Make Money with Fran/Passive Digital Mastery

Francesca Fields is just your average stay-at-home mom, except for one tiny detail – she claims to have become a multimillionaire in fewer than two years.

How did she do it? Posts like the ones above on her Instagram account Make Money with Fran are vague but mention digital products, affiliate marketing and a “secret Instagram account.” However, in other posts, Fields specifically credits master resell rights for her newfound wealth.

You may be wondering, what is master resell rights?

Master resell rights or MRR is a type of business model that allows consumers to buy a digital product and the rights to sell that product, which they can then resell to others. Often the digital product is an online course and Fields follows this trend.

At the beginning of her journey toward financial freedom, Fields claims she sold a digital course created by someone else – that’s how she purportedly made her first million. Then, she came up with her own online course called Passive Digital Mastery, which she claims teaches the MRR and social media marketing methods she used to get rich and which she says can be sold using the MRR model “over and over and over again for 100% profit,” minus transaction fees. It’s a simple formula, according to Fields.

“Digital courses equal education with unlimited potential and unlimited income potential,” Fields said in an Instagram post earlier this month.

Fields claims her readymade course is perfect for people with no experience in digital marketing and for those looking to earn a “full-time income” working whenever and wherever they want. But if you’re thinking about signing up, there are a few things you should know about Fields and her MRR pitch.

What do participants typically earn?

While Fields has referred to her course in social media posts and on her website as a “free masterclass,” it’s not actually free. The “masterclass” is just an hour-long ad for the actual course, which costs $487 (and which you then need to sell to others for $487 in order to make money). That may not seem like a lot if the payoff is financial freedom. But what’s the likelihood of attaining such wealth? Or that you’ll make any money at all? That’s critical information Fields never discloses (and did not provide to TINA.org upon request).

Instead, Fields has tacked disclaimers onto the end of long Instagram captions stating things like:

• “These are my results and not a promise of similar results.”
• “This is meant to educate and inspire and is in no way a promise of similar results.”

Meanwhile, an earnings disclaimer linked at the bottom on Fields’ website addresses “income potential” stating:

The income potential associated with the Product is highly subjective and can vary significantly from person to person. Your success depends on various factors, such as your marketing strategies, target audience, competition, and economic conditions. We cannot predict or guarantee your individual results.

The FTC has warned companies pitching money-making opportunities that “[c]laims of ‘potential’ earnings imply that such earnings are representative of what the typical participant achieves,” adding:

Before making such a claim regarding potential earnings (e.g., via a testimonial of a well-paid member), the advertiser must possess adequate substantiation that the experience described is representative of what participants will generally achieve. If the claim is not representative, the advertisement must avoid giving that impression.

When TINA.org asked Fields for substantiation that the advertised millionaire experience is typical or generally achievable, we heard crickets.

Restrictions, additional terms

If you do choose to get involved and then find it hard to sell the course at the $487 price point, you cannot lower the price to potentially make it appealing to more people, according to a list of “distribution rights” for the course on a reseller’s website. Resellers are also prohibited from modifying the course in “any way.”

In addition, there is no option to return the digital product for a refund. “Since the products made available [through passivedigitalmastery.com] are intangible, there is a strict no refund policy,” the refund policy states. So if you’re unable to make a single sale, you will have to eat the $487, along with any business expenses.

Fields’ questionable history

Lastly, Fields’ rags-to-riches story seems a little suspect.

To drive home the point that her MRR business can take you from earning very little to making millions, Fields claims she was making a much more modest income just before taking the MRR plunge and would “budget down what we could spend to the day.” But a little digging revealed a conflicting story.

In April 2022, Fields posted about becoming a “6-figure earner” with an MLM called Q Sciences (the post even showed her holding multiple big checks, including one for $2 million). In fact, the story Fields told of her rise in Q Sciences sounds a lot like her journey toward becoming a multimillionaire with MRR.

The bottom line

Consumers should be wary of any purported business opportunity that claims you can make a lot of money with minimal effort and/or experience. Before investing any of your money, find out exactly how the business works (or doesn’t work) and how others have made money (or lost money) in the venture.

Find more of our coverage on income claims.