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Telecom, energy and essential services · Customer-point MLM

ACN, Inc.

The rare compensation plan that pays nothing whatsoever for enrolling a person - attached to a catalog that is eleven-twelfths somebody else’s brand, and a company that has gone from 27 markets to 2 in four years.

Reviewed August 1, 2026 Founded Founded January 1993 as American Communications Network, Inc., opening with 20 representatives as the marketing arm of a long-distance reseller; #22 on the Inc. 500 in 1998 Confidence: Medium
C-GRADE
5.8/10
Weighted composite

REAL CUSTOMER RULE, SHRINKING FOOTPRINT

No bonus of any kind fires when you sign someone up - you must acquire seven personal customer points across three services before you earn at all - and the same company has exited 25 of its 27 markets since 2022.

The question you came with

Can you actually make money with ACN?

GO, WITH CONDITIONS Only under conditions, and they are specific

Yes, under conditions, and the condition that matters is that you have to acquire customers before this plan pays you anything at all. No bonus of any kind fires when you sign somebody up. There is no signup bonus, no pack commission and no fast start paid on a fee. The company's own compensation document opens in bold with the sentence that compensation is earned only when customers are acquired.

The gate is seven personal customer points across at least three different services, maintained rather than hit once, before you earn a dollar. Regional Director and above must hold fifteen points across five services simply to keep receiving earned-position pay, which de-qualifies top earners whose own customer base decays. That is the strongest customer-acquisition architecture graded on this site.

The cost is low and it is honest about itself: $299 to start, $25 or $30 a month, $49 a year to renew, so $648 to $708 in year one, with nothing to stock, no autoship and no product-purchase requirement anywhere. What is missing is the other half of the ledger. No income disclosure with readable figures exists. The only participant-level in-and-out data ever published came from a 2010 Montana filing built from records the company supplied, in a proceeding later vacated in full.

Two facts belong in front of anybody weighing this. The commission rate starts at 3%, and the 20% the marketing quotes needs 200 personal customer points, which at one point per residential energy service is 200 energy customers. And the company has gone from 27 markets to 2 since 2022 - its own FAQ now says it operates in the United States and Canada.

What it costs to be in
$299

one-off Start-Up Fee, then a Business Support Fee the company’s own website states as both $25 and $30 a month on two different pages, plus $49 a year to renew - $648 to $708 in year one, with no autoship, no inventory and no product-purchase requirement

What has to be true for this to work for you
  • You can find and hold seven paying customers across three services before you are paid anything. That gate is maintained continuously rather than cleared once, and it is the whole reason this plan looks the way it does.
  • You are content to sell somebody else's brand on somebody else's bill. Eleven of twelve categories in the catalog are a third party's service, and the policies forbid a representative from publishing price comparisons.
  • You would not be badly hurt by leaving. Commissions pay in the third month after billing and are forfeited entirely on termination, so a representative who quits in April loses January, February and March.
  • You can build inside two markets. Twenty-five of twenty-seven have closed since 2022, and a downline in a country the company has exited is not a downline any more.

That call is computed, not chosen - the rule reads three of the nine published dimension scores and is printed on the methodology page. It describes this company's plan and the figures it publishes about the people already in it. It is not a prediction about you, and nothing on this site is advice.

$0
Paid for enrolling anyone
no signup bonus, no pack commission, no fast start - every bonus requires a customer billing event
7
Personal customer points across 3 services
the minimum before anything is earned, and it must be maintained continuously
27 → 2
Markets, 2022 to 2026
the company’s own FAQ now says it operates in the United States and Canada
0.38%
Of participant inflow paid for sales to non-participants
Montana 2009, computed from ACN-supplied records, in a proceeding later vacated in full

Legal status

LEGAL - and the contested file resolved in ACN’s favor, which is unusual enough that it has to be said precisely. The Full Federal Court of Australia allowed ACN’s appeal on 25 October 2005, set aside the first-instance pyramid-selling declarations in full and ordered the regulator to pay ACN’s costs; the High Court refused the regulator special leave on 2 June 2006 with costs, so the appellate holding stands as a litigated judgment for the defendant. A Montana cease-and-desist order and notice of proposed disciplinary action issued in August 2010 was vacated by the Commissioner within about five weeks in a settlement recording that the conduct complained of was "not part of the ACN business model" - no fine, no restitution, no admission. A 2002 Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission consumer-services matter settled with the allegations disputed and the terms under seal. There is no FTC action, no consent order, no SEC proceeding, no state assurance of voluntary compliance, and no criminal charge against the company or any of its four founders. The October 2021 FTC Notice of Penalty Offenses was a mass mailing to more than 1,100 companies and is not an allegation, a charge or a finding against any recipient.

Confidence: Medium

Primary sources fetched directly where possible. Everything we could not verify is listed at the bottom of this page by name.

What this actually is

Follow the money

A North Carolina direct seller, private since 1993 and still run by its four original co-founders, whose representatives sign customers up to telecommunications, energy, television, home-security, identity-protection, healthcare-sharing, travel, payment-processing and payroll services - almost all of them supplied, branded and billed by other companies - and are paid a percentage of what those customers are billed. The US participant contracts with ACN Opportunity, LLC.

The compensation architecture is the best thing about it and it should be said without hedging. There is no payment of any kind for enrolling a person: no signup bonus, no pack commission, no fast start, no autoship and no inventory. The plan document says so in bold on its own front page - "Compensation is earned only when customers are acquired" - and the qualification tables enforce it. Seven personal customer points across at least three different services are required before anything at all is earned, and the requirement must be maintained. Regional Directors, Regional Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents must maintain fifteen personal customer points across at least five services simply to keep being paid at their rank. Per-leg caps of 200 and 750 customer points block single-leg stacking. Even the team bonus fires only when the person who was enrolled acquires customers within 30 days. This is the structure on which the Full Federal Court of Australia allowed the company’s appeal in 2005, holding that "if the recruiter does no more than recruit other participants there is no entitlement to any payment," and it is the reason the securities score on this page is a 10 and the compensation score is the highest of any dimension bar securities.

Then the catalog, which is where the value question lives. Eleven of the twelve categories the company itself lists are another firm’s service under another firm’s brand, on another firm’s bill: the electricity and gas supplier and the home-security company are now both owned by the same listed utility group, the internet and television are the ordinary national carriers, the identity-protection enrollment runs through a plain affiliate link, and the healthcare product is a not-for-profit sharing membership that is expressly not insurance. Every one of those suppliers sells direct at the same price or better, and several run refer-a-friend schemes that cost nothing at all. The company’s own Policies and Procedures forbid representatives from publishing price comparisons against other telecom or energy providers, and forbid any numerical savings claim. A business that sells on price and bans the comparison has answered the question.

And the context a 2026 joiner most needs is the retreat. Recruitment across Europe was suspended without public explanation in late 2022. In a single week in January 2024 the Latin American mobile business was sold, the Korean operation was sold, and all European direct selling was wound down, the European distributor database handed to an unrelated listed direct seller free of charge while the holding company invested USD 1m into that buyer. Spanish fixed-line service ended in May 2025; the Danish company was dissolved that same month and the UK service company was placed into a solvent members’ voluntary liquidation in October 2025 and dissolved in May 2026. Those are solvent wind-ups, not insolvencies, and neither is a finding of wrongdoing - but the company’s own FAQ now reads, flatly, "ACN currently operates in the United States and Canada." In 2019 it said 26 or 27 countries. That is 27 markets to 2 in roughly four years, and it is the real risk in this file.

Where a US participant’s year-one $648 actually goes

The published US fee schedule at the $25-a-month reading of the Business Support Fee. This is the fee flow only - the money that pays commissions comes from a separate pot, a slice of third-party service billings, and the two must not be merged.

46% 46% 8%
Start-Up Fee, retained by the company - $299Business Support Fee, 12 × $25, retained by the company - $300Annual renewal on the anniversary, retained by the company - $49Paid to the sponsor or anyone upline - $0
ProductPricePays
IBO Start-Up Fee
The whole of it is retained by the company. Nothing flows to the sponsor - the finding on which the Australian appeal turned. Refundable in full within ten business days of enrollment.
$299
one-time
$0 to the upline
Business Support Fee
The company’s own website states both figures on two different pages of the same FAQ system, and its April 2025 slide deck says $25. A prospect cannot determine their own monthly cost from the operator’s site. Refundable for the thirty days preceding a termination.
$25 or $30 a month
monthly
Annual renewal
Charged on the anniversary of the start date, so it lands inside month twelve. Miss it by 30 days and the position is non-renewed; reinstatement within eleven months requires paying all accrued back Business Support Fees for months in which nothing could be earned.
$49
annual
Residential electricity or gas (third-party supplier)
From the 2021 US schedule, the most recent full commissionable-revenue table publicly retrievable. At the 3% entry band a $100 supply charge pays the representative $1.20 a month. Roughly 500 such customers would be needed to reach $600 a month at that band.
the customer’s own bill
monthly
1 customer point per service · 40% of the bill is commissionable · life of customer
Home security and automation (third-party supplier)
2021 schedule. The highest point value in the residential catalog, and the same listed utility group that owns the energy supplier now owns this vendor too.
the customer’s own bill
monthly
8 customer points · 85% commissionable · life of customer
Identity-theft protection (third-party brand)
2021 schedule. Enrollment runs through an affiliate link carrying an affiliate ID, which is a fair description of the relationship. Statutory credit freezes at the three bureaux have been free since 2018.
the customer’s own subscription
monthly to annual
2 points monthly · 3 quarterly · 4 annual · 90% commissionable · life of customer
Television and home internet (national carriers)
The heart of the price-to-value problem and of the marketing problem. A full satellite-television bill generates $35 of commissionable revenue, paying a new representative $1.05 a month at the 3% band - and it stops entirely at month 24. One wireless product stops at month 30.
the customer’s own bill
monthly
1–3 points · a fixed $10–$45 of commissionable revenue · 24 months only
Healthcare sharing membership (third-party organization)
Expressly not insurance, with no guarantee of payment and household responsibility amounts of $2,500 to $10,000 a year, plus per-visit provider fees of $50 to $150 that never count toward that amount. The company gates the product behind an annual accreditation quiz at a 90% pass mark, which is a real compliance control and is counted as such.
from $73/month individual, from $378/month family
monthly
paid by ACN directly to the representative
Background check

Who runs it, and what they ran before

RS
Robert Stevanovski
Chairman and Co-Founder, in place since January 1993

Named as the third respondent in the Australian regulator’s 2004 Federal Court proceeding - but the regulator discontinued against the third and sixth respondents before judgment, so no finding of any kind was ever made against him personally. Named individually in the Montana 2010 notice of proposed agency disciplinary action, which was vacated in full settlement with no fine, no restitution and no admission. No criminal proceeding, fraud judgment or insolvency could be located against him in any jurisdiction.

G"
Gregory "Greg" Provenzano
President and Co-Founder, in place since January 1993

Described by the company as counseling representatives daily on building their organizations. Named individually in the vacated Montana action. No regulatory finding, criminal proceeding or fraud judgment could be located. The four founders’ pre-1993 ventures are described by the company only as "countless years of direct sales experience" and are not named; no authoritative source for them could be found, and the internet folklore on the point is unsourced and is not repeated here.

A"
Anthony "Tony" and Michael "Mike" Cupisz
Vice Presidents and Co-Founders - twin brothers, in place since January 1993

Both named individually in the vacated Montana action; nothing was found against either. Thirty-three years with the same four owners, no receivership, no insolvency of the operating business and no criminal file against any principal is genuinely rare in this category and is the strongest single item in the ownership column.

Gn
Governance note
What the same management did with what it bought - and with what it built

Between 2021 and 2026 this management acquired a Dallas energy direct seller in 2021 and a 22-year-old buying-club direct seller in January 2022 - each of which had been ranked within a few places of ACN itself on the 2017 trade table - and then, by December 2023, discontinued the perks offering that gave the acquired membership its purpose, a trade blog reporting that the membership was left with "no value". In a single week in January 2024 it sold its Latin American mobile business, sold its Korean operation, and wound down all European direct selling by handing the European distributor database to an unrelated listed direct seller free of charge while its holding company put USD 1m of equity into that buyer. A separate related-party question is flagged and unresolved: two lead-generation aggregators list the co-founder of one of ACN’s flagship 2023–2026 healthcare products as holding a C-suite title at ACN. The identity match is aggregator-asserted and could not be confirmed.

Registered address

Concord, North Carolina, USA
Privately held since inception and still run by the same four co-founders, through Manna Holdings, LLC. Relocated from Farmington Hills, Michigan to 1000 Progress Place NE, Concord in 2008. There is no filed, audited or company-published revenue figure anywhere in the public record: the widely-repeated $750m is a self-submitted, unaudited entry in a 2017 trade ranking for FY2016, the $650m for 2018 is a trade estimate showing −7% year on year, and the $500m repeated identically for 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 by one directory is a stale placeholder field rather than a measurement. Aggregator profiles claiming roughly 4,800 employees across 60 countries are counting independent representatives’ own LinkedIn self-descriptions as staff and list markets the company has publicly exited. The honest statement is that ACN has never published a revenue number, and that its own FAQ now reads: "ACN currently operates in the United States and Canada."

Compensation plan

What has to be true for you to get paid

To coverYou need
Enrol and hold the position for one year $648-$708
$299 Start-Up Fee, twelve Business Support Fees at $25 or $30, and the $49 renewal, which lands inside month twelve
Earn anything at all - reach Customer Qualified 7 personal customer points across at least 3 services
maintained continuously, not hit once; e.g. own electricity 1pt + own gas 1pt + an annual identity-protection subscription 4pt + one internet customer 1pt
Cover the year-two running cost from personal residual alone ~$970 a month of commissionable revenue
at the 3% entry band against $349-$409 a year of fees - roughly 25 residential energy customers, since a $100 supply charge yields $40 of commissionable revenue
Reach the 20% headline rate the marketing quotes 200 personal customer points
at 1 point per residential energy service that is 200 personal energy customers; at 2 points per television customer, 100 of them. The entry band is 3%.

Read this twice

The cost side of this arithmetic is exact and it is genuinely low for the category: $648 in year one at the $25 reading of the Business Support Fee, $708 at the $30 reading, and $349 to $409 a year thereafter. There is no autoship, no inventory, no starter pack and no minimum monthly purchase volume - the policies say in terms that a representative does not need to buy anything to be one. That is worth more than it sounds, because in most of what this site grades the recurring purchase requirement is the extraction mechanism, and here there simply is not one. The earnings side is where the exercise breaks down, and it breaks down for a specific reason: the company does not publish an income disclosure with figures. A document titled "ACN Earnings Statement 2023" is publicly archived by a watchdog nonprofit as a scanned image, but its cohort figures could not be extracted and are not guessed at here; the company’s own FAQ answer to "How much can you make in ACN?" contains no number at all. So the panels above are built from the plan document rather than from outcomes. Three external anchors are worth setting beside them, each labeled. First, the company’s own policies require Regional Vice Presidents, Platinum RVPs and Senior Vice Presidents to disclose that their earnings are in the top 1% of all representatives - an honest rule, and the clearest statement of the odds available. Second, in the Australian High Court the regulator’s senior counsel stated on the record, uncontradicted, that the average representative had about 13 direct customers producing under $400 a year - a submission in a case the regulator lost, but arithmetic that was never disputed, and $400 is below the $648 year-one cost under the current US schedule. Third, the only participant-level in-and-out data that exists anywhere: in 2009, 312 Montana participants paid in about $234,813 and received $16,615 in total, of which $896.86 - 0.38% of the money in - was for direct sales to non-participants. Those figures came from records the company itself supplied to the state, in a proceeding that was vacated in full settlement with no finding and no admission, and they are seventeen years old. They have also never been contradicted. One further structural point belongs in any break-even sum: a large part of the catalog decays. Television, internet and carrier customers stop paying commission at 24 months and one wireless product at 30, and customers who merely stop using a service are silently removed from qualification counts by a process the policies call purging.

Run your own numbers

Drag the sliders. Nothing here is stored or sent.

-
Cumulative net, after costs
Retained residential service customers -
Commission that month -
Total commissions earned -
Total you paid in -
Net -

One dollar twenty a month is what a new representative earns on a typical residential energy customer, and the arithmetic is the company’s own: a household paying $100 a month for supply generates $40 of commissionable revenue, and the entry residual band is 3%. That band is the honest one to model - the 20% headline the marketing quotes requires 200 personal customer points, and a customer of this kind is worth one point. Nothing at all is earned until Customer Qualified, which requires seven personal customer points across at least three different services, so the first several notches on this slider genuinely pay zero. The one-off $75 Personal Customer Bonus is excluded because it is a threshold payment rather than a commission, and television and internet residuals are excluded because they stop after 24 months while the marketing describes residual income as running "year after year". The cost line is the $30 monthly Business Support Fee, the higher of two figures the company’s own website gives on different pages; year one is $648 to $708 with no autoship and no product-purchase requirement, which is a genuinely low bar for this category. Break-even on fees alone at the 3% band needs roughly $970 a month of commissionable revenue behind you. Your own subscription cost of $30/mo is included.

Your money

What it costs to replace this yourself

This stack is unusually easy to build, because in eleven of twelve categories the replacement is the identical product bought one step earlier in the chain. Prices are given as 2026 open-market bands rather than exact figures for one reason stated plainly: the operator’s own storefront could not be priced. The services index rendered as an empty JavaScript shell, the mobile plan grid returned zero rows, the energy site is a ZIP-code-gated rate engine that also now redirects enrollments away, and two further pages returned crawl errors. That is "could not retrieve", not "does not exist" - and a storefront a prospective customer cannot price without a personal representative link is itself a finding.

What they sell youWhat you'd use insteadYour cost
Residential electricity and gas through the retail supplierYour incumbent utility’s own default supply service - Con Edison, National Grid, PECO, ComEd, Ameren, CenterPoint - or a state rate-comparison board such as PAPowerSwitch or Energy Choice Ohiousually less; regulator data shows retail-supplier customers paid ~$1.2bn more over three years in one state
Home security and automation through the referral layerThe same vendor direct, or SimpliSafe, Ring Alarm, ADT, Abode, Wyze$10-60/mo, same or lower
The company’s own mobile virtual networkMint Mobile, Visible, US Mobile, Tello, Boost Mobile or Google Fi - all on the same three host networks, all self-serve, none charging a membership$15-40/mo
Home internet and television through the agentAT&T, Frontier, Spectrum, DIRECTV and DISH direct - every one sells online with promotional pricing an agent cannot beatidentical or lower
Identity-theft protection through an affiliate linkThe same vendor direct, or Aura, Identity Guard - plus statutory free credit freezes at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion$0-20/mo
Healthcare sharing membership from $73/moAn ACA marketplace plan with premium tax credit if eligible, or an employer planvaries; materially different risk transfer
Members-only travel subscriptionBooking.com, Expedia, Costco Travel, Priceline, airline and hotel loyalty programs$0 to join
Merchant payment processing through a referral layerSquare, Stripe, Helcim or PayPal Zettle at published interchange-plus pricingpublished rates, no agent
Payroll and HR through an undisclosed vendorGusto, ADP RUN, Paychex or QuickBooks Payroll$40-80/mo + per-employee
The representative position itself - $648 in year oneThe free refer-a-friend programs run by most of those same carriers, energy suppliers and security vendors$0
Total as sold
$648-$708 in year-one fees before a single customer
Total, built yourself
$0 to refer, and the same services at the same or lower prices

Price-to-value

The sharpest line in this table is the last one. A person can already refer friends and family to the security vendor, the television carrier or an energy supplier for nothing, through those companies’ own programs, and be paid for it. What $648 a year buys is a structured, ranked, downline-bearing version of that activity, with a maintenance requirement attached and a book you do not own at the end. On the customer side the picture is simpler still: in no category is the buyer being offered a price the market does not already offer them directly, and in the energy category there is regulator-criticized evidence and a certified class action against the supplier suggesting the opposite. The company’s own compliance rules forbid its salesforce from publishing the comparison that would settle it.

Odds of profit

Three operators, five horizons

Probability of cumulative net profit

Hover any point for median, top decile and bottom quartile.

0% 25% 50% 75% 100%3 mo6 mo1 yr3 yr5 yr 4% 25% 14%
The switcher - joins mainly to move their own household bills across and earn a little on the side; never recruitsThe grinder - 10-15 hrs/wk, works the customer side hard, builds toward 40 personal points and sponsors a handfulThe organization builder - 30+ hrs/wk, events and travel, driving toward Regional Director and beyond

The switcher

joins mainly to move their own household bills across and earn a little on the side; never recruits

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 2% −$390
6 mo 2% −$470
1 yr 3% −$530
3 yr 4% −$1,150
5 yr 4% −$1,750

The grinder

10-15 hrs/wk, works the customer side hard, builds toward 40 personal points and sponsors a handful

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 6% −$420
6 mo 11% −$520
1 yr 22% −$180
3 yr 26% +$400
5 yr 25% +$300

The organization builder

30+ hrs/wk, events and travel, driving toward Regional Director and beyond

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 3% −$1,100
6 mo 5% −$2,000
1 yr 9% −$3,400
3 yr 13% −$6,500
5 yr 14% −$8,000

Methodology note. These are modeled outcome ranges, not claims, and not the company’s figures - because the company does not publish figures. ANCHORED to the published plan and fee schedule: the $299 Start-Up Fee, the $25 or $30 monthly Business Support Fee, the $49 renewal, the 3% entry residual band and the 20% band at 200 personal customer points, the 4% per level to level five, the seven-point Customer Qualification bar across three services, the fifteen-point five-service maintenance rule at Regional Director and above, the personal customer bonus ladder from $75 at three services and seven points to $600 at eleven services and twenty-two points, the overriding customer acquisition bonuses of $50 to $450 that fire only when a sponsored representative qualifies within 30 days, the 2021 commissionable-revenue schedule with its 40% energy rate and its fixed $10-$45 carrier amounts, and the 24- and 30-month cut-offs on the carrier products. ANCHORED also to three external data points, each stage-labeled in the break-even note: the company’s own top-1% disclosure rule, an uncontradicted regulator submission about 13 customers and under $400 a year in a case that regulator lost, and the vacated Montana filing’s in-and-out figures computed from company-supplied records. MODELED by us: every dollar figure above, the proportion of each cohort in cumulative profit, the cohort definitions, and the expense side beyond the published fees - travel, events, the optional business tools, phone and time are not in these numbers and the company does not price them. Two calibrations cut in the company’s favor and belong here. There is no autoship, so the fee line really is the whole mandatory cost; and a switcher who genuinely moves bills they were paying anyway is not spending new money on product, which is why the switcher’s losses converge on the fee schedule rather than compounding. One cuts the other way: the grinder’s later-year medians assume the customer book is replaced as the 24-month carrier products roll off, which is work that has to be done again every two years.

Go-to-market

Where you are actually allowed to promote this

Platform policy reads, not verifications. Check every one before you spend a dollar - enforcement changes faster than the written policy does.

Channel
Status
Notes
Representative-created marketing materials, websites and adverts
PROHIBITED
The policies strictly prohibit creating, distributing or using any non-company-developed marketing material, expressly listing advertisements, brochures, videos, audio, flyers, banners, flags, websites, telephone recordings, emails, presentation materials, apparel and building signage. The narrow exception is event-promotion material that is not sold, promotes only a meeting, follows the trademark policy and makes no reference to plans, rates or any component of the compensation plan. A representative cannot build a marketing asset, cannot own search equity, and has nothing to sell at the end. In practice representative-built sites plainly exist and operate in the open, which is an enforcement gap rather than a permission.
Publishing a price comparison against other telecom or energy providers
PROHIBITED AT ALL TIMES
The wording is unambiguous: representatives "are at all times prohibited from publishing comparisons of the prices of ACN’s services and those of other telecommunication or energy providers," the stated reason being that such comparisons are invariably incorrect and lead to disputes with other providers. Separately, no specific or numerical savings guarantee may be made - the policy gives "ACN will save you $X on your telephone bills" as a violation and offers "many customers of the major carriers will save" as the acceptable substitute. This is the single most consequential clause in the file for anyone assessing value.
Income guarantees and anticipated-earnings claims to prospects
PROHIBITED
No promise or guarantee of earnings, express or implied, in writing, electronically or verbally, and no hypothetical earnings calculation other than those in official company material. Representatives "shall make no claim or inference to prospective IBOs as to the anticipated or actual income an IBO might earn." That is a stricter written rule than most of this category carries.
Mandatory disclosure on every presentation and testimonial
REQUIRED - INCLUDING A TOP-1% RULE
Every presentation of the opportunity, the plan or any testimonial must convey that earnings depend solely on selling services to customers, that expenses will be incurred, and that individuals may lose money. Testimonials need a separate not-typical disclosure. And Regional Vice Presidents, Platinum RVPs and Senior Vice Presidents "must further convey that their earnings are in the top 1% of all ACN IBOs" - a self-imposed rule that is above category norm and is simultaneously the plainest statement of the odds the company publishes.
Social media
PERMITTED - BUT ONLY WITHOUT ANY EARNINGS CLAIM
The policies acknowledge that character-limited channels cannot carry the full disclosure and waive it there, expressly conditional on making no earnings representation at all. The design is right. The enforcement is the problem: a watchdog nonprofit’s 2023 review archived roughly 22 items it considered non-compliant, most of them testimonial videos.
Paid search and trademark bidding
NO EXPRESS RULE FOUND
No clause on pay-per-click, brand-keyword bidding, lead buying or third-party lead vendors could be located in the retrievable policy text. The blanket prohibition on representative-created marketing materials, which expressly includes websites and emails, would appear to cover paid advertising by implication. Get it in writing before spending anything.
Selling or promoting outside the United States and Canada
PROHIBITED
A representative "may not promote or sell ACN Products or the ACN Opportunity in countries in which ACN does not operate." Since the company now operates in two countries, this clause has gone from a routine territorial rule to a hard geographic cage, and it tightened without the representative doing anything.
Claiming any regulator has reviewed or approved the plan
PROHIBITED
The policies state that no regulatory authority ever reviews, endorses or approves any product, membership or compensation program of any marketing company, and that no representative may claim otherwise. That is an accurate statement of how regulation works and it is unusual to see it written down.
Conduct the company deems unethical or disruptive
AT THE COMPANY’S SOLE DISCRETION
The policies reserve the right to determine whether a representative’s activities are unethical, disruptive or damaging, with an indemnity running from the representative to the company for claims and legal costs arising from any policy breach. Broad discretionary language of this kind sits alongside renewal being at the company’s sole discretion and termination carrying total forfeiture of unpaid compensation.
The evidence

Red flags and green flags

Red flags

15
1Twenty-five of twenty-seven markets exited in roughly four years
European recruitment was suspended without public explanation in late 2022. In one week in January 2024 the Latin American mobile business was sold, the Korean operation was sold, and all European direct selling was wound down. Spanish fixed-line service ended in May 2025, the Danish company was dissolved that month, and the UK service company entered a solvent members’ voluntary liquidation in October 2025 and was dissolved in May 2026. The company’s own FAQ now reads: "ACN currently operates in the United States and Canada."
2No income disclosure with figures exists in machine-readable form
A document titled "ACN Earnings Statement 2023" is publicly archived by a watchdog nonprofit - as a scanned image only, whose cohort figures could not be extracted and are not guessed at here. The company’s own FAQ answer to "How much can you make in ACN?" contains no number of any kind.
3The Policies and Procedures forbid representatives from publishing price comparisons
Representatives "are at all times prohibited from publishing comparisons of the prices of ACN’s services and those of other telecommunication or energy providers," and may make no specific or numerical savings claim. A company that sells on price and bans the price comparison has answered the question for the reader.
4"Year after year" residual income stops at 24 months on most of the catalog
The opportunity FAQ promises a percentage of the customer’s bill "month after month, year after year for as long as they remain an ACN Customer." On the 2021 schedule the television, home-internet and satellite products pay for 24 months and one wireless product for 30. Only the company-billed services pay for the life of the customer.
5The company’s own website states two different monthly fees
One FAQ page says the Business Support Fee is $30 a month; another page of the same FAQ system, and the company’s April 2025 slide deck, say $25. A prospect cannot determine their own monthly cost from the operator’s own site. The most likely reading is an increase with one page left unrevised.
6Total forfeiture of earned-but-unpaid commissions on termination, against a three-month payment lag
Commissions are paid the third month after the month in which the customer is billed, and on termination "you will forfeit all rights to payment of Compensation of any kind." A representative who leaves in April forfeits commissions already earned on January, February and March billings. The same forfeiture applies if a valid payment method is not supplied within 90 days of notice.
7The representative never owns the customer or the downline
"No Sponsor, Upline, or IBO has any right or claim in or to a deactivated position, its Customers, Downline, or placement in any sales organization." A representative who leaves and returns after the compulsory twelve-month wait gets none of it back.
8Commissionable revenue is a haircut on the bill, and the company may cut it further at will
It is defined as billed revenue less taxes, surcharges and a bad-debt allowance, and for some products it is a flat dollar amount - a full satellite-television bill can generate just $35 of it, paying a new representative $1.05 a month at the 3% entry band. The policies reserve the right to "reduce commissionable revenue by a percentage factor" for promotional plans, negotiated pricing or certain services, and to reduce compensation for a country’s overall bad-debt ratio.
9Eleven of twelve categories are somebody else’s brand and somebody else’s bill
The customer signs the supplier’s contract, is billed by the supplier and can cancel with the supplier directly. Two of the largest categories, residential energy and home security, are now owned by the same listed utility group. The company sold the energy business it once owned in 2006 and re-entered only as a referral agent.
10The energy product is sold through a retail supplier channel with a documented cost problem
New York Public Service Commission staff found in March 2018 that retail-supplier mass-market customers had "become the victims of a failed market structure," with utility data showing roughly $1.2bn of overpayment against default utility supply across 36 months. Separately, ACN’s energy supplier is the defendant in a class certified in August 2023 covering an estimated 80,000-110,000 customers and alleging $27.5m-$55m of overcharge. That is a filed and certified claim against the supplier, expressly denied, with no ruling on the merits and no finding against ACN.
11The only participant-level in-and-out data that exists shows near-total loss
In 2009, 312 Montana participants paid in about $234,813 and received $16,615 in total compensation, of which $896.86 - 0.38% of the inflow - was for direct sales of services to non-participants. In 2008, of $61,741.69 paid in by 91 participants, $783.06 went to non-participant sales and only two people received more than $600. Figures computed from records ACN itself supplied, in a proceeding that was vacated in full settlement with no finding, no fine and no admission; seventeen years old, and never contradicted.
12Watchdog findings on income claims twice, six years apart
A watchdog nonprofit wrote to the company in December 2017 about unsubstantiated income claims and again after its 2023 review of 100 direct sellers, archiving roughly 22 items - mostly testimonial videos - and formally notifying the company in February 2024. This is a private organization’s analysis, not a government action, not a self-regulatory case and not an advertising-standards ruling. No such ruling against the company was found in any of those forums.
13An acquired membership base was left with no value
A 22-year-old buying-club direct seller was acquired in January 2022, announced only through a social-media post. By December 2023 the perks offering that gave the membership its purpose had been discontinued, a trade blog recording that the former membership was left with "no value". Sourced to that blog’s update note rather than to a company document.
14A decade of paid celebrity endorsement, scrubbed overnight and never reconciled
The company had a paid endorsement relationship from 2006 to 2015 and removed every reference from its website when the endorsement became politically inconvenient. The litigation that followed was against the endorser and his family, not against ACN, which was never a defendant - but a recruiting narrative built on a borrowed reputation and then silently deleted is a marketing-conduct fact.
15The company’s own answer to the pyramid question concedes recruitment is one of two income drivers
"IBO income potential is contingent on two factors — Customers purchasing services through an ACN IBO and Recruitment of new IBOs." That sentence appears in the same FAQ answer in which the company denies being a pyramid scheme.

Green flags

10
1No payment of any kind for enrolling anyone
No signup bonus, no pack commission, no fast start, no enrollment override. Every bonus in the plan requires a customer billing event, and the team bonus fires only when the sponsored representative acquires customers within 30 days of their own start date. The plan document leads with it in bold: "Compensation is earned only when customers are acquired."
2No autoship, no inventory, no product-purchase requirement
The policies state it directly: "You do not need to purchase ACN Products or ACN Business Tools to become an IBO." In a category where a monthly qualifying purchase is the standard extraction mechanism, there is not one here, and the year-one cost is bounded at $648 to $708.
3Personal customer maintenance at every rank, including the top
Seven personal customer points across at least three services to earn anything, maintained continuously; fifteen personal points across at least five services for Regional Director, Regional Vice President and Senior Vice President to receive earned-position compensation at all. A rank ladder that de-qualifies its own top earners when their personal customer base decays is unusual.
4Per-leg caps that block single-leg stacking
Regional Director requires 600 total customer points with a maximum of 200 from any one leg; Regional Vice President requires 3,000 with a maximum of 750 per leg; the Gold, Platinum and Senior Vice President billing requirements carry per-leg limits of $60,000, $100,000 and $250,000. These are real anti-gaming provisions.
5The recruit’s fee goes to the company, not to the sponsor
The whole of the $299 Start-Up Fee, the monthly Business Support Fee and the renewal are retained by the company; none of it reaches the upline. This was the finding on which the Full Federal Court of Australia allowed the company’s appeal: "The recruiter does not get any benefit from the recruit’s participation fees; they go to ACN."
6A litigated appellate judgment in the company’s favor, with costs against the regulator
The Full Federal Court allowed the appeal on 25 October 2005 and set aside every declaration and order; the High Court refused the regulator special leave on 2 June 2006, holding an appeal would enjoy insufficient prospects of success, again with costs. That is a judgment on the merits for the defendant - not a settlement, not a dismissal on procedure.
7A mandatory top-1% disclosure by the highest ranks
Regional Vice Presidents, Platinum RVPs and Senior Vice Presidents "must further convey that their earnings are in the top 1% of all ACN IBOs" whenever they present. Almost nothing else graded here imposes that on its own leaders, and it is the clearest statement of the odds the company publishes.
8Plan documents lead with the loss warning, in bold
"Individuals will not earn income and will lose money as an IBO if customers are not acquired." It appears on the compensation plan, the policies, the opportunity overview and the presentation deck, not buried in a footnote.
9Ten business days to cancel for a full refund, plus a support-fee refund on later exit
A full refund of the initial payment within ten business days of enrollment, and on any later termination a refund of the Business Support Fee paid in the preceding thirty days. Physical business tools are returnable for a year at 90%. Most operators in this batch refund nothing.
10Real named third-party services, and an accreditation gate on the healthcare product
Electricity, gas, mobile, internet, television, security, identity protection, payment processing and payroll from named national suppliers - no invented product, no ingestible, no health claim, no token. The healthcare-sharing product carries prominent "not insurance" and personal-responsibility disclaimers and may not be marketed until the representative passes an annual accreditation quiz at 90%.
What would move this grade

We would like to be wrong about this

Upward

  • Publication of a current income disclosure with cohort figures in a machine-readable form - or simply a legible version of the 2023 earnings statement that exists only as a scanned image - together with a compliant Canadian typical-participant disclosure under the Competition Act, which would by law contain a median-band figure rather than an average.
  • An express plan rule that customers used to satisfy Customer Qualification and rank maintenance must be non-participants, which would close the one real hole in an otherwise strong customer-acquisition architecture; and repeal of the ban on representatives publishing price comparisons, which would let the salesforce prove the value case rather than being forbidden from testing it.
  • Evidence that the retreat has stopped: two consecutive years without a market exit or a further sale of a field organization, confirmed growth in the US and Canadian business, and a single consistent Business Support Fee across the company’s own website.

Downward

  • Any further market exit, any sale of the US or Canadian field organization, or the imposition of an "adjusted compensation plan" on the North American field of the kind the European representatives were given in January 2024.
  • A judgment against the energy supplier in the certified class action, which would convert a filed claim into a finding that the flagship energy product overcharged customers; or any refiled state-court action arising from the endorser litigation that names ACN itself or produces adverse findings about the opportunity.
  • A first regulatory action of substance - an FTC matter, a state attorney general enforcement action, a surviving consent order - or evidence of further undisclosed fee increases on the pattern of the unexplained $25 to $30 discrepancy already on the company’s own site.
The better trade

Grade is C-. The plan pays nothing for enrolling anyone and demands real customers before anything is earned - attached to a catalog that is eleven-twelfths somebody else’s, and a company that has left 25 of its 27 markets since 2022.

Three things here are genuinely better than the reputation and they go first. There is no payment of any kind for enrolling a person - no signup bonus, no pack commission, no fast start - and the plan says so in bold on its own front page. Before a representative earns anything at all they must acquire seven personal customer points across at least three different services and keep them; Regional Directors, Regional Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents must maintain fifteen personal points across five services simply to keep being paid at their rank; and per-leg caps of 200 and 750 customer points stop a single leg carrying a qualification. There is no autoship, no inventory and no product-purchase requirement, so the mandatory cost is bounded at $648 to $708 in year one. And the contested legal file resolved in the company’s favor: the Full Federal Court of Australia allowed its appeal on 25 October 2005, set aside every declaration and ordered the regulator to pay costs, and the High Court refused special leave on 2 June 2006, again with costs. The Montana cease-and-desist of 2010 was vacated within about five weeks with no fine, no admission and an express settlement finding that the conduct was not part of the business model. The company was never a defendant in the litigation involving its former celebrity endorser, whose racketeering claims were dismissed in 2019, whose class certification was denied in October 2023, and which left federal court without prejudice in January 2024.

The value question is where it turns. Eleven of the twelve categories the company itself lists are another firm’s service under another firm’s brand on another firm’s bill - and two of the biggest, residential energy and home security, are now owned by the same listed utility group. Every one of those suppliers sells direct at the same price or better; several run refer-a-friend programs that cost nothing to join. The company’s own Policies and Procedures forbid representatives from publishing any price comparison against other telecom or energy providers and from making any numerical savings claim. On the economics, no income disclosure with figures exists in machine-readable form - the one archived earnings statement is a scanned image - and the only participant-level in-and-out data ever published showed 0.38% of participant inflow being paid for sales to non-participants, from company-supplied records in a proceeding later vacated. The company’s own rules require its top ranks to say on the record that they are in the top 1%. Meanwhile the FAQ promises income "year after year" on products whose commissions stop at month 24.

The third element is the one that would decide it for most people. This company is not growing; it is withdrawing. Recruitment across Europe stopped in late 2022 without explanation. In a single week in January 2024 it sold its Latin American mobile business, sold Korea and wound down all European direct selling, handing the European distributor database to an unrelated listed direct seller free of charge while its holding company invested USD 1m into the buyer. Spain ended fixed-line service in May 2025, Denmark dissolved that month, and the UK service company was solvently liquidated and struck off by May 2026. Solvent wind-ups are not insolvencies and none of this is a finding of wrongdoing - but the company’s own FAQ now says it operates in two countries, against 27 in 2019. Set that beside the terms: total forfeiture of earned-but-unpaid commissions on exit, a three-month payment lag, no claim to the customers you acquired, and twelve months before you may re-join. The plan is not being funded by inflow; it is being wound down market by market, and the European field found that out with a letter.

1

Take the free referral route the suppliers already run

Most national carriers, energy suppliers and security vendors operate their own refer-a-friend programs that pay for the same activity and cost nothing to join. Before paying $648 in year one for a structured version of it, check what the two or three suppliers you would actually recommend pay directly. If the answer is comparable, the fee is buying you rank and a downline, not access.

2

Do the seven-point sum honestly before you enrol

Nothing is earned until you hold seven personal customer points across at least three different services, maintained. Write down the actual names - not "friends and family", the names - of people who will move their electricity, their television or their identity protection to a supplier they can already buy from directly. If the only names on the list are your own household, you have not built a customer base; you have moved your own bills and paid $648 for the privilege.

3

Ask what happens to your book at month 24, and what happened in Europe

Ask your sponsor which products in the catalog pay for the life of the customer and which stop at 24 or 30 months, and get the answer in writing against the current schedule. Then ask what the European representatives were told in January 2024, and what happened to their downlines. A sponsor who cannot answer either question has not read the documents that govern your income.

4

Sell the comparison the representatives are not allowed to publish

The single largest content gap in this category is the thing the policies forbid: honest, sourced, up-to-date comparisons of energy tariffs, mobile plans, home-internet pricing and identity-protection cover, with the default utility rate and the free credit freeze included. The search demand is enormous and permanent, it needs no fee, no rank and no permission, and affiliate programs from the same suppliers pay for it. It is a merchant business rather than a miner business, and nobody can deactivate it.

Nothing is paid for enrolling anyone - and the company that built that rule has gone from 27 markets to two in four years.
Scorecard

Nine dimensions, weighted

Comp structure & KoscotDoes the plan pay for recruitment or for sales to real customers?
20%
6.0
Start with the fact that decides this line: no payment of any kind exists for enrolling anyone. There is no signup bonus, no pack commission, no fast-start paid on a fee and no autoship anywhere in the plan. The company’s own compensation document opens in bold with "Compensation is earned only when customers are acquired," and the qualification tables enforce it. Customer Qualification requires seven personal customer points across at least three different services before a representative earns anything at all, and it must be maintained rather than hit once. Regional Director, Regional Vice President and Senior Vice President must each maintain fifteen personal customer points across at least five services simply to receive earned-position compensation - a rank ladder that de-qualifies its own top earners when their personal customer base decays. Per-leg caps bite at 200 customer points for the 600-point Regional Director requirement and 750 for the 3,000-point Regional Vice President requirement, which genuinely blocks single-leg stacking. Even the team bonus fires only when the enrolled representative acquires customers within 30 days of their own start date. That is the strongest customer-acquisition architecture graded on this site. It is marked down for two things. Nothing in the retrievable plan text requires those customers to be non-participants, and the policies expressly contemplate a new representative claiming their own existing customer account - so seven points across three services can plausibly be "my own gas, my own electricity and my own mobile". And the company’s own FAQ concedes the point in writing, in the same answer where it denies being a pyramid scheme: "IBO income potential is contingent on two factors — Customers purchasing services through an ACN IBO and Recruitment of new IBOs."
Securities exposureAny passive return on capital? Howey, staking, tokens, withdrawal friction.
15%
10.0
This line measures one thing only: capital handed over by a participant against a promised return. There is none here. No token, no staking, no yield, no pool, no passive product, no managed account, no equity or profit-participation offering and no commission advancing of any kind could be located. The participant pays a Start-Up Fee, a monthly Business Support Fee and an annual renewal, and receives a contractual right to be paid a percentage of third-party service billings that the participant themselves generates. That is a service agreement, not an investment contract. No securities regulator has an open or closed enforcement matter against the company; the 2010 Montana action was brought under that state’s securities statute but was vacated in full settlement within about five weeks with no finding. One search-hygiene point belongs here because it is the single most dangerous confusion in this file: any hit for an "ACN securities fraud investigation" or "ACN shareholder suit" belongs to the NYSE-listed consultancy that trades under the ticker ACN, not to this company. A 10 on this line says nothing about whether the opportunity is worth taking - it says the participant is not being sold a security.
Ownership & track recordWho runs it, what did they run before, and what happened to it.
15%
6.0
The same four founders have run this business for 33 years, they have never taken outside capital, never sold and never listed, and no criminal proceeding, fraud judgment, receivership or insolvency of the operating business could be located against any of them anywhere. In this category that is a genuine credibility point and it goes first. The regulator that named the chairman as a respondent in Australia discontinued against him before judgment, so nothing was ever found against him; the Montana notice that named all four individually was vacated in full settlement. Against that record sits a four-year pattern of retreat that is a fact about management judgment rather than about legality. Twenty-five of twenty-seven markets have gone since 2022. Three field organizations - Latin American mobile, Korea and the whole of Europe - were sold or handed away in a single week in January 2024, with the European distributor database transferred to an unrelated listed direct seller free of charge and USD 1m of the holding company’s equity going the other way. And a membership base acquired in January 2022 had its core perks offering discontinued by December 2023, a trade blog recording that the acquired membership was left with "no value". Both halves of that record are true and both belong here.
Product reality & demandWould a rational buyer purchase this if no income offer existed?
12%
6.0
What is sold is real, named, third-party services that people genuinely need and would buy anyway: electricity and gas, mobile, home internet, television, home security, identity-theft protection, payment processing, payroll. There is no invented product, no pseudo-science, no ingestible, no health claim and no proprietary blend anywhere in the line - a distinction worth stating plainly, because most of what this site grades fails on exactly that. The reservation is structural. Eleven of the twelve categories the company itself lists are somebody else’s brand, sold under that brand, billed by that brand and cancellable by the customer directly with that brand; the single exception is the company’s own mobile virtual network. Two of the largest categories, residential energy and home security, are now both owned by the same listed utility group, so the representative is selling two products from one conglomerate at that conglomerate’s retail prices. The company sold the energy business it once owned in 2006 and re-entered only as a referral agent for a third party. On the healthcare product the disclosure is genuinely good - the company publishes the "not insurance" and "you are always personally responsible for the payment of your own medical bills" warnings prominently and gates the product behind an annual accreditation quiz at a 90% pass mark - but a healthcare-sharing membership is a materially different risk transfer from insurance and the report will not pretend otherwise.
Participant economicsReal cost in, realistic money out, and whether they publish the numbers.
10%
3.0
The cost side is a genuinely low bar for this category and the report should say so before anything else: $299 to start, $25 to $30 a month, $49 a year to renew - $648 to $708 in year one and $349 to $409 thereafter - with no autoship, no inventory, no minimum monthly purchase volume and no starter-pack upsell. The policies state in terms that "You do not need to purchase ACN Products or ACN Business Tools to become an IBO." Almost nothing else graded here can say that. The problem is the other side of the ledger. No machine-readable income disclosure exists. A document titled "ACN Earnings Statement 2023" is publicly archived by a watchdog nonprofit, but only as a scanned image whose cohort figures could not be extracted, and the company’s own FAQ answer to "How much can you make in ACN?" contains no figure at all. The only participant-level in-and-out data ever published came from a 2010 Montana regulatory filing computed from records ACN itself supplied: in 2009, 312 Montana participants paid in about $234,813 and received $16,615 in total compensation, of which $896.86 - 0.38% of the money in - was for direct sales of services to non-participants. That proceeding was vacated in full settlement and produced no finding, and it is seventeen years old; but the numbers came from the company’s own records and have never been contradicted. The company’s own policies also require its Regional Vice Presidents, Platinum RVPs and Senior Vice Presidents to state on the record that their earnings are in the top 1% of all representatives.
Price-to-valueWhat the same capability costs on the open market.
8%
3.0
Every supplier in the catalog sells direct at the same price or better. The energy supplier, the security company, the identity-protection vendor, the internet and television carriers and the payment processor all take customers through their own front doors, usually with promotional pricing an agent cannot match, and several of them run refer-a-friend programs that cost nothing to join at all. The finding that settles the line, though, is the company’s own compliance document: the Policies and Procedures state that representatives "are at all times prohibited from publishing comparisons of the prices of ACN’s services and those of other telecommunication or energy providers," and separately forbid any specific or numerical savings claim, offering as acceptable substitute wording only that "many customers of the major telephone carriers will save." A business that sells on price and bans its own salesforce from publishing the price comparison has told the reader which way the comparison goes. Two further pressures sit underneath. Residential energy is sold through a retail energy supplier, a channel in which the New York Public Service Commission staff found that mass-market customers had "become the victims of a failed market structure," with utility data showing roughly $1.2bn of overpayment against default utility supply across three years. And ACN’s own energy supplier is the defendant in a certified class action alleging its variable rates were not set as the contract required - a filed and certified claim with no ruling on the merits and an express denial, not a finding, and a claim against the supplier rather than against ACN.
Payout sustainabilityCan the company fund the plan out of margin, or only out of inflow?
8%
5.0
The money that pays the field comes from genuine third-party margin, not from participant inflow, and that is a real structural strength that separates this plan from most of what is graded here. When a customer pays their electricity supplier or their television provider, ACN receives an agent commission and passes a slice down the plan; the participant’s own $648 of fees is retained entirely by the company and none of it reaches the upline - the exact finding on which the Full Federal Court allowed the appeal in Australia. The plan is not inflow-dependent in the Ponzi sense and the report will not imply that it is. What it is, is thin and shrinking. The company’s own letter to its European representatives diagnosed the problem: "Many services in the telecommunications industry have become commoditized and the energy business has been very volatile." The best-sourced revenue trend available is a trade estimate showing −7% in 2018, and the market count has gone from 27 to 2 since. Commissionable revenue is itself a haircut on the bill - a full television bill can generate as little as $35 of it - and the policies reserve a unilateral right to "reduce commissionable revenue by a percentage factor for promotional plans, products, negotiated pricing or certain services," to reduce compensation for country-level bad debt, and to pay nothing at all if a supplier fails to pay ACN. Commissions run three months behind the billing month. The risk to a 2026 joiner is not that the plan is unfunded; it is that it may be wound down around them, market by market, as it was for the European field in January 2024.
Marketing conductIncome claims, regulator run-ins, hype, deadline stacking.
7%
4.5
The written disclosure regime is above category norm and it goes first. Every time a representative presents the opportunity, the plan or any testimonial they must convey that earnings depend solely on selling services to customers, that expenses will be incurred, and - in bold on the plan document itself - that "Individuals will not earn income and will lose money as an IBO if customers are not acquired." Testimonials require a separate not-typical disclosure. Most strikingly, Regional Vice Presidents, Platinum RVPs and Senior Vice Presidents "must further convey that their earnings are in the top 1% of all ACN IBOs" - a self-imposed rule that almost nothing else on this site carries, and simultaneously the clearest available statement of the odds. Income guarantees, savings guarantees and any claim of regulatory endorsement are prohibited outright, and the social-media carve-out for character-limited channels is conditional on making no earnings representation at all, which is the right design. The gap is enforcement and accuracy. A watchdog nonprofit examined the company’s income claims in 2017 and again in 2023 - analysis by a private organization, not a government action and not a self-regulatory case - and in 2023 archived roughly 22 items it considered non-compliant, mostly testimonial videos, notifying the company formally in February 2024. And the opportunity FAQ itself promises earnings "month after month, year after year for as long as they remain an ACN Customer" on a catalog in which the television, internet and carrier products stop paying commission at 24 months and one wireless product at 30. That gap between "year after year" and zero at month 24 is the marketing finding.
Operator terms & exitWho owns the customer, what you forfeit, how hard it is to leave.
5%
4.0
The way in is better than category norm: ten business days to cancel for a full refund of the initial payment, and after that window a termination still triggers a refund of any Business Support Fee paid in the preceding thirty days. Physical business tools are returnable for a year at 90%. The way out is where this collapses. On termination "you will forfeit all rights to payment of Compensation of any kind" - and because commissions are paid the third month after the month of billing, a representative who quits in April forfeits commissions already earned on January, February and March billings. The same total forfeiture applies if a valid payment method is not supplied within 90 days of notice. Miss the renewal by 30 days and the position is non-renewed, reinstatable within eleven months only on payment of all accrued back Business Support Fees for months in which nothing could be earned. A representative who terminates cannot re-join for twelve months, and on return the previous customers and downline are not reinstated. Most decisively, the customer book is never the representative’s: "No Sponsor, Upline, or IBO has any right or claim in or to a deactivated position, its Customers, Downline, or placement in any sales organization." Renewal is at the company’s sole discretion, sale of a position requires consent and may attract an undisclosed transfer fee, there is no claim for lost profits, and customers who merely stop using a service are silently removed from qualification counts by a process the policies call purging.
Weighted composite
5.78
C-

Dimension profile

Further from center is better. Hover any point.

Comp structure& Koscot 6.0 Securitiesexposure 10.0 Ownership &track record 6.0 Product reality& demand 6.0 Participanteconomics 3.0 Price-to-value 3.0 Payoutsustainability 5.0 Marketingconduct 4.5 Operator terms& exit 4.0

Hard caps that bind here

Non-binding ceiling at C- nothing caps this file. The weighted arithmetic on the nine dimension scores lands at 5.78, inside the C band, and the grade publishes there on those numbers alone. What would have to be true for a cap to bite is a finding - a surviving pyramid determination, a consent order still in force, a fraud judgment against a principal, or a compensation plan that pays for enrollment - and none of those exists. It is worth stating in full what this grade does NOT rest on, because the internet consensus on this company rests on all three. It does not rest on the Australian litigation: the Full Federal Court allowed ACN’s appeal on 25 October 2005, set aside every declaration and order and awarded ACN its costs, and the High Court refused the regulator special leave on 2 June 2006, again with costs against the regulator, so the binding outcome is a litigated judgment for the defendant. It does not rest on Montana: the August 2010 cease-and-desist order and notice of proposed disciplinary action was vacated within about five weeks in a settlement recording that the conduct complained of was "not part of the ACN business model" but consisted of isolated instances by particular representatives, with no fine, no restitution and no admission. And it does not rest on the litigation involving the company’s former celebrity endorser: ACN was never a defendant in it, the racketeering claims were dismissed in 2019, class certification was denied on all four proposed classes in October 2023, and the case left federal court without prejudice in January 2024 with three individual plaintiffs and roughly $7,000 of claimed out-of-pocket loss between them. There is no conviction anywhere, no consent order surviving anywhere, and no adjudicated pyramid finding standing anywhere. The C- is earned by the economics, the catalog and the retreat, not by the legal file.

The lowest binding cap wins, regardless of the weighted arithmetic.

Sources consulted

What we read

Every source below links to the document itself. Tier 1 is a primary record - the company’s own plan, policy or disclosure, a court filing, a regulator’s decision or an SEC filing. Tier 2 is a self-regulatory or secondary regulator record, tier 3 reporting or academic work, tier 4 an open-market price comparison. Where a document can be moved or withdrawn, an archived copy is linked beside it. If a link is dead when you try it, that is a correction we want.

  1. ACN North American Compensation Plan Overview, effective 1 April 2020 (PDF) - the seven-Customer-Point/three-service Customer Qualification bar, the 3%–20% personal residual band and the US customer-point and commissionable-revenue schedule
    Compensation planTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2020-04-01archived copy

    North American Compensation Plan Overview, effective 1 April 2020 (www2.acninc.com/join/301.pdf) and effective 1 May 2021 (acncompass.com) - the 3%-to-20% personal residual band and its 200-point top rate, 4% per level to level five, the 1.5%-3% generational overrides, the seven-point/three-service Customer Qualification bar, the fifteen-point/five-service maintenance rule for RD, RVP and SVP, the 600/200 and 3,000/750 per-leg caps, the $75-$600 personal customer bonus ladder, the $50-$450 overriding customer acquisition bonuses and their 30-day qualification trigger, and the full US commissionable-revenue schedule by product

  2. ACN North American Compensation Plan Overview, effective 1 May 2021 (PDF, ACNCompass) - the 15-point/five-service RD, RVP and SVP maintenance rule and the 600/200 and 3,000/750 per-leg customer-point caps
    Compensation planTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2021-05-01archived copy
  3. ACN U.S. Compensation Plan Overview effective 1 March 2012, filed as Exhibit 3 in Doe v. The Trump Corporation (S.D.N.Y.) - the predecessor plan against which the 2020/2021 qualification bars can be compared
    Court recordTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York · 2012-03-01archived copy
  4. ACN Policies and Procedures - United States, effective September 2021 (PDF) - no-purchase requirement, ten-business-day cooling off, Business Support Fee refund, forfeiture on termination, the twelve-month re-join bar, purging, the three-month payment lag and the mandatory disclosure and top-1% rules
    Policies & proceduresTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2021-09-01archived copy

    ACN Policies and Procedures - United States, effective September 2021 (acn.com/documents/legal/USPP_EN_ADA_9.01.21.pdf) - no purchase requirement, ten-business-day cooling off, Business Support Fee refund, total compensation forfeiture on termination, the twelve-month re-join bar, "no Sponsor, Upline, or IBO has any right or claim in or to a deactivated position, its Customers, Downline, or placement", purging, the three-month payment lag, the right to reduce commissionable revenue, supplier non-payment, and the mandatory disclosure and top-1% rules

  5. ACN Policies & Procedures - Australia and New Zealand (PDF, ACN Pacific Pty Ltd) - clause 1.2 Marketing and Advertising Policy, the ban on IBO-created marketing materials and websites, the prohibition on savings/rate guarantees and on earnings claims
    Policies & proceduresTier 1ACN Pacific Pty Ltd (ABN 85 108 535 708)archived copy

    ACN Policies and Procedures - Australia and New Zealand (myacn.acninc.com) - the prohibition on publishing price comparisons against other telecom or energy providers, the ban on numerical savings guarantees, the ban on representative-created marketing materials and websites, and the prohibition on claiming regulatory endorsement

  6. ACN Australian Compensation Plan, effective 1 December 2016 (PDF) - the Australian seven-Customer-Point/four-service qualification and the customer-point and commissionable-revenue schedule referenced by the ANZ policies
    Compensation planTier 1ACN Pacific Pty Ltd · 2016-12-01archived copy
  7. ACN New Zealand Independent Business Owner Agreement - Terms and Conditions, effective 1 August 2020 (PDF)
    Policies & proceduresTier 1ACN Pacific Pty Ltd · 2020-08-01archived copy
  8. Australian Communications Network Pty Ltd v Australian Competition and Consumer Commission [2005] FCAFC 221 (25 October 2005) - Full Federal Court allows the appeal, sets aside the declarations and orders and awards costs against the ACCC
    Court recordTier 1Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia (via AustLII) · 2005-10-25archived copy

    Australian Communications Network Pty Ltd v ACCC [2005] FCAFC 221 (25 October 2005), allowing the appeal, setting aside all declarations and orders and awarding costs against the regulator; ACCC v Australian Communications Network Pty Ltd [2005] FCA 276 and [2005] FCA 988 (first instance and orders); ACCC v ACN [2006] HCATrans 265 (2 June 2006), special leave refused with costs; ACCC media releases of 25 October 2005 and 5 June 2006

    Not established by this document: No retrievable transcript of ACCC v ACN [2006] HCATrans 265 (2 June 2006) could be located; AustLII's HCATrans series did not surface the document. The refusal of special leave with costs is instead evidenced by the ACCC's own media release of 5 June 2006, cited above.

  9. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Australian Communications Network Pty Ltd [2005] FCA 276 (23 March 2005, Selway J) - first-instance finding that the $499-plus-GST scheme was a pyramid selling scheme
    Court recordTier 1Federal Court of Australia (via AustLII) · 2005-03-23archived copy
  10. Australian Competition & Consumer Commission v Australian Communications Network Pty Ltd [2005] FCA 988 (20 July 2005, Mansfield J) - the declarations, injunctions and corrective-publication orders later set aside on appeal
    Court recordTier 1Federal Court of Australia (via AustLII) · 2005-07-20archived copy
  11. "Full Federal Court upholds ACN's appeal against pyramid selling decision" - ACCC media release MR 255/05, 25 October 2005
    RegulatorTier 1Australian Competition and Consumer Commission · 2005-10-25archived copy
  12. "High Court refuses special leave in ACCC – ACN" - ACCC media release 3/06, 5 June 2006, recording that special leave was refused on 2 June 2006
    RegulatorTier 1Australian Competition and Consumer Commission · 2006-06-05archived copy
  13. "Court finds Australian Communications Network scheme is a pyramid selling scheme" - ACCC media release MR 072/05, 23 March 2005
    RegulatorTier 1Australian Competition and Consumer Commission · 2005-03-23archived copy
  14. In the Matter of ACN, Incorporated, Gregory Provenzano, Robert Stevanovski, Anthony Cupisz and Michael Cupisz - Notice of Proposed Agency Disciplinary Action and Cease-and-Desist Order, Montana Securities Department, August 2010 (scanned copy) - the 2008 and 2009 participant in-and-out figures, including $896.86 of $234,813.02 paid for direct sales to non-participants
    RegulatorTier 1Office of the Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, Montana State Auditor (scanned copy hosted on Scribd) · 2010-08archived copy

    Montana Notice of Proposed Agency Disciplinary Action and Cease-and-Desist Order (August 2010, scanned) and the September 2010 settlement vacating it - the 2008 and 2009 participant in-and-out figures computed from company-supplied records, including $896.86 of $234,813 paid for direct sales to non-participants, and the Commissioner’s determination that the conduct was not part of the business model; contemporary reporting of the order being lifted on 13 September 2010

    Not established by this document: The Montana Commissioner's own posted copies of the August 2010 order and the September 2010 motion to vacate could not be located on csimt.gov, whose Legal Actions index does not reach back to 2010; the scanned copy of the Notice above and contemporaneous Associated Press reporting are used in their place.

  15. "State resolves pyramid scheme allegation" - Associated Press, 12 October 2010, reporting Commissioner Lindeen's finding that the conduct was not part of the ACN business model and the terms of the settlement
    ReportingTier 3Associated Press / Bozeman Daily Chronicle · 2010-10-12archived copy
  16. "ACN settles with state over pyramid-scheme allegations" - Associated Press, 13 October 2010
    ReportingTier 3Associated Press / Missoulian · 2010-10-13archived copy
  17. Contemporary trade report of the Montana cease-and-desist order being lifted on 13 September 2010, quoting ACN's notice to its field
    ReportingTier 3MLM Blog (Ty Tribble) · 2010-08-04archived copy
  18. "Company" - ACN corporate page (US), 2026: founded January 1993 by Greg Provenzano, Robert Stevanovski, Tony Cupisz and Mike Cupisz; "United States and Canada"
    Company documentTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2026archived copy

    ACN corporate pages and FAQs, 2026 - /us-en/company, /us-en/faqs/acn/about-acn, /us-en/faqs/acn/the-acn-opportunity, /us-en/faqs/acn/history-of-acn and the residential service pages - the $299, $25/$30 and $49 fee schedule and its internal contradiction, the twelve service categories, "ACN currently operates in the United States and Canada", the "month after month, year after year" residual claim, and the concession that income potential is contingent on customers and on recruitment of new IBOs

  19. "The ACN Opportunity" - ACN US support FAQ: the $299 Start-Up Fee, $25 monthly Business Support Fee and $49 Annual Renewal Fee, and the "month after month, year after year" residual claim
    Company documentTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2026archived copy
  20. "History of ACN" - ACN US support FAQ: over 30 years, the four founders, and DSA membership and Code of Ethics certification
    Company documentTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2026archived copy
  21. "The ACN Opportunity" - ACN Canada support FAQ, showing the same $299/$25/$49 fee schedule but a 10% (not 20%) personal residual ceiling
    Company documentTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC (Canada) · 2026archived copy
  22. ACN Business Opportunity Overview, effective 1 April 2025 (PDF) - the $299 start-up plus $25/month, the $50–$450 overriding CAB range and the bolded warning that "Individuals will not earn income and will lose money as an IBO if customers are not acquired" (company deck, copy served from an IBO site; ACN's own hosted copy could not be reached)
    Company documentTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC · 2025-04-01archived copy

    ACN Business Opportunity Overview effective 1 April 2025 and the 2023 ACN Presentation deck archived by a watchdog nonprofit - the current category list, the $50-$450 bonus range and the bolded loss warning that individuals will not earn income and will lose money if customers are not acquired

  23. 2023 ACN Presentation deck (PDF) as archived by Truth in Advertising, Inc. - the $299/$25 fee panel, the $50–$450 CAB range and the earned-position ladder
    Company documentTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC, archived by Truth in Advertising, Inc. (TINA.org) · 2023-09archived copy
  24. 2023 ACN Earnings Statement - ACN's most recently published income disclosure, archived by Truth in Advertising, Inc. as a scanned image (not machine-readable)
    Income disclosureTier 1ACN Opportunity, LLC, archived by Truth in Advertising, Inc. (TINA.org) · 2024-01archived copy
  25. 2023 ACN Income Claims Database - TINA.org's catalog of ACN income claims, and the source of the archived Earnings Statement and enrollment cost material
    Self-regulatoryTier 2Truth in Advertising, Inc. (TINA.org) · 2023archived copy
  26. ACN Inc. - TINA.org brand file, recording the FTC's Notice of Penalty Offenses to ACN, TINA.org's 2017 and 2023 income-claims letters and ACN's responses
    Self-regulatoryTier 2Truth in Advertising, Inc. (TINA.org)archived copy
  27. FTC Notice of Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities (PDF, October 2021) - the practices the Commission has determined to be unfair or deceptive in earnings representations
    RegulatorTier 1U.S. Federal Trade Commission · 2021-10archived copy
  28. List of October 2021 recipients of the FTC's Notices of Penalty Offenses Concerning Money-Making Opportunities (PDF) - the roster of more than 1,100 businesses served, which includes ACN
    RegulatorTier 1U.S. Federal Trade Commission · 2021-10-25archived copy
  29. "FTC Puts Businesses on Notice that False Money-Making Claims Could Lead to Big Penalties" - FTC press release, 26 October 2021
    RegulatorTier 1U.S. Federal Trade Commission · 2021-10-26archived copy
  30. Doe (later McKoy) v. The Trump Corporation, No. 1:18-cv-09936 (S.D.N.Y.) - full public docket
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, via CourtListener (RECAP)archived copy

    Doe v. The Trump Corporation, No. 1:18-cv-09936 (S.D.N.Y., Schofield J.) - motion-to-dismiss opinion of 24 July 2019 dismissing the RICO counts, dismissal of the three Trump children in June 2023, denial of class certification on all four proposed classes on 17 October 2023, and the order of 11 January 2024 dismissing the remaining claims from federal court without prejudice. ACN was not a defendant

    Not established by this document: The separate so-ordered stipulation dismissing Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump could not be retrieved as its own docket PDF; the class-certification opinion at ECF No. 640 records the dismissal and dates it 19 May 2023 rather than June 2023.

  31. Opinion and Order of 24 July 2019 (Schofield J), ECF No. 97 - motion to dismiss granted in part, RICO Counts I and II dismissed for failure to plead proximate cause; state-law claims retained under CAFA
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York · 2019-07-24archived copy
  32. Opinion and Order of 17 October 2023 (Schofield J), ECF No. 640 - class certification denied on all four proposed classes and on the Rule 23(c)(4) issue class; records that the Trump family members were dismissed by stipulation on 19 May 2023
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York · 2023-10-17archived copy
  33. Order of 11 January 2024 (Schofield J), ECF No. 682 - the court declines supplemental jurisdiction and dismisses the remaining state-law claims without prejudice to refiling in state court
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York · 2024-01-11archived copy
  34. Defendants' Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Plaintiffs' Motion for Class Certification, ECF No. 553 - the defense position that "[t]his entire case is about ACN, Inc.", which was not a defendant
    Court recordTier 1Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York · 2023archived copy
  35. Mirkin v. XOOM Energy, LLC, No. 18-3138 (2d Cir., 26 July 2019) - reversal in part, reinstating the breach-of-contract claim
    Court recordTier 1U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (via Justia) · 2019-07-26archived copy

    Mirkin v. XOOM Energy, LLC - Second Circuit opinion of 26 July 2019 reinstating the contract claim, E.D.N.Y. summary judgment of 14 August 2023 and class-certification opinion of 31 August 2023 (80,000-110,000 members; expert estimates of $27.5m-$55m); court-approved class notice, February 2024, stating that the court has not determined who is right. A claim against ACN’s energy supplier, not against ACN

    Not established by this document: The 14 August 2023 summary-judgment opinion (ECF No. 151) was not retrievable as a standalone document; its holdings are recounted at length in the certification opinion and in the June 2024 decertification opinion.

  36. Mirkin v. XOOM Energy, LLC, No. 1:18-cv-02949, ECF No. 152 (E.D.N.Y., 31 August 2023, Ross J) - Opinion and Order certifying the New York class; records the experts' $27.5m and $55m overcharge estimates
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (via Justia) · 2023-08-31archived copy
  37. Court-approved class notice website, Mirkin v. XOOM Energy, LLC - "The Court has not determined who is right"; exclusion deadline 12 February 2024
    Court recordTier 1Court-approved notice administrator, E.D.N.Y. No. 18-cv-2949 · 2024-02archived copy
  38. Long-Form Notice to the certified class (PDF), Mirkin v. XOOM Energy, LLC
    Court recordTier 1Court-approved notice administrator, E.D.N.Y. No. 18-cv-2949 · 2023-12archived copy
  39. Court's Certification Order as posted on the class-notice site (PDF)
    Court recordTier 1U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York · 2023-08-31archived copy
  40. "DSN Announces the 2017 Global 100!" - ACN ranked 30th at $750 million of FY2016 revenue (self-submitted, certified by the company rather than audited)
    ReportingTier 3Direct Selling News · 2017-04-20archived copy

    Trade and journalism, each labeled where used: Direct Selling News 2017 Global 100 (self-submitted, unaudited) and its 2021 and 2023 features; BusinessForHome and MLMRanks directory estimates including the stale $500m field and the modeled 20% payout ratio; BehindMLM on the 2022 European recruitment halt, the January 2022 acquisition and its December 2023 devaluation, and the January 2024 sales of Europe, Korea and Latin American mobile; UK Companies House and Danish CVR records for the 2025-2026 solvent wind-ups; BBC News, 9 March 2020 and The Spinoff, 2 October 2019, both journalism rather than regulation

    Not established by this document: The Danish CVR entity page at datacvr.virk.dk returned HTTP 403 to the fetcher; the company's own filed annual report served by the Danish Business Authority is cited instead. MLMRanks' ACN record could not be located under that name.

  41. DSN Global 100 methodology note - revenue is self-submitted on a Revenue Certification Form validated by the CEO, not independently audited
    ReportingTier 3Direct Selling Newsarchived copy
  42. BusinessForHome directory record for ACN - the stale $500m estimated-revenue field carried unchanged from 2021 to 2025 and the modeled 20% payout ratio
    Open-market comparisonTier 4Business For Home Internationalarchived copy
  43. "ACN halts recruitment in Europe (we don't know why)" - BehindMLM, 29 October 2022
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2022-10-29archived copy
  44. "ACN quietly acquires Team National" - BehindMLM, 17 January 2022
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2022-01-17archived copy
  45. "ACN discontinues perks, Team National left with 'no value'" - BehindMLM, 11 December 2023
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2023-12-11archived copy
  46. "ACN appears to be collapsing outside of the US" - BehindMLM, 2 February 2024, on the January 2024 sales of the European, Korean and Latin American mobile businesses
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2024-02-02archived copy
  47. "Zinzino Enters into Strategic Partnership with ACN Europe" - trade report of ACN's decision to wind down its European direct-selling operations and transfer its distributor database, 29 January 2024
    ReportingTier 3Direct Selling News · 2024-01-29archived copy
  48. Report of the 24 January 2024 acquisition of ACN Korea, with ACN Korea's 2022 sales of KRW 33.35 billion
    ReportingTier 3Maeil Business Newspaper (MK) · 2024-01-25archived copy
  49. "Diri acquires Flash Mobile Latam" - report of ACN's sale of its Latin American mobile business, 24 January 2024
    ReportingTier 3BNamericas · 2024-01-24archived copy
  50. ACN European Services Limited (company no. 03650246) - Companies House record: members' voluntary liquidation resolved 10 October 2025, declaration of solvency 26 November 2025, dissolved 5 May 2026
    Corporate registryTier 1Companies House (UK) · 2026-05-05archived copy
  51. ACN Danmark A/S (CVR 24212572) - annual report filed with the Danish Business Authority, disclosing that management expects to liquidate the company by normal liquidation and that DKK 27.4m of DKK 27.4m current assets is a receivable from affiliated companies
    Corporate registryTier 1Erhvervsstyrelsen (Danish Business Authority) / ACN Danmark A/S · 2023-12-31archived copy
  52. "People recruited by sales company ACN 'losing money'" - BBC News, 9 March 2020
    ReportingTier 3BBC News · 2020-03-09archived copy
  53. "Why you should be wary of ACN, the next multi-level marketer to hit social media" - The Spinoff, 2 October 2019, including ACN's statement in response
    ReportingTier 3The Spinoff (New Zealand) · 2019-10-02archived copy
Unable to verify

What we could not get

  • The 2023 ACN Earnings Statement figures. A document by that name exists and is publicly archived by a watchdog nonprofit - but only as a scanned image, not in machine-readable form, and its cohort figures could not be extracted. They are not guessed at anywhere in this report. This is the single highest-value open item on the company.
  • Live 2026 consumer prices for anything in the catalog. The services index rendered as an empty JavaScript shell with no product or price content; the mobile plan grid returned zero rows; the energy site is a ZIP-code-gated rate engine that additionally redirects enrollments elsewhere; two further pages returned crawl errors. That is "could not retrieve", not "does not exist", and no claim about current retail prices is made in this report.
  • The North Carolina and Delaware entity registration numbers for ACN Opportunity, LLC and ACN, Inc. The state business registry was not reachable through the tooling available. Again: could not retrieve, not does not exist.
  • The current Canadian typical-participant disclosure. Canada is one of the two markets the company still operates in and has the stricter regime - s.55 of the Competition Act requires disclosure of compensation actually received by typical participants, defined by the Competition Bureau as a median band rather than an average. No such current disclosure could be located on reachable Canadian pages. If it exists and is compliant it contains the best number available on this company anywhere.
  • The NYSE ticker collision, which is a reader-facing correction and worth the space. "ACN" is the ticker of an unrelated listed consultancy with roughly 800,000 employees, and a widely-circulated June 2026 headline about investors joining a securities-fraud investigation into "ACN" belongs to that listed company - it was found mechanically appended to a machine-built company profile for this company’s European subsidiary. Any "ACN securities fraud" or "ACN shareholder suit" result is the listed consultancy. The string also collides with Australian Company Numbers, which appear on every Australian corporate filing, and with clinical and aviation abbreviations. Every search behind this report was qualified accordingly.
  • The current BBB rating and accreditation status, and current US Direct Selling Association membership. Both are asserted by the company; neither could be independently retrieved, and a BBB rating is a private ratings body’s finding in any case. Membership as at June 2023 is confirmed by a third party.
  • Whether the "ACN Chief Development Officer" named by two lead-generation aggregators and the co-founder of one of the company’s flagship healthcare products are the same person. If they are, it is a related-party product placement. The identity match is aggregator-asserted and could not be confirmed either way.
  • The final outcome of the class action against the energy supplier, whether the endorser litigation was refiled in California, Maryland or Pennsylvania state courts, the amounts of the payment-processing, account-maintenance and transfer fees referenced but not quantified in the policies, event ticket prices, and the current 2026 North American compensation plan - the 2020 and 2021 editions are the most recent publicly retrievable, and promotional overlays change monthly.

Not advice

This is independent analysis for decision-making, not legal, financial or investment advice. Allegations reported by third parties should be verified against primary court and regulatory records before any decision.

Who writes this

Researched by Claude. Reviewed by an editor.

Every report is researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, from the company’s own plan documents, policies, terms and regulatory file - then reviewed before publication by Rob Fore, who checks the sources and the stage-label on every allegation.

  • Nine weighted dimensions, published with their weights
  • The editor checks the evidence and cannot change the number - the build rejects any page whose grade does not reconcile to its own arithmetic
  • Every affiliate position we hold is disclosed on the report it touches
  • No company has paid for a grade, and no report carries an affiliate link
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Common questions

ACN - frequently asked

QIs ACN a pyramid scheme?
No finding to that effect survives anywhere, and the contested history resolved in the company’s favor. A first-instance Australian judgment in March 2005 held the scheme to be a pyramid selling scheme; the Full Federal Court allowed the company’s appeal on 25 October 2005, set aside every declaration and order and awarded costs against the regulator, holding that "if the recruiter does no more than recruit other participants there is no entitlement to any payment." The High Court refused the regulator special leave on 2 June 2006, again with costs. A Montana cease-and-desist order of August 2010 was vacated within about five weeks in a settlement recording that the conduct complained of was not part of the business model, with no fine, no restitution and no admission. There is no FTC action, no consent order and no criminal proceeding. Structurally, nothing in the plan pays for enrolling a person: seven personal customer points across at least three services must be acquired and maintained before anything is earned. The countervailing points are that nothing in the retrievable plan text requires those customers to be non-participants, and that the company’s own FAQ concedes income potential depends on customers "and Recruitment of new IBOs."
QHow much does it cost to join ACN, and is there an autoship?
There is no autoship, no inventory and no product-purchase requirement - the policies state that a representative does not need to buy anything to be one, which is genuinely unusual in this category. The mandatory cost is a $299 Start-Up Fee, a monthly Business Support Fee, and a $49 annual renewal charged on the anniversary of the start date, so it lands inside month twelve. The company’s own website states the Business Support Fee as $30 a month on one FAQ page and $25 on another page of the same system, with its April 2025 slide deck also saying $25 - most likely an increase with one page left unrevised, but the practical effect is that a prospect cannot determine their own monthly cost from the operator’s site. Year one is therefore $648 at the lower reading and $708 at the higher; year two onward is $349 to $409. Enrollment is refundable in full within ten business days.
QHow much do ACN representatives actually earn?
The company does not publish an income disclosure with figures. A document titled "ACN Earnings Statement 2023" is publicly archived by a watchdog nonprofit but only as a scanned image whose cohort numbers could not be extracted, and the company’s own FAQ answer to the earnings question contains no number at all. What can be said comes from three labeled sources. The company’s own policies require Regional Vice Presidents, Platinum RVPs and Senior Vice Presidents to state that their earnings are in the top 1% of all representatives. In the Australian High Court, the regulator’s senior counsel stated on the record, uncontradicted, that the average representative had about 13 direct customers producing under $400 a year - a submission in a case that regulator lost, but arithmetic nobody disputed. And a 2010 Montana regulatory filing, computed from records the company itself supplied, recorded 312 participants paying in about $234,813 in 2009 and receiving $16,615 in total, of which $896.86 - 0.38% of the inflow - was for direct sales to non-participants. That proceeding was vacated in full settlement with no finding, and it is seventeen years old.
QWas ACN sued over its celebrity endorsement?
ACN was never a defendant. The case was Doe v. The Trump Corporation, No. 1:18-cv-09936 in the Southern District of New York, brought against Donald J. Trump, The Trump Corporation and three of his children, alleging that they failed to disclose they were paid to endorse the opportunity. It was a marketing-conduct claim about the endorser, not a claim about ACN’s business model, and no court made any finding about ACN because ACN was not before it. The racketeering counts were dismissed in July 2019 for failure to plead proximate cause; the three Trump children were dismissed as defendants in June 2023; class certification was denied on all four proposed classes on 17 October 2023; and on 11 January 2024 the court declined supplemental jurisdiction and dismissed the remaining claims from federal court without prejudice, leaving three individual plaintiffs with roughly $7,000 of claimed out-of-pocket losses between them. Whether anything was refiled in state court could not be verified. Separately, and worth stating because it is the most common search error on this company: the ticker "ACN" belongs to an unrelated listed consultancy, and 2026 securities-investigation headlines about "ACN" concern that company, not this one.
QIs ACN still operating, and where?
Yes, in two countries. The company’s own FAQ reads: "ACN currently operates in the United States and Canada." In 2019 it described itself as operating in 26 or 27 countries. Recruitment across Europe was suspended without public explanation in late 2022. In a single week in January 2024 it sold its Latin American mobile business to a third-party telecom, sold its Korean operation, and wound down all European direct selling, handing its European distributor database to an unrelated listed direct seller free of charge while its holding company invested USD 1m into that buyer. Spanish fixed-line service ended on 30 May 2025, the Danish company was dissolved on 7 May 2025, and the UK service company passed a members’ voluntary liquidation resolution in October 2025 and was dissolved by final Gazette in May 2026. Those last two are solvent wind-ups with declarations of solvency, not insolvencies, and none of this is a finding of wrongdoing - but 27 markets becoming two in four years is the material risk for anyone joining in 2026, and it is a different risk from the one the internet talks about.
Who wrote this report

Author, editor and publisher

C
Written by Claude AI
Reviewed by Rob Fore · Published by Listech Inc · August 1, 2026

This report was researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from primary documents - ACN’s own compensation plan, its policies and procedures, its terms of service, its income disclosure statement where one exists, and its regulatory and self-regulatory file. It was scored against nine weighted dimensions that are published in full, with their weights, on the methodology page.

Before publication it was reviewed by Rob Fore, who checks every source link, every figure against the document it came from, and every allegation against its stage-label - an investigation is not a finding, a warning letter is not an enforcement action, and a filed claim is not a verdict.

The editor does not set the grade. The published score is the weighted composite of the nine dimension scores, and the build refuses to emit a page where the two disagree by more than 0.06. A grade moves when the evidence moves it and not otherwise.

Rob Fore has marketed online since 1996, wrote Online MLM Marketing (2014), and is CEO of Listech Inc, the Nevada corporation that publishes this site. He holds affiliate positions in companies graded here - including LiveGood, which this site grades D, SendOutCards, which it grades C−, and the Home Business Academy, which it grades B−. Those positions are disclosed on the reports they touch, and changed nothing on this page.

About the author and our conflicts  ·  Contact the editor  ·  Corrections: corrections@opportunitygrade.com

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