Check out the latest online Shopping Experience.

DubLi’s server is hosted in Germany and the domain name is registered to an address in Denmark. They operate in the United States as a shell corporation, or “mailbox” company with a mailbox in Delaware, where they are registered as an LLC.

The current CEO and founder, Michael Hansen, marketed ACN in Denmark and managed firms that bankrupted during his involvement.

Santi Fuentes, Carlos Oestby, were at one point heavily involved in DubLi (as management/staff). They are no longer there as of very recently.

Santi Fuentes started Evolution Market Group, also known as FinanzasForex. The Spanish Government issued a warning through the CNMV (National Securities Market Commission). France, Austria, Sweden and others did as well. (AMF Warning about FinanzasForex). Then Santi Fuentes took down the page and promised FinanzasForex was “in the process of regularizing with the CNMV”, which the CNMV denied.

Carlos Oestby, from Norway is linked to UbiFone, 1CellNet, (tried as a pyramid scheme in Australia).

The U.S. Country Manager (Dean Mannheimmer) used to work for TNI or Tahitian Noni International. These are the same scam artists that asked you to reduce your doctor-prescribed medications and drink overpriced juice.

Troy Dooly and Xray kindly pointed out Jonathan Gulla is DubLi’s “North American Director of Training”.

Here’s Gulla’s track record:

PDI Clinical Labs - Mail and Wire Fraud, 2001
Capital Credit - Fake Credit cards, 1999-2000

In 1999, Gulla sells Lancer International (Nevada) to StarTronix International (Delaware) in exchange for $50,000 cash and $673,000 in stock. Becomes COO of STNX.

(StarTronix was targeted by law enforcement during Operation Missed Fortune for being a pyramid scheme in 1996).

Some numbers

Statistics available from the DubLi site indicate that as of last November (2008) there were only 57 DubLi promoters, based on the distribution of prizes that were awarded at that point. Since then, multiple people, including our readers, have observed that the only auction worth investing in is the express auction, and coincidentally, DubLi is mathematically bound to take a loss if the price is not reduced by 25%, or set to 133% of market value.

There is absolutely no way to know what the results of the lotteries actually are. They could be rigged by the operator, and according to the shady disclaimer, they reserve the right to ban you off, even if you have remaining gambling credits.

The plurality of prices were won by DubLi distributors (so-called business associates) who at some point frequented this site.

The primary reason for this is that DubLi promoters are required to buy credits that are bundled with advertising packages (licenses to sell more licenses). It’s a case of eating your own dog-food.

The difference is you have to pay a yearly fee to advertise for DubLi.

Statistically, DubLi can earn you ~90 dollars out of your 3000 dollar investment.

Not a pyramid scheme?

Apologist sites (subcontracted by DubLi) claim DubLi sells advertising to Kelkoo and therefore it is not a pyramid scheme; The U.S. DubLi site, offers no such advertising and the European counterpart receives a fraction of that traffic by comparison.

More interestingly, the DubLi Network site (for promoters) receives half of the traffic of the standard DubLi. This strongly suggests that for every visit to dublinetwork.com, there are two visits to dubli.com. In other words: for every visit made by a promoter, there are two visits made by a “potential customer”, who might well also be a promoter or existing customer. Best case scenario: one customer for every distributor. Worst case scenario: “bidding” requires twice as much traffic (or more) as viewing earnings on the dublinetwork, so distributors are eating their own dog-food. Based on earlier analyses, the worst case scenario is much more likely.

Other:

Spammed all over the place

They are advertised by 24-7pressrelease.com, free-press-release.com, and 1888PressRelease.com. Take a look at the list of all the scams they advertise (6,000 articles of pure spam). The distributors are engaged in a deceptive marketing campaign.

Recognized as a scam elsewhere in the world, Can’t trade on the money market

Dubli doesn’t trade on the stock market, nor is it able to do so, as a Spanish blogger points out in DubLi, the alleged competition to eBay.

Dubli’s Bad Marketing

Dubli claims to be a reverse auction. A regular auction happens when many buyers compete for an item (so they bid up). A reverse auction occurs when many sellers compete to sell an item (so they bid down to lower prices).

In Dubli, no sellers compete to lower a price (to bid down), instead, the buyers compete to lower a price by paying. So DubLi has nothing to do with reverse auctions.

But, lottery and gambling are better descriptions for two of the “auctions” on DubLi.

Lottery

In game 2 your chances of winning an item depend on how many times you pay to click a button (the more, the better) to view the price of an item. It also depends on how many players have bought the right to click the button.

Gambling

Game 3 is equivalent to spread-betting.

The other two deceptive “reverse auctions”.

Technically, neither PayPal nor any U.S. Bank is allowed wire funds to DubLi, due to laws on gambling. That’s very unfortunate because any money you invest in DubLi cannot be efficiently tracked by the U.S. Federal Government.

According to California law, it is illegal to operate unlicensed gambling facilities. Whether DubLi can legally circumvent this by hosting their material in Germany is an interesting question.

Apparently DubLi’s underlying software is worth 482 US dollars.

Aaronsrod said:
its not a pyramid scheme, unless its a pyramid you want to buy, its a shopping site and a reverse auction site unlike ebay the prices goes down not up.
If Charles Ponzi had of thought of this idea may be he wouldn't have gone to jail for fraud.