Shaqir lacking in vastly overpriced poisoned chalices with which to flog from the internet lemonade stall he called Millionaires Challenge System.

It was either go find honest work commensurate with his talents and qualifications, like flipping burgers, or find another overpriced pyramid scheme to promote and keep him in the manner to which he had become accustomed.

Flipping burgers won’t finance a Ferrari though, even one rented for a day, so the world was denied another fast food van. A hotdog stand at the very least.

When Shaqir looked around for a new opportunity, he may have been thinking that what with the FTC branding MOBE a scam, and also shutting down the equally criminal Digital Altitude, that his options were limited.

He may also have mused on the thought, that as the scam business model that’d netted him so much big commissions (and that he’d so enthusiastically promoted to the public and endorsed) might be experiencing a downturn and “negative publicity” cycle, that it may not be the wisest thing to continue associating himself with. I mean, he could throw in behind another pyramid scheme for it just to get raided like MOBE did and he’d be right back to square one again.

Worse than that, there’s the possibility that the auditor could come after the big names of the scheme who made the most money out of it, and he’d find himself having to hand all those ill-gotten gains back.

Like what’s happening with Shaqir’s pals at MOBE.

Night sweats for Shaqir Link

Got to wonder how folks like Shaqir and John Chow have been sleeping.

Maybe this is why Shaqir only flirted with The Four Percent Group… and then decided it was time to really step up, be the man he claimed to be in his promotional literature: now was the time for his own big ticket, high commission, line-his-own-pockets MOBE-lite homage and Vick Strizheus (fellow Empower Network huckster) be damned!

Shaqir hoping you’ll continue to fund his lifestyle

And so Wealth Academy was created. Or pushed harder after a revamp anyway. May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

I think it’s an apt name, too. Somewhat unoriginal and overused in internet marketing because there’s several programs that share the name “Wealth Academy”, but I’d never accuse Shaqir of an original thought, and he maintains a consistent service in that regard.

I say it’s an apt name because Wealth Academy does provide instruction in how to get wealthy, but only if you look at it from the correct angle.

The wrong way to look at it, is from the perspective of thinking that any of the information in the overpriced programs could actually make you wealthy.

If you look at Wealth Academy from the perspective of a case study in how to generate wealth for yourself by selling overpriced, common knowledge, mediocre instruction and actually convincing people to pay the extortionate sums, then it’s a masterclass.

And Shaqir Hussyin was taught by the best in that regard: Matt Lloyd and Dave Wood.

To reiterate, and it bears repeating, Shaqir fronted MOBE and it was shut down by US Federal authorities and unequivocally branded a “pyramid scheme” and a “scam” by the FTC. The official report stated that those benefiting from the scheme knew there was little to no prospect of anyone making the sums claimed, that they convinced others to join purely to enrich themselves, and that the high-pressure and callous sales tactics resulted in financial ruin for many participants.

Empower Network operated exactly the same business model. It collapsed under the ineptitude of its drug-addled founder, Dave Wood, before it too could be raided and meet a similar fate.

Shaqir trying to enrich himself at your expense in the scam pyramid scheme known as MOBE.

That’s how the Federal Trade Commission sees it, anyway.

From Shaqir’s own website:

“As an Internet Millionaire, the founder and leader of the #1 Done For You Traffic Agency – SoloAdsAgency.com for the Home Business Industry, and Top Million Dollar Earner inside of TWO different leading home business communities (Empower Network + MOBE ). Rest assured, you are in great hands.”

I’m not sure if he’s confessing or providing a testimonial?!

But it certainly serves as a testimonial as to how much you can trust him.

Him, and his “great” money-grubbing hands.

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Who Is Shaqir Hussyin?

Shaqir answers that question on the site that bears his name, on the page that bears his name, here.

You should take the time to read his story, a story he implores us in bold lettering that “might seem hard to believe, but I promise you that it’s the truth. ONE Thing.”

That “ONE thing” is Shaqir’s prose not mine. Yeah, I’m confused too. I’m not sure if that sentence is meant to read “I promise you one thing it’s the truth” or “I promise you it’s the truth. EVERYTHING”.

Whatever, sloppy writing used to be the hallmark of Shaqir, which was in glorious evidence on an earlier incarnation of shaqirhussyin.com.

But in order to appreciate it today, you need to travel back in time using the internet’s own Tardis, the Wayback Machine.

It’s unfortunate for folks like Shaqir, but the archives of the Wayback Machine can often prove to be a goldmine of embarrassing and (self) contradictory information. Particularly when delving into past claims a person’s made about him or her self.

2009 is when the first archived page for Shaqir appears. It looks a little forlorn, but the seedling begins to grow as we move into 2010. It’s then that we find the first claims of how successful and wealthy Shaqir is, how fantastically he’s taken the marketing world by storm, and how adept he is at his trade.

In case you’re confused, that trade isn’t the Art of Bullshit, but internet marketing (though the two can be conflated). So expert is he, he offers coaching:

Note the typos and schoolboy copywriting. Best of all is the Gmail, rather than domain name, email address. That just screams coach and guru to the “serious entrepreneur”. And down at the bottom there – a link to CarbonCopy. We’ll get to that later, though.

But he’s just so damn annoyingly, effortlessly, successful that he invites us to smack him.

An invite I think we should all take him up on, but not for the offence of being successful (because I doubt he’s guilty on that count, at least not in 2010), but as punishment for the puerile prose and grammar he inflicts upon us.

It’s evident Shaqir’s getting someone else to do the copywriting on his sales pages these days. That original copy of his is dire. Reads more like the copy you used to get in the back of old comics trying to convince you to buy stink bombs and x-ray specs.

It really works!

Which is maybe apt, as Shaqir’s always tended to promote items as likely to live up to their advertising, as what’s to be found on the shelves of a joke shop.

Point in question is that Carbon Copy PRO & WealthMasters International. Shaqir is funnelling folks to that waste of money by 2010 and claiming it’s made him rich, too. At least on the 2010 version of his website he is. In his ‘About’ backstory in 2020 he’s saying he was just getting started on it in 2009, and only in 2010 does he get his first break.

Which is not quite the way he depicted himself ten years ago.

He’s also saying he was morbidly obese way back in the day, but unless the pics he posted back then are doctored, he doesn’t appear to be. He’s always been a tad chubby, but nothing to do a double take at.

Awww… is that his school uniform?

Okay, let’s be charitable – he was faking it till he made it and gilding the lily a bit. So what? That’s the advice all these MLMs/pyramid schemes give out, to bullshit it up that you’re raking it in with whatever program, to try and convince others to jump in the hole too.

Except he was touting himself as an expert in multiple fields of marketing way back then and seeking £2,000 a pop for his coaching (a bargain compared to what he wants now).

Which he doesn’t appear to have been – an expert.

Nor so rich we should smack him.

These are the summarised company accounts from Mintmemo Ltd, a company Shaqir is listed as a director of, and shares the same address as listed on his Contact page.

Life sure gets good once Empower and Mobe show up, don’t it. Not so rosy prior to then, though.

But it ain’t this good: “He has been coaching and providing cutting edge training for the home-based business industry since 2009 and was one of the fastest and youngest success stories in the history of direct sales, earning his first $10,000,000 by age 26.” Link.

Shaqir was 26 years-old in 2014. There’s no ten million dollars listed on that balance sheet for 2014, or any other year, or accumulation of years.

But what of the other companies Shaqir’s listed as a director/owner of? Maybe the missing money’s to be found there?

They’re either dissolved, dormant, or as in the case of Solo Ads, struck off the register.

However, there could very well be overseas companies and bank accounts, which of course I wouldn’t be privy to. Given Shaqir’s travelled to Hong Kong and abroad on business, that wouldn’t surprise me.

What muddies the waters still further is that MOBE allegedly staged fake promo shots with its top earners, featuring fictitious cheque amounts. Its top affiliates were doing good, but maybe not as good as some of the exaggerated earnings they were pictured with. The affiliates would’ve been happy to go along with it as marketing bullshit like that would enhance their reputation further, and could be put to use in promoting other programs.

It’s hard to see through all the smoke and mirrors. However, unless I’m misreading what is publicly available, and in addition misreading what Shaqir’s stated about himself past and present on his website, then it appears he’s misrepresented himself, his skill set, and success, at various points throughout his marketing career.

Presumably in order to better procure money from people.

And if you part with money in good faith on the understanding that the recipient is the authority they advertise themselves to be, and they aren’t, then that’s misleading advertising isn’t it?

Of much the same sort MOBE and Empower indulged in. The same MOBE that Shaqir fails to mention in his website ‘About’ bio in 2020 (though it is stated elsewhere on the “joinourteam/about-shaqir” page).

But he does mention Carbon Copy PRO & WealthMasters International.

And if you knew anything about the now defunct Carbon Copy PRO & WealthMasters International, I wouldn’t mention that one, either.

I first wrote on those companies in my review of Michael Force and Digital Altitude. Force was involved with Carbon Copy PRO (CC) and it’s a precursor to Digital Altitude. Read the relevant section in my review of that MLM, links and all, to understand what a cesspit of intrigue, greed and backstabbing the alliance of CC & WealthMasters was. Suffice to say, if you joined you’d about as much chance of making money from the program as you did in Digital Altitude. Maybe Shaqir’s hoping everyone’s forgotten what CC was, but I haven’t, and it’s not an association to brag about.

Over the years Shaqir’s been willing to hitch his wagon to any MLM that he thought would get him rich off the backs of others by convincing them to join – and results and financial impact to the poor sods who did be damned. He’d been cultivating an email list since the early days, bullshitting on his abilities and success since his first subscriber, so it doesn’t surprise me he threw in with MOBE and Empower once they hit his radar. He did good with them, too.

Shaqir’s a marketer, and marketer enough to know what he was actually pushing on people. He doesn’t care if you buy a lemon from his used car sales lot of promotions, he only cares that he gets the dollar from the commissions. Better yet, buy two cars. It’s not like Shaqir is going to answer the phone, or give a refund, if they breakdown at the first set of stop lights.

“I promise you that it’s the truth”

So that’s who Shaqir Hussyin is.

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Ecommerce

You may not know this, but Shaqir is also an ecommerce expert. I know that because he charged $25,000 for an ecommerce course.

You can read comments from the attendees under a prior article on lazymoneymaking here:

In an act of financial gall that would’ve made Matt Lloyd jealous, Shaqir charged every attendee $25,000 for that shit show of common knowledge.

That was around 80 people according to that review. Eight-zero. All left in the lurch.

So what was the payday for Shaqir? Let’s calculate it: 80 x $25,000 = $2,000,000(!)

If nothing else, you have to admire the sheer chutzpah of the man!

And marvel at his complete lack of conscience, and how ready he is to shamelessly renege on his promised course content once he had the money.

You can understand why he walked off too – “My team and I are supporting the best we can. I don’t appreciate negativity in my life and won’t tolerate it.”

Said Shaqir reclining on a big pile of your cash.

Don’t bring him down with your negativity and concerns about getting what you paid for, or any of the value his advertising promised. That is grounds to cancel the course with no refunds!

Oddball don’t give no refunds

Before we leave this section, here’s some other products and services you may be unaware Shaqir possesses expertise in:

“I’ve worked in and DOMINATED various other niche businesses ranging from Skin Care, Computer Games, How To Play Piano, Golf, Weight Loss, Cake Baking, Solar Panels, Forex Trading, Hair Loss, Conspiracy Theories, Designer Clothing, Dating, Healing, Accident Claims Management, & a few other weird ones.” Link. 

Everything but a French cabaret chanteuse.

With all that talent, little wonder Shaqir sports such a big shit eating grin in every pic or video you see his fat face in.

Shaqir’s been gilding the lily since 2009 and is still at it. He’d tell you he was Santa Claus if he was trying to sell you a Popsicle.

And if he tells you the sky is blue and the grass is green, I’d advise you walk over to a window and look out and check.

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Wealth Academy

Wealth Academy offers a number of online marketing courses for four figure prices that come with their very own certificate once completed. This certificate is, according to the site blurb, something you can produce to have your expertise acknowledged by your peers and employers.

Except Wealth Academy isn’t an accredited institution with any school of further education or awarding body.

Meaning any certificate you get automatically emailed on completion of any test is worthless.

That doesn’t make it illegal. You or I or anyone, can create a course and issue a certificate of course completion to go with it.

Just no one who matters, or is in the know, will take it seriously.

So from an employment perspective, Wealth Academy’s certificates are as much an investment as Blockbuster stock is.

But if you’re interested in the content and training in itself then that’s fair enough; they just have to do what they say on the tin for you to get your money’s worth.

But there’s a guy called Adam Ali who does review videos, who’s been following Shaqir for years, met him three times, and he says Shaqir’s training ain’t all that good. In fact he describes Shaqir’s training as “junk”.

Adam says the Wealth Academy coaches aren’t there to mentor or train anyone: they’re sales guys working off commissions, and as such will lie and tell you any bullshit necessary to try and get more money out of you. Adam claims they’ll even make up courses on the fly (that they’ll cobbled together offline) to fit whatever “need” or problem it is you have, or they tell you have.

But all these guys are really interested in doing, is figuring out how much disposable income you have so they can bleed you dry with further training upsells and sales funnels.

Adam Ali says Shaqir is a great actor but unethical, that hundreds of people have lost money with him, and he’s basically all about enriching himself at your expense.

Adam’s final recommendation on Shaqir Hussyin is to “stay well away.”

Me, I wouldn’t recommend paying the sums asked ($1,497 – reduced from $4,997) for Shaqir’s (“junk”) courses as you can find similar programs at a fraction of the price. You can find the information for free, for that matter.

As we’ve seen, Shaqir’s been prepared to present himself as an expert in online marketing from the first day he threw up a website… whose word do we have other than his, that he’s what he claims to be now? Did he even create these courses himself?

Just because he may be worth a million bucks doesn’t put his advice at a premium: remember he made that money in part by charging a premium for advice and expertise he didn’t possess. Do you think the older Shaqir has changed?

I don’t. I think he’s as trustworthy as that scarcity timer on his sales pages that resets to zero on each refresh.

Which is an advertising violation as it misleads.

Are you seeing a pattern yet?

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Wealth Academy As A Business Opportunity

Wealth Academy follows the same business model of MOBE and Empower.

You buy in, and having bought in, you can promote and receive commissions from those programs you’ve purchased. If someone buys additional programs or services that you haven’t, then you make zero affiliate returns on those.

So you’re pressed to buy-in to as much as possible, at ever increasing three and four figure prices, so you don’t lose out.

Or so Shaqir doesn’t lose out, because you almost certainly will.

As prices range from $2,997 to $19,997 and even $40,000, and some with monthly fees on top, those programs are wildly overpriced. Unless they contain some super secret God-like sauce you just can’t find anywhere else on Earth (and past reviewers say not), they’re just not worth it.

However… you will get something for your money. To scam you would be to get nothing in return. Or to get half of something and then disappear (which some allege is a ghost act Shaqir’s performed in the past).

But you will get something.

It’s a tact MOBE tried too – providing a “product” to try and circumvent the accusation of being a pyramid scheme. It just didn’t work, as the FTC still labelled them as such. Even with the minimal training tacked-on it was still obvious the driver was to sell the overpriced program for the commissions, not the content, which was of little value.

But I reckon Shaqir Hussyin is a good marketer. Or conman. You say “potat-o”, I say “pot-ato”. Whether you feel his products and advice is worth the money is your call.

Be honest with yourself and admit if it’s the program content in itself you want, or simply the commissions to be had from it.

Because just about everything that there is to know about marketing is out there in the public domain and is available for free.

So if you drop $40,000 or whatever sum into this hole, the way to get out of it is to pull others in to join you.

Except just as in MOBE, and all these other “big ticket” programs, you’re going to find it very, very difficult to convince others to part with a similar amount of money.

Even in small ticket sales, you’ll find it difficult to succeed, as per the FTC’s report on MLMs, some 99% of participants lose money. More than that, MOBE and Empower’s own earnings reports confirmed that: just about no one made a damn thing,

You’re not going to buck that trend.

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Wealth of Complaints

I’ll start this section by recognising that there are indeed a wealth of happy testimonials to be found regarding Shaqir’s courses and products. Some of them not even on Shaqir’s own sites.

Like this guy. You’ll note his site hasn’t been updated in a year and a half. Since July 2018. Since around the time when MOBE was shut down.

I wonder if Fabian still feels lucky to have been selected to give Shaqir $25k?

James below doesn’t, and he parted with half that sum:

Link

Complaints and negatives reviews re Shaqir Hussyin and his shady practices abound on the net. As I said, you don’t even need to bounce off this site to find them.

Here’s a complaint submission to rip-off report.

The complaint is standard fare for Shaqir: overcharge, over-promise, fail to deliver, and then ignore all subsequent emails from the customer when they point that out. Nothing new there.

What is worth linking to that report for, is the laughable rebuttal from “SH Legal Team – (USA)”. That reply is so obviously not penned by a legal professional as to be hilarious! It seems to be written by a high schooler struggling in English class, but doing their best to sound all grown-up and professional.

So going by Shaqir’s old copy, looks to me like his work.

But whoever wrote it, if that puerile piece of nonsense is supposed to be a defence/recommendation, or even a legal threat, it does nothing but make Shaqir Hussyin as a company look amateurish and a laughing stock.  

“This is ONE case of negativity and we hope you do not deter from doing business with Shaqir and his recommendations because of ONE FALSE negative review.”

Written as if penned by Clarence Darrow himself.

Here’s another piece of negativity: Shaqir Hussyin Scam. 

That’s in the Wayback Machine of the internet archive because Shaqir would really rather you didn’t read it, so the author of the piece was threatened with legal action, subsequently caved, and removed it.

The author being a bona fide customer of Shaqir’s. I remember the discussion around the article, and Shaqir’s supposed threats, at the time.

Quite how serious the threat of legal action was, I don’t know. If it was on a par with the threat on Rip-off Report, I’d have had a good giggle and ignored it. It was a standard tactic of the MOBE mafia, to contact a site hosting a negative review and claim that their “team of lawyers” were to be sicced on the owner for libel if it wasn’t removed posthaste… but this was before the FTC described MOBE as a scam and Matt Lloyd had his assets seized and went on the run.

Anyway, that article I link to above is well worth reading as the comments section brought forth even more damning comments regarding Shaqir and supported the author’s experience.

It’s a sickening read. The folks who went to that event were just there to be press ganged into giving Shaqir four and five figure sums. One commenter says Shaqir’s people were pushing a $100,000 VIP course at him! And this guy was a kid just out of college – where in hell was he gonna get that sort of money from? But the “coaches” helpfully offered to come to the bank with him. Man, they were ruthless vampires by the sounds  of it, and that was the experience of other folks chiming in. Hard-sell salespeople who didn’t give a damn where you got the money from as long as you gave it to them (Shaqir).

And all for a course/information that was decidedly lacking. To confirm what Adam Ali had to say, Shaqir’s people were more interested in trying to means test the participants in order to estimate how much they could wring out of them. It sounds more like a Mob shakedown than a program.

Frankly, it sounds disgusting, and several did indeed walk out/didn’t return in disgust at the sales tactics used. I recommend reading the whole archived thread.

Archived because threats were issued to try and censure the information, and bully the woman who’d attended Shaqir’s program into removing her post. I wonder if all the IP addresses of the folks who subsequently chimed in on the article were subpoenaed and the unhappy list of customers sued for defamation?! All for committing the high crime of honestly recounting their experience, and expressing an opinion on the reality of what to expect from a Shaqir Hussyin event.

Shaqir isn’t in the least concerned, Cecilia. Link.

Just that bad reviews don’t seem such a one-off as the “SH Legal Team – (USA)” would want us all to believe. The weight of public opinion, from those who’ve had dealings with Shaqir, seems pretty uniform, and it isn’t a positive one. At least in the comment sections linked above.

Little wonder Shaqir strives to censure such articles with hamfisted bullying tactics, then.

If you have a negative opinion of Shaqir, then as far as Shaqir is concerned, you are not entitled to it.

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Should You Join Wealth Academy

In my opinion, no, you should not.

Why would a used car salesman with a history of selling lemons suddenly give you a good deal?

He wouldn’t.

Asking yourself if you should join Wealth Academy is like debating whether or not it’s a good idea to stick your hand in a blender.

If you find yourself even considering purchasing anything from Shaqir Hussyin then I’d advise you shut down your computer and destroy it with a hammer – you’ll have just saved yourself a lot of money, far more than the cost of both buying and replacing the laptop or PC.

What you always have to come back to, and what Shaqir will never escape, is that he fronted for, and profited from, MOBE: “The Federal Trade Commission has charged three individuals and nine businesses with bilking more than $125 million from thousands of consumers with a fraudulent business education program called MOBE (“My Online Business Education”). Link.

I think Bob’s not alone in his surprise. Link.

It’s something Shaqir never addresses, because he can’t. He was complicit in that “bilking” and he made a lot of money from promoting and recommending a “fraudulent business education program”. He still would be if the authorities hadn’t shut it down.

He did the same thing with Empower. With CarbonCopy Pro & WealthMasters.

And Wealth Academy follows a similar high-ticket, high-commission buy-in.

In my opinion Shaqir’s real talent lies not in general internet marketing or entrepreneurship, but in marketing himself and convincing others that he knows what he’s talking about, and that his hackneyed “advice” is worth four figure sums to listen to.

He’s another guy selling picks & shovels to gold miners. He figured out way back in 2009/2010 that’s where the money’s at in internet marketing. Not going gold digging yourself. He’s selling the dream by presenting himself as the sort of success everyone wants to be in internet marketing, but he got to be a millionaire (if he is) not by doing what he teaches, but selling what he teaches.

So, no, I do not recommend Shaqir Hussyin’s Wealth Academy or any of the other sites/programs of his that funnel to it.

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Who Can You Trust?

My recommendation goes to Wealthy Affiliate (WA). I’ve been with them since 2016, joined for a look, liked what I saw, and stuck around.

It’s not a “high ticket” anything, it’s a reasonably priced service that includes all the tools required to make a bit of money in affiliate marketing.

Not so much money as to make Shaqir interested, but there are some of us that prefer to be able to sleep at night without fear of being awoken by the authorities brandishing a writ for assets seizure.

You can make some decent money in affiliate marketing and still keep your soul. WA doesn’t deal in fantasy, claiming it’s going to make you a millionaire by next week, but it will net you some decent side-money. Very decent indeed.

It’s free to join, no “credit card required for verification” purposes bullshit, and no phone numbers handed over, you just create your account and walk in. You get a week’s worth of free membership which is more than enough time to figure out if it’s for you, after that you revert to guest user.

I liked what I saw so I stayed. Maybe you will too and make a few bucks yourself. Up to you.

You can read my review of Wealthy Affiliate here.

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Recommended further reading for aspiring millionaires:

A classic you should be aware of if you aren’t. I’m sure Shaqir Hussyin has read it. Or bought the audio book anyway.

The Millionaire Fastlane

Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!

by M. J. DeMarco