The Struggle is (Not) Real

If you spend any time on TikTok or Instagram, you may have seen posts promoting digital-based business opportunities that allow you to escape the 9 to 5 and create significant streams of income working as little as two hours a day.

The people pitching these purported opportunities often offer up their own personal experiences as proof that their program works.

Before launching Passive Digital Mastery, Francesca Fields claims she used to have to “budget down what we could spend to the day.” Now, as a self-proclaimed multimillionaire, she says “it doesn’t even matter what comes in, what comes out, because of Instagram and digital products and digital marketing.”

Rachell Medero (who also refers to herself as Rachell Jova) says she was struggling to pay her rent prior to starting Digital Wealth Academy but after taking the “dive into digital products,” she is now able to travel the world, drive luxury cars and buy “a house with land” with the millions of dollars she’s purportedly earned through her digital business.

And Michele Oneil claims that she was finding it hard to make money or time for her family but that all changed when she discovered Legacy Builders – which she markets as a “done-for-you” digital business – and went from feeling “stressed and overwhelmed” to “making six figures in six months.”

Yet a little digging into these women’s Instagram accounts reveals conflicting stories of economic prosperity, raising doubts over whether they’ve actually encountered financial hardship.

At or around the same time Fields was setting her daily budget, Medero was worrying about how she was going to pay her rent and Oneil was stressing about money, they were all posting about becoming six-figure earners or replacing their income with a multilevel marketing (MLM) business opportunity or “side hustle.”

And these old pitches sound eerily similar to how the women are marketing their current digital offerings as a way to get out of whatever difficult financial situation you might find yourself in.

The only thing that’s changed is the “opportunity.” Instead of MLM, it’s master resell rights or MRR, which is a type of business model that allows consumers to buy a digital product (in these and similar instances, a digital course) and the rights to sell that product, which they can then resell to others.

It is perhaps not surprising that these three women came from the MLM industry, which has provided a blueprint on how to deceptively market the business opportunity with misleading income claims.

For her part, Medero has admitted that her experience with Digital Wealth Academy isn’t typical but she doesn’t think that’s a reason to stop making outrageous income claims. As she put it, “I will not silence my success to protect your feelings.”

But by law you cannot make atypical earnings claims without clearly and conspicuously disclosing what the typical participant achieves. And you don’t need a law to say that embellishing or lying about your rags-to-riches story to recruit new participants into your business opportunity is wrong.

Find more of our coverage on income claims.