Right from when I first started battling the Amway Myths and Misconceptions on the internet I wanted the discussion to be about facts, not personalities. I’m a scientist by training, and while who says something may affect how closely you listen, it doesn’t mean they don’t need to build and support an argument.
I recall once in the early days of the internet being involved in an online discussion regarding a field of research I worked with. The debate went on for many weeks, primarly driven by two of the forum members. Both were at the time anonymous, yet they both provided incredibly well argued and well referenced evidence to back up their perspectives.
After many weeks, we were in for a surprise – one of these two combatants was revealed to be a highly credentialled professor from one of North America’s top Universities.
The other was a teenage schoolboy from New Zealand.
They had debated as equals, the playing field levelled by anonymity. In 1993, the New Yorker magazine published a cartoon that perhaps best summed up this amazing feature of the internet. It remains one of my all-time favourites.
Not surprisingly however, numerous Amway critics have for quite some time been desperate to learn exactly what breed of dog I am, hoping, I assume, that it would somehow lead to me being discredited. I’ve at various times been accused of being an Alticor or Amway employee, a Network 21 employee, an employee of an N21 subsidiary, a paid consultant to one of the above, the paid son of a Diamond, multiple people(!!) all playing a role, and well, a few things less savoury in between.
None of these are true. I’ve always simply said the truth – "I’m an IBO" and tried (but admittedly not always succeeded) to keep any debates in the realm of publicly provable information. Nobody should have to take my word for it that some Amway myth is wrong – they should be able to see and evaluate the evidence for themselves. Of course, this was never good enough for the critics and there was much speculation about my identity and my "pin level". Finally I gave up one day and simply said "at least Founders 3%"! It says nothing but at least conveys I’m an IBO and have been for a while. Which is pretty much all I ever claimed. I left it at that.
When I decided to go on the offensive and started this website 18 months ago I continued to choose to remain anonymous. There were a number of reasons for this, but the primary one is I felt it allowed me to give honest commentary without fear of causing problems for "innocent" people. Apart from a couple of minor exceptions, nobody in my upline or downline or Network 21, the organization I affiliate with as an IBO, has known about my internet efforts nor my identity as IBOFightback/Insider. To give one example of why I had concerns, recently I heard through the grapevine that Amway, or perhaps Amway legal, felt that some of my commentary on the current BERR vs Amway case in the UK was "unhelpful" and they apparently asked Jim Dornan, head of Network 21, if they could "control me" better. Dornan and N21 could only of course say something like "no, not really – we’ve no idea who he is".
In my opinion, that’s the way it should be.
I’ve also at times been critical of the behaviours and actions of some IBOs and some groups. Quite obviously this has the potential to cause rifts between others, something I don’t wish to happen. Of even more concern from my perspective was the possibility that some IBO may take offence at something I post and decide to complain about this website to Amway Corporation. If I was an identifiable, known IBO, then the "high profile" of this site could be used to claim I was inappropriately using it for prospecting, a rules violation. This is nothing to say of the numerous probable copyright violations I’ve made! How would Amway react if there were significant complaints? My guess, or perhaps my fear, is that they’d have little choice but to ask me to shut the site down, or sanction me as an IBO, or both.
Obviously not a result I would want, but perhaps one the critics would.
Finally, for most of the last 5+ years I’ve not been an active IBO. There’s a long and very personal story behind the reasons for that, which I may or may not post over the next few days, but I have however acted in support of some active IBOs. I’ve been concerned that if my online activity was public that may cause problems for them or other IBOs in the region where I live.
Hopefully, all of these concerns will prove unfounded.
As you may be aware, some well known Amway/Quixtar critics have taken it upon themselves to not only identify me by name, but to also publish various photographs (including one with my son), information on various of my business dealings, as well as an address and telephone numbers and satellite photographs of where they believe I live.
As it happens, not all of what they have published is accurate, some of it is outdated, some just wrong. I just hope this doesn’t cause any problems for folk who have no association at all with this.
But back to the title of this post …. took them long enough ….
I’ve never made any secret of the fact I’m Australian, that I started with Amway Australia, and that I’ve been debating internet critics on and off since I joined a decade ago. With that knowledge it’s always been extraordinarily easy to work out my name to a fairly high degree of certainity. Once you have a name, the rest is easy.
Back before the web really took off, the most popular discussion forums on the internet were of a form called "usenet news". alt.business.multi-level was one of the groups on usenet news. A few years back, Google took it upon themselves to add all of these groups to their search engine. You can access it by going to Google.com and then clicking groups.
Type in some search term you think might be of interest, such as, ohhh … "amway australia" or "network21 australia". (how obvious is that?). Let me know what you find …. hidden in plain site all along.
took them long enough !!!! 
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