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Fragrance, cosmetics, home care and supplements · Italian direct selling under Law 173/2005 · stairstep-differential plan

Chogan Group S.p.A.

A real Italian manufacturer with the lightest entry terms in this sector - free registration, no autoship, no annual fee and no enrollment bonus of any kind - whose founder was arrested in May 2024 and again in April 2025, with €355 million under preventive seizure and the company itself entrusted to a judicial administrator. Those are pre-trial measures. There is no conviction and no finding of liability by any court or regulator anywhere.

Reviewed July 31, 2026 Founded Registered 04/04/2016 as Chogan Group S.r.l. and later converted to S.p.A.; the group dates its own founding to 2013 Confidence: Medium
DGRADE
4.7/10
Weighted composite

REAL PRODUCT, UNRESOLVED CRIMINAL FILE

It costs nothing to register and the plan pays no recruitment bounty - but the filed 2024 accounts show a €22,459,167 net loss on €189,911,985 of revenue, no income disclosure exists in any of 90-plus markets, and the criminal proceedings against the founder remain wholly untried.

The question you came with

Can you actually make money with Chogan?

NO No - not on the numbers this company publishes

No, not as a network business, and the reason sits in the plan rather than in the newspapers. Every rank requires personally recruited lines - two at the bottom, three through the middle, five from Emerald upward - and no amount of selling substitutes for them. A consultant moving 10,000 euro of product a month with nobody underneath earns the dealer margin and exactly zero network commission. A monthly personal quota of 125, 187.50 or 312.50 euro then gates every euro of that commission, payable whether anybody else orders or not.

There is no income disclosure anywhere. Not in Italy, not in any of the other 90-plus markets the company says it serves, and not in any of the seven languages this was searched in. The rank tables circulating online that run from about 2,500 euro a month up to 105,000 are written by distributors and carry their own disclaimers saying they are not company material. What can be checked is the filed 2024 bilancio: 189,911,985 euro of revenue against a 22,459,167 euro net loss, in the same year as the seizure.

Now the part that genuinely works, because a good deal of it does. Registration is free. No autoship, no annual fee, no minimum monthly order, and the dealer margin is a flat 50% off catalog on a single unit with no volume condition. Four bottles recover the 60 euro kit and nine recover the 149.90 one. Somebody who only ever buys at 17.50 and sells at 35 has a small honest trading business and owes the plan nothing. Italian law adds a ten-day withdrawal right and a 90% repurchase of unsold stock within thirty days of leaving.

One thing has to be stated precisely rather than loudly. The founder was taken into pre-trial detention in May 2024 and placed under house arrest in April 2025, 355 million euro sits under preventive seizure, and the company itself is an investigated party entrusted to a court-appointed administrator. Those are pre-trial measures. There is no conviction and no finding of liability by any court or regulator anywhere. What it means for a consultant is that the customer base they build sits inside a business somebody else is now running under court supervision.

What it costs to be in
€0 to register · kit from €60

registration is free and there is no annual fee, no autoship and no minimum monthly order; an optional starter kit from €60 to €619.90 unlocks consultant pricing, and from 1 March 2026 you must generate 300 points (about €375 of purchases) every rolling six months to keep it

What would have to change
  • An income disclosure, in some market, in some language. Ninety-plus countries and 160,000 claimed consultants have produced no median, no distribution and no zero-earner rate, so no figure attached to this plan can be tested by anybody standing outside it.
  • Ranks that count sales instead of recruited lines. While every rung from Partner upward requires two, three or five personally sponsored people, the plan is paying for structure at the margin whatever the marketing says it rewards.
  • Points that accrue on verified resale rather than on purchase. No retail-sales rule, no registered-customer requirement and no 70% equivalent appears anywhere, so the plan cannot tell a consultant who sold a hundred bottles from one who bought a hundred.
  • A qualification bar that does not rise underneath the people already standing on it. The semester threshold went from 200 points to 300 on 1 March 2026, and the monthly personal gate has roughly quadrupled since the 2018 plan document.

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.

€189,911,985
Filed 2024 revenue - with a €22,459,167 net loss
up 34.9% on 2023, against share capital of €150,000
€355 million
Under preventive seizure; company under judicial administration
a pre-trial measure, 30 May 2024 - no conviction, no finding of liability
€0
To register - no autoship, no annual fee, no enrollment bonus
genuinely the lightest entry terms graded on this site
Zero
Income disclosures published, in any of 90-plus markets
searched in seven languages; nothing found in any market

Legal status

LEGAL BUT UNDER LIVE, UNRESOLVED CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION - and the two halves of that sentence must be kept strictly apart. On the first half: no court and no regulator anywhere has found Chogan Group S.p.A., or its compensation plan, to be a pyramid scheme or an unfair commercial practice. No AGCM istruttoria, provvedimento, accepted impegni or consumer alert naming the company could be located; no consumer-protection or competition action naming it was found in Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Romania or the United Kingdom; no EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) alert naming the brand was located; and no trade-mark proceeding naming the company as defendant was located. On the second half: on 30 May 2024 the Procura della Repubblica di Trani, executing through the Guardia di Finanza of the Barletta-Andria-Trani command, obtained precautionary measures in Operazione "Paradise World" - custodia cautelare in carcere for the founder and two others, arresti domiciliari for a fourth, a six-month ban from entrepreneurial activity for a fifth, nine natural persons under investigation plus the company itself as an entity under D.Lgs. 231/2001, a €355,000,000 preventive seizure, and the entrustment of the company to a court-appointed amministratore giudiziario. The charges are criminal association aimed at tax fraud, money laundering and self-laundering, together with tax and bankruptcy offenses. On 3 April 2025 two of the men were placed under house arrest again, on an allegation that they had continued to manage the group in breach of the interdiction, with a further €18 million seized against invoices for objectively non-existent transactions. Every one of those is a pre-trial precautionary measure, ordered by a giudice per le indagini preliminari on a standard of gravi indizi di colpevolezza - a threshold for detention, not a finding of criminal liability. There is no conviction. No committal for trial, no Tribunale del Riesame outcome and no first-instance judgment could be located. The individuals are presumed innocent, and this report treats them as presumed innocent throughout.

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

An Italian manufacturer and wholesaler of fragrance, cosmetics, home-care products and food supplements, selling through self-employed incaricati alle vendite a domicilio under Law 173/2005 on a stairstep-differential plan. The catalog runs to roughly 4,000 SKUs; the fragrance line, branded Olfazeta, is sold by number rather than by brand comparison; the company files public annual accounts in Italy and reports shipping to more than 90 countries with 146 to 167 employees.

The entry terms are the best part and they should be stated first without hedging. Registration is free. There is no annual fee, no compulsory autoship and no minimum monthly order - confirmed independently in German, Latvian and Italian consultant sources. There is no enrollment bonus of any kind: six languages of plan documentation were read and not one described a payment for signing somebody up. The optional starter kit runs from about €60 to €619.90 and is product at consultant pricing rather than licenses or training, so a participant who resells it recovers the cost from about nine bottles of 70-millilitre fragrance. On top of that, Law 173/2005 art. 4 supplies a statutory 10-day right of withdrawal and an obligation on the company to buy back at least 90% of the cost of unsold stock within 30 days of termination, which bites whether or not the company advertises it. Measured on what the recruit is asked to hand over against a promise of return, this is one of the cleanest files graded on this site.

Then the criminal file, and every word of it needs its stage label. On 30 May 2024 the Procura di Trani obtained precautionary measures in Operazione "Paradise World": pre-trial detention for the founder and chief executive, the co-founder and the company accountant, house arrest for a fourth person, a six-month ban from entrepreneurial activity for a fifth, nine natural persons under investigation and the company itself an investigated party under D.Lgs. 231/2001. A €355,000,000 preventive seizure covered bank accounts and roughly 200 properties and expressly included the investigated company, which was entrusted to a court-appointed judicial administrator. On 3 April 2025 the founder and the accountant were placed under house arrest again on an allegation of continuing to run the group in breach of the interdiction, with a further €18 million seized. Prosecutors allege the principals were fictitiously classified as door-to-door sellers to obtain an effective IRPEF rate of about 18% against 43% - the same statutory container every ordinary consultant sits in. All of that is at the investigative and precautionary stage. There is no conviction, no committal for trial that could be located, no first-instance judgment and no finding of liability by any court or regulator anywhere. The defendants are presumed innocent. The company continues to trade under supervision.

The economics are the third element and they are the reason the numbers land where they do. No income disclosure exists in any market, in any language, so nobody outside the company knows what the median consultant earns. Points accrue when a consultant buys, not when a sale to a real customer is verified, and every rank requires a minimum number of personally recruited lines - 2, then 3, then 5 - so a consultant selling €10,000 a month with no recruits earns exactly zero network commission. A personal purchase quota of €125, €187.50 or €312.50 a month gates all network pay, and the semester activity requirement rose from 200 to 300 points on 1 March 2026. And the filed accounts show €189,911,985 of revenue for 2024 with a net loss of €22,459,167, against share capital of €150,000.

Where €100 of catalog-price product goes

Reconstructed from the published plan and the company’s own 2018 plan document. The dealer margin is trading profit on resale, not commission; the network figure is the theoretical maximum at the top rank, and the realized rate is far lower because the differential structure pays only the gap between adjacent percentage bands.

50% 18% 33%
Selling consultant - the 50% dealer margin (50%)Upline network commission - up to 17.5%, typically low single digits (17.5%)Retained by the company for goods, logistics, staff, tax (32.5%)
ProductPricePays
Registration as a consultant
Free in every market checked, with no annual renewal fee located anywhere. There is no compulsory autoship and no minimum monthly order. This is genuinely the lightest entry graded on this site and it is the single biggest credit in the file.
€0
one-time
LITE Kit
The smallest kit, positioned for own use and testing. Buying a kit is what activates consultant pricing; membership itself is free, which keeps the structure on the compliant side of the Law 173/2005 art. 4 prohibition on requiring purchase as a condition of participation - but only just. Itemised contents could not be retrieved for any kit.
from €60
one-time
OLFAZETA Kit
The most-recommended entry kit, fragrance-focused. At the standard 50% discount it should contain roughly €300 of catalog-price product, so a participant who genuinely resells it recovers the cost from about nine 70-millilitre bottles at €35.
€149.90
one-time
GOLD / BRILHOME / PLATINUM Kits
The larger kits, current from 1 March 2026. Worth noting the trend: the €60 entry point has held for six years, but a €619.90 top kit did not exist in 2020. The ceiling has risen even as the floor has not.
€309.90 / €349.00 / €619.90
one-time
Monthly personal active points quota
100 AP for the 4% to 8% bands, 150 AP for 12% to 16%, 250 AP for 23% and above. Payable whether or not anyone else in the organization orders anything. The 2018 company plan document set the equivalent gate at €50 to €75 a month, so it has roughly quadrupled.
€125 / €187.50 / €312.50
recurring
Semester activity requirement
300 points per rolling six months to keep consultant pricing, up from 200 on 1 March 2026, satisfiable through own use, customer orders or a combination. Reactivation after a lapse requires a minimum order of 350 points, about €437.50.
≈ €375 per six months
recurring
Olfazeta eau de parfum, 70 mL (e.g. No. 16)
€0.50 per millilitre at catalog, €0.25 at consultant price. The network commission on the same bottle is €0.70 at the 4% band and €5.34 at 30.5% - gross, before differentials. The dealer margin of €17.50 dwarfs any plausible network commission on the same unit.
€35.00 catalog / €17.50 consultant
per unit
50% dealer margin
Olfazeta Luxury unisex, 50 mL, 30% essence (e.g. No. 129)
€1.04 per millilitre. The stated 30% extrait concentration is above the 15% to 20% typical of designer eau de parfum and partly earns the price - though no independent laboratory verification of concentration could be located.
€52.00 catalog / €26.00 consultant
per unit
50% dealer margin
Background check

Who runs it, and what they ran before

MP
Michelangelo Paradiso
Founder, chief executive and legal representative

Aged 51 to 52 at the time of the first arrest and resident in Barletta. Taken into custodia cautelare in carcere on 30 May 2024 on charges of criminal association aimed at tax fraud, money laundering and self-laundering. Placed under arresti domiciliari again on 3 April 2025 on an allegation that he had continued to take operational decisions in breach of the interdictive measure, without the knowledge of the judicial administration. Both are pre-trial precautionary measures. There is no conviction, no committal for trial that could be located and no finding of liability by any court. He is presumed innocent. Searches for any prior venture or prior legal matter before 2016 returned nothing at all - that is a gap in the record rather than a clean bill of health, and it is recorded as a gap.

LS
Liborio Scelzo
Co-founder and President

Aged 48, of Taranto and resident in Bari. Named in the May 2024 custodial order and taken into custodia cautelare in carcere. Allegation stage; no conviction; presumed innocent. No prior corporate or legal history could be located.

AF
Arcangela Fumarulo
Co-founder

Aged 49, of Barletta. Placed under arresti domiciliari in May 2024. House arrest is a precautionary measure, not a sentence; there is no conviction and she is presumed innocent.

Gn
Governance note
The accountant, the sixth measure, and the judicial administrator

The company accountant, aged 63 and not a company officer, was also taken into pre-trial detention in May 2024 and re-arrested in April 2025; prosecutors characterised him as "la mente del meccanismo fraudolento," the mind behind the fraudulent mechanism. That is a prosecutor characterisation in a press release, not a judicial finding, and it should be read as one. A sixth person, aged 26, received a six-month ban from entrepreneurial activity. The company itself is an investigated party under D.Lgs. 231/2001, Italy’s corporate criminal liability regime, and was entrusted to an amministratore giudiziario. Three material facts could not be established from free sources: the identity of that administrator, the current board, and the shareholder register - the last of which matters because the €355 million seizure expressly included the investigated company itself, so the beneficial control position as of 2026 is genuinely unclear. No public statement by the company addressing the arrests could be found in its own newsroom or anywhere else.

Registered address

Rome, Italy - registered office in Rome, operations at Barletta in Puglia
Start with the credit, because it is real and it is unusual in this sector: Italy requires companies of this form to file public annual accounts, and Chogan files them. Revenue, the profit line, headcount and the four-year trend could all be established from mirrors of the Registro Imprese without asking the company a single question - a material transparency advantage over the many direct sellers incorporated where nothing is filed at all. The filed series reads €67,861,279 of revenue and a €1,538,600 profit in 2022, €140,720,469 and a €2,408,278 profit in 2023, then €189,911,985 and a net loss of €22,459,167 in 2024, against share capital of €150,000 and a reported headcount of 146 to 167. Two stage labels belong on those figures. They are reproduced by commercial mirrors of the register rather than quoted from a certified visura or an auditor’s report, and three independent mirrors agree to the euro - strong corroboration, not an audit. And the nota integrativa that would explain the 2024 loss could not be retrieved, so no cause is asserted here. Since May 2024 the company has been under a court-appointed judicial administrator as part of the €355 million preventive seizure. It continues to trade, ship and recruit. Whether the judicial administration remains in force in 2026, and who the administrator is, could not be established from any free source.

Compensation plan

What has to be true for you to get paid

To coverYou need
Recover the €60 LITE kit from resale 4 bottles
€17.50 of dealer margin per 70 mL bottle sold at €35 catalog
Recover the €149.90 OLFAZETA kit from resale 9 bottles
achievable in the first month for most people with a social network - this is the honest, workable version of the business
Cover the €125 monthly personal quota from network commission alone ≈ 3,125 points a month (≈ €3,900 of consultant-price team volume)
at the 4% Partner band - about six times the 500 points that qualifies for the rank in the first place
Keep consultant pricing for a full year 600 points (≈ €750 of purchases)
300 points per rolling six months from 1 March 2026, up from 200; a lapse costs a 350-point reactivation order

Read this twice

The arithmetic here splits cleanly in two, and the split is the whole story. The retail half works. A 50% dealer margin on a physical product you can buy one unit of, with no minimum volume, no autoship and no annual fee, is an ordinary wholesale-retail arrangement: nine bottles clears the €149.90 kit, ten bottles a month at €35 produces about €175 of gross margin, and after samples, packaging, travel and payment fees roughly €142 a month for about twenty hours of work. That is below an Italian minimum-wage equivalent, but it is real money with no capital at risk beyond the stock on hand, and it uses none of the network plan - no downline, no points, no ranks. The network half does not work at the entry ranks, and it is important to be arithmetically precise about why. To be paid any network commission at all you must personally generate 100 active points a month, about €125 of purchasing at consultant price. At the Partner band of 4%, a qualifying team of 500 points - roughly €625 of network volume - pays about €25 a month gross, less differentials to any downline qualifying in their own band, less the 17.94% ritenuta. So the commission does not come close to covering the personal quota that unlocks it; it would take a team generating about 3,125 points a month, six times the qualifying threshold, before the commission alone covered the €125. Until that point the network plan is a net cost, not a net income, and the participant only breaks even by reselling the stock the quota obliges them to buy. Two further items belong in this sum and neither appears in any recruitment material read for this report. The first is the tax cliff. An incaricato alle vendite earning up to €5,000 net a year is taxed under a closed regime - a 22% flat presumed-expense deduction, then a 23% ritenuta a titolo d’imposta on the remaining 78%, an effective rate of 17.94%, final, with no partita IVA, no VAT and no INPS. That is genuinely favorable and it is one of the attractive features of Italian direct selling. The €5,000 is measured net of the deduction, so the gross ceiling is €6,410 of commission a year, about €534 a month. A Senior Leader at 12% on a 3,500-point network grosses roughly €525 a month before differentials. Cross the line and the participant must open a partita IVA, register with INPS gestione separata at contributions in the mid-twenties percent, and charge and account for IVA - permanently, even if income later collapses, with accountant fees of €500 to €1,200 a year. The plan therefore has a dead zone between roughly €5,000 and €12,000 of annual commission where advancing makes the participant worse off. The second is the exit. Law 173/2005 art. 4 gives a 10-day right of withdrawal from the consultancy contract and requires the company to repurchase at least 90% of the cost of unsold stock within 30 days. That right exists by statute whether or not the company publishes it - and the company’s own terms and conditions could not be retrieved, because its site returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval, so how it is implemented in practice is unknown.

Run your own numbers

Drag the sliders. Nothing here is stored or sent.

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

Euros converted to US dollars at roughly $1.08 to the euro, because this calculator renders in dollars while the plan is written in euros - read every figure as an approximation of a EUR number. The retail side is the honest part of this plan: a consultant buys at a 30–50% discount and keeps the difference, so a customer spending about €50 a month is worth roughly €25, or about $27. The cost line is the activity requirement rather than a fee. Registration is free, there is no annual fee, no autoship and no minimum order - but from 1 March 2026 a consultant must generate 300 points a semester to keep the discount at all, which at roughly €1.25 of purchase per point works out near €62.50 a month, about $68. The network commission is excluded deliberately. It is paid on total point volume generated by purchases rather than on verified resale, and every rank above the entry tier requires a minimum number of separately recruited lines - two, then three, then five - so including it would model recruiting rather than selling. There is no income disclosure in any of the ninety-plus markets, so nothing on this slider can be checked against a company figure. Your own subscription cost of $68/mo is included.

Your money

What it costs to replace this yourself

The job to be done here is one of the most competitively supplied in European retail: smell like an expensive designer fragrance without paying designer prices. Every company named below is an ordinary, non-graded retailer, supermarket or fragrance house. Prices are 2026 and per-millilitre figures are rounded; sterling is converted at approximately £1 = €1.18.

What they sell youWhat you'd use insteadYour cost
Olfazeta 70 mL at catalog - €35.00 (€0.50/mL)Lidl Suddenly / G. Bellini EDP, 75 mL - commissioned from established European perfume houses≈ €5.90-6.20 (€0.08/mL)
Olfazeta 70 mL at catalog - €35.00Aldi Lacura EDP, 75 mL - Cardinal Red takes a direct swing at Baccarat Rouge 540≈ €7.05 (€0.09/mL)
Olfazeta 70 mL at catalog - €35.00Mercadona own-label equivalences, 100 mL, with published correspondence tables≈ €6-12 (€0.06-0.12/mL)
Olfazeta 70 mL at catalog - €35.00Zara Emotions and main range, 80-100 mL - the Emotions line developed with Jo Malone CBE≈ €15-30 (€0.15-0.30/mL)
Olfazeta 30 mL at catalog - €18.00 (€0.60/mL)Any of the above at a third to an eighth of the price per millilitre€5-12
Olfazeta Luxury 50 mL, 30% essence - €52.00 (€1.04/mL)Dossier, 50 mL extrait - publishes its designer reference openly≈ €27-45 (€0.54-0.90/mL)
Olfazeta Luxury 50 mL - €52.00ALT Fragrances, 50 mL extrait concentrations≈ €32-41 (€0.65-0.82/mL)
Olfazeta Luxury 50 mL - €52.00Dior Sauvage EDT, 100 mL, boutique price and frequently discounted online≈ €110 (€1.10/mL)
Olfazeta as a designer alternativeMaison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540, 70 mL - the thing being imitated≈ €300 (€4.29/mL)
Semester activity requirement - €375 every six monthsBuying perfume when you want perfume€0
Monthly personal quota to unlock network pay - €125-€312.50No quota, no rank, no lapse, no reactivation order€0
Total as sold
≈ €435 in the first six months for a self-consumer on the LITE kit - about 750 mL of fragrance
Total, built yourself
≈ €435 buys roughly 5,200 mL of supermarket EDP, or about 1,700 mL of Zara

Price-to-value

On the mainstream 70-millilitre line the verdict is unambiguous: at €0.50 per millilitre it is roughly six times Lidl and two to three times Zara for the same job, and the 30-millilitre format at €0.60 is the worst value in the range. Two things genuinely cut the other way and both deserve saying. Against the direct-to-consumer clone houses - Dossier and ALT Fragrances - Chogan wins on price, and against the designer originals it is not close. And the Luxury line at a stated 30% extrait is a different product from a five-euro supermarket bottle whose standard criticism is two to four hours of wear; a buyer who wants all-day longevity is not being served by the cheapest comparator, and that is a real difference rather than marketing air. At the consultant price of €0.25 per millilitre the range is competitive with Zara, which is exactly why so many registered consultants are self-consumers who never sell anything. Buying at €17.50 what you would otherwise pay €35 for is a rational thing to do. It is just not a business, and the honest benchmark for the discount is the open market, not the company’s own catalog price.

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 5% 60% 20%
The self-consumer - joins for the 50% discount on the LITE kit, never sells anything, holds the semester quotaThe part-time seller - OLFAZETA kit, 10-14 bottles a month to colleagues and friends, no downline, ~20 hrs/monthThe network builder - PLATINUM kit, holds the 150 AP quota, recruits and supports lines, ~60 hrs/month

The self-consumer

joins for the 50% discount on the LITE kit, never sells anything, holds the semester quota

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 3% −€250
6 mo 4% −€435
1 yr 5% −€810
3 yr 5% −€2,300
5 yr 5% −€3,800

The part-time seller

OLFAZETA kit, 10-14 bottles a month to colleagues and friends, no downline, ~20 hrs/month

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 45% +€180
6 mo 55% +€520
1 yr 58% +€1,200
3 yr 60% +€4,200
5 yr 60% +€7,000

The network builder

PLATINUM kit, holds the 150 AP quota, recruits and supports lines, ~60 hrs/month

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 8% −€600
6 mo 10% −€900
1 yr 14% −€400
3 yr 18% −€900
5 yr 20% −€1,400

Methodology note. These are MODELED outcome ranges, not claims, not company data and not a prediction about any individual. They have to be modeled rather than anchored, because no income disclosure exists for this company in any of the 90-plus markets it says it serves, in any language - which is itself the most important fact on this page for anyone trying to forecast an outcome. ANCHORED to published figures: the €0 registration, the €60 to €619.90 kit range, the 50% dealer margin, the €35 catalog and €17.50 consultant price on the 70-millilitre fragrance, the 100/150/250 monthly active-point quota at €125/€187.50/€312.50, the 300-point semester requirement and 350-point reactivation order effective 1 March 2026, the rank percentages and minimum-line requirements from the plan, and the 17.94% effective ritenuta on commissions under the incaricato regime. Also anchored to the company’s own two published numbers, which imply about €1,187 of purchasing per consultant per year across a claimed 160,000 consultants. MODELED by us: the proportion of each cohort in cumulative profit, the cohort definitions themselves, the resale sell-through rates, and the time cost. One calibration that cuts in the company’s favor: the part-time seller profile is genuinely positive at every horizon, because a 50% margin on a single unit with no minimum and no autoship is a real trading arrangement, and that cohort uses none of the network plan. One that cuts against: the self-consumer profile is negative at every horizon by construction, because the semester quota is a purchase obligation and the honest benchmark for the discount is the open market rather than the company’s own catalog price. Neither profile captures the risk that dominates the file - that the entire relationship sits inside a company under judicial administration, and the consultant owns none of it.

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
Comparison lists matching Chogan numbers to designer brand names
THE LARGEST UNMANAGED RISK ON THIS PAGE
Publishing, forwarding, screenshotting or verbally reciting a table that matches a Chogan number to a designer original is the specific conduct the CJEU held unlawful in L’Oréal v Bellure (C-487/07, 18 June 2009) and that the Spanish courts held unlawful against a smell-alike chain through to the Supreme Court, which ordered the defendant to renumber its product codes because the numbers themselves had become the vehicle of the association. The Tribunale di Torino applied the same line in a case brought by Chanel. There is no defense that the comparison is true. The company sells numbers and stays clean; the seller who supplies the correspondence is the person a trade-mark proprietor writes to. Chogan does not indemnify you, and no recruitment material read in six languages mentions this once.
Brand names used as keywords, hashtags or listing titles
SAME EXPOSURE, MORE TRACEABLE
Marketplace listings reading "ricorda [BRAND]" and social posts tagged with designer names are the easiest form of this conduct for a rights holder to find and the easiest to act on. The practical consequence is not a catastrophic damages award; it is a cease-and-desist letter from a luxury house’s Italian counsel, a listing takedown, a marketplace account strike and, if ignored, an inibitoria with a penalty for each day of continued infringement - against an expected profit of €17.50 a bottle.
Retail resale at the 50% dealer margin
PERMITTED AND GENUINELY WORKABLE
Buy at 50% off catalog, one unit at a time, no minimum volume, no autoship, and resell at catalog. This is an ordinary wholesale-retail arrangement and it is the only mechanism in the whole offer that reliably makes a participant money. It requires no downline, no points and no rank.
Home parties and in-person selling
THE STATUTORY CHANNEL
Law 173/2005 defines vendita diretta a domicilio as the collection of orders at a consumer’s residence or in temporary premises, and requires every incaricato to carry a numbered, photographed tesserino di riconoscimento issued and updated annually by the company. Whether Chogan issues them could not be confirmed - a specimen could not be retrieved - and a person operating without one is operating outside the statute.
The personalized e-commerce site supplied by the company
PROVIDED FREE - AND THE COMPANY OWNS IT
The 2018 company plan document offers a personalized online store at no stated cost, which is a real convenience. It is also the mechanism by which the customer, the order history and the data sit with the company rather than the consultant. It is not an asset you can build equity in, and it is not an asset you can sell.
Marketplace selling on Amazon, eBay and similar
HAPPENS, AND CARRIES THE COMPARISON RISK
Independent third parties list the product to buyers who have never heard of the plan, which is genuine evidence of end demand. But marketplace listings are also where the brand-comparison language most often appears, and marketplaces enforce trade-mark complaints faster than any court. Whether the company restricts marketplace selling could not be established, because the terms and conditions could not be retrieved.
Income claiming by consultants on social media
DENSE, AND MEASURED AGAINST NOTHING
Because no income disclosure exists in any market, there is no published benchmark against which any claim can be tested. The field circulates rank-income tables running to €105,000 a month at the top rank; these are distributor-authored, carry their own disclaimers that they are not official company material, and are not company data. An unverifiable claim is not a proven false one - but a company that publishes no outcome data has also removed the only means of checking.
The company’s own marketing and newsroom
PRODUCT-LED, WITH VANITY METRICS
The corporate site avoids naming other brands and publishes operating claims instead: more than 160,000 consultants, more than 90 countries, more than 100 new Managers every month. These are unaudited marketing figures and are inconsistent with distributor-published headcounts of 250,000 in 40-plus countries. No public statement addressing the arrests could be found anywhere in the company’s own channels.
The evidence

Red flags and green flags

Red flags

15
1The founder and chief executive was taken into pre-trial detention in May 2024
Custodia cautelare in carcere on 30 May 2024, on charges of criminal association aimed at tax fraud, money laundering and self-laundering, plus tax and bankruptcy offenses. Investigative and precautionary stage; no conviction; presumed innocent.
2The company itself is an investigated party and is under judicial administration
Chogan Group S.p.A. is under investigation as an entity under D.Lgs. 231/2001, and was entrusted to a court-appointed amministratore giudiziario as part of the €355 million preventive seizure. A participant’s entire asset sits inside a business someone else is now running under court supervision, and no contractual claim on that customer base survives a disposal.
3€355 million under preventive seizure, and €18 million more in April 2025
Roughly half in bank accounts and half in some 200 properties, cash and luxury goods, expressly including the investigated company. A preventive seizure is a pre-trial measure, not a fine and not a forfeiture - but its scale is far larger than the company’s own filed revenue, which implies a wider group perimeter that could not be mapped.
4A second arrest in April 2025 for allegedly defying the first
House arrest for the founder and the accountant, on an allegation that they continued to take operational decisions and provide consulting without the knowledge of the judicial administration, with a further €18 million seized against invoices for objectively non-existent transactions. Allegation stage; no conviction.
5The alleged scheme abused the very legal status the participant occupies
Prosecutors allege the principals were "fittiziamente qualificati come venditori porta a porta" to obtain an effective IRPEF rate of about 18% against the 43% otherwise due. That is the Law 173/2005 incaricato regime - the identical container every consultant sits in. Nothing about that makes an ordinary consultant’s status unlawful, and for a genuine part-time seller under €5,000 the regime is entirely proper.
6A €22,459,167 net loss on €189,911,985 of revenue in 2024
A minus 11.83% net margin, against €150,000 of share capital, in the same year as the seizure. A net loss is not a finding of wrongdoing - but a plan being paid out of a loss-making trading position is not being funded from comfortable margin. EBITDA and the balance sheet are paywalled, so no view is taken on solvency.
7No income disclosure exists, in any market, in any language
Searched in Italian, English, German, French, Romanian, Polish and Latvian across the corporate site, the country storefronts and the distributor field. Nothing. The rank-income tables in circulation are distributor-authored and explicitly disclaimed as unofficial.
8Every rank requires a minimum number of personally recruited lines
2 at Partner and Junior Leader, 3 from Senior Leader through Sapphire, 5 from Emerald upward. No amount of personal selling substitutes: a consultant moving €10,000 a month with no recruits earns the dealer margin and exactly zero network commission. That is a plan paying for structure rather than for sales, at the margin.
9Points accrue on purchase, not on verified resale
About 0.80 points per euro of consultant-price buying, with no retail-sales-verification rule, no registered-customer volume requirement and no equivalent of a 70% rule anywhere in the plan. It cannot distinguish a consultant who sold a hundred bottles from one who bought a hundred.
10A personal purchase quota gates every euro of network commission
100 AP (about €125 a month) for the 4% to 8% bands, 150 AP (€187.50) for 12% to 16%, 250 AP (€312.50) for 23% and above - payable whether or not anyone else ever orders. The company’s own 2018 plan document set the equivalent gate at €50 to €75, so it has roughly quadrupled.
11The semester threshold was raised unilaterally from 200 to 300 points on 1 March 2026
About €375 of purchases every six months to keep consultant pricing, with a 350-point (≈ €437.50) minimum reactivation order after a lapse. The direction of travel on ongoing purchase obligations is upward, and it is not a change a participant can plan around.
12The equivalence model transfers the legal risk from the company to the seller
Chogan sells numbers and publishes no comparison list. The consultant supplies the correspondence - and that is the conduct L’Oréal v Bellure, the Spanish smell-alike line through to the Supreme Court, and the Tribunale di Torino in the Chanel case all hold unlawful. No recruitment material read in six languages mentions it once.
13The €5,000 tax cliff sits exactly where the mid-ranks pay out
The simple incaricato regime - 22% presumed-expense deduction, 23% final ritenuta, an effective 17.94%, no partita IVA, no VAT, no INPS - stops at €5,000 net, a gross ceiling of about €6,410 a year. A Senior Leader at 12% on a 3,500-point network grosses roughly €6,300. Crossing it forces partita IVA, INPS gestione separata and VAT, permanently. Nothing in the recruitment material discloses it.
14Not on the Italian self-regulator’s published effective-members list
The sector’s principal Italian self-regulatory association publishes a full-member list; this company does not appear on it as of the retrieval date, despite being larger on filed revenue than most companies that do. Non-membership is not misconduct. It is the absence of a binding code of conduct and an external consumer complaints channel.
15The widely repeated "+31% to $590M" is a trade estimate, not a company figure
It comes from a direct-selling trade publication and has never been reconciled to a filed bilancio. For the two years where both exist, that publication’s series runs at roughly 2.2× the filed statutory revenue, because it is measuring retail volume rather than turnover. The filed 2024 figure is €189.9 million, with a €22.5 million loss.

Green flags

9
1Filed, public, multi-year accounts
Italy requires companies of this form to file annual accounts and this one files them. Revenue, the profit line, headcount and a four-year trend were established without asking the company anything. In a sector where a great many operators are incorporated where nothing is filed at all, that is a material transparency advantage and it should be said first.
2No enrollment bonus of any kind
Six languages of plan documentation were read and not one described a payment for signing somebody up. No fast-start, no coded bonus on entry, no pack-scaled sponsor payment. In this sector that is genuinely uncommon and it is the strongest single point in the plan’s favor.
3Free registration, no autoship, no annual fee, no minimum order
Confirmed independently in German, Latvian and Italian consultant sources. The recruit is not out a joining fee, a renewal or a subscription, and there is no monthly order they must place merely to remain enrolled. The entry terms are the lightest graded on this site.
4Statutory participant protections that actually bite
Law 173/2005 art. 4 gives a 10-day right of withdrawal from the consultancy contract, requires the company to repurchase at least 90% of the cost of unsold stock within 30 days of termination, prohibits requiring purchase as a condition of participation, and requires that remuneration consist solely of commissions on transactions that were accepted and regularly executed. These apply by operation of law whether or not the company publishes them.
5A real 50% dealer margin on a real physical product
Available on a single unit, with no volume minimum and no autoship. A participant who only ever sells and never recruits has a coherent, honest small trading business - and it is the only cohort modeled on this page that is positive at every horizon.
6No securities exposure of any kind
No token, no staking, no yield, no revenue-share investment and no passive return on capital. The collaborator agreement itself states the consultant is not a securities holder, joint venturer, mandatary or beneficiary of the company. There is nothing here for a capital-at-risk analysis to bite on, and the criminal proceedings do not change that.
7A clean regulatory record outside the criminal file
No AGCM istruttoria, provvedimento, accepted commitments or consumer alert naming the company could be located. No consumer-protection action was found in Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Romania or the United Kingdom - including from a Polish regulator currently among Europe’s most aggressive pyramid enforcers. No EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) alert naming the brand. No trade-mark proceeding naming the company as defendant. Eight years of operation at scale without any of those is a real and creditable fact.
8Real manufacturing, real logistics, real employees, real end demand
Roughly 4,000 SKUs, 146 to 167 staff, shipping to more than 90 countries, an own-brand app, and product resold by independent third parties to buyers who have never heard of the compensation plan and have no income motive at all. The product exists and is bought by people who are not participants.
9Part of the distributor field self-polices better than the company does
The German consultant page documenting the new 300-point rule tells prospects to check whether they would genuinely use €375 of product every six months before signing, and states plainly that there is no guarantee of any particular earnings. That is better disclosure than the company itself provides anywhere.
What would move this grade

We would like to be wrong about this

Upward

  • A published income disclosure with medians, modal earnings by rank and a stated percentage of consultants earning nothing - the single largest available upgrade, because it would replace the biggest vacuum on this page with data, and it would move participant economics several points on its own.
  • Resolution of the criminal proceedings in the defendants’ favor, or discharge of the judicial administration and the preventive seizure - which is the only thing that lifts the ceiling, and would move the ownership score materially.
  • A retail-sales-verification rule requiring a stated share of qualifying volume to be sold to registered non-participant customers, removal of the minimum-lines requirement from rank qualification, and a dated compensation-plan PDF and terms and conditions published on the company’s own domain with the withdrawal and buyback rights stated in the same document.

Downward

  • Any conviction in the Trani proceedings, or an extension of the investigation to the compensation structure itself rather than the tax treatment.
  • Any AGCM istruttoria under Annex I point 14 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive or the Codice del Consumo, any consumer-protection action in another member state, or a trade-mark action naming this company rather than its resellers.
  • Introduction of an enrollment bonus, a compulsory autoship or an annual renewal fee; a further increase in the monthly or semester point thresholds; or a second consecutive loss-making year.
The better trade

Grade is D, score 4.67. The lightest entry terms in this sector attached to the most unresolved governance file - and every measure in that file is pre-trial, with no conviction anywhere.

Three things about this company are genuinely better than its reputation and they have to be stated without hedging, because the rest of the page depends on the reader believing this part. It costs nothing to register: no joining fee, no annual renewal, no autoship, no minimum monthly order. It pays no enrollment bonus of any kind - six languages of plan documentation, and not one payment for signing somebody up, which is uncommon enough in this sector to be the single strongest fact in the plan’s favor. And the exit is protected by statute rather than by the company’s goodwill: Law 173/2005 art. 4 gives a 10-day right of withdrawal and requires repurchase of at least 90% of the cost of unsold stock within 30 days, enforceable whether or not the company advertises it. Add filed public accounts, roughly 4,000 real SKUs, 146 to 167 employees, and product resold by third parties to buyers with no income motive whatever, and the honest description is a real manufacturer with unusually decent terms.

The governance file is why the grade is where it is, and it needs its stage labels on every clause. On 30 May 2024 the Procura di Trani obtained precautionary measures in Operazione "Paradise World": pre-trial detention for the founder, the co-founder and the company accountant, house arrest for a fourth, nine individuals under investigation and the company itself an investigated party under D.Lgs. 231/2001. A €355,000,000 preventive seizure included the company, which was entrusted to a judicial administrator. On 3 April 2025 the founder and the accountant were placed under house arrest again on an allegation of continuing to run the group in breach of the interdiction, with €18 million more seized. Prosecutors allege the principals were fictitiously classified as door-to-door sellers to be taxed at an effective 18% against 43% - the same statutory container every consultant sits in, which is what turns a distant governance story into a participant-facing one. And then the necessary sentence, which is not a formality: these are allegations, every measure listed is pre-trial, there is no conviction, no committal for trial that could be located, no first-instance judgment and no finding of liability by any court or regulator anywhere. The defendants are presumed innocent. The company continues to trade under supervision.

The economics are the third element and they are where a prospective participant should spend the most time, because they do not depend on how the criminal case turns out. No income disclosure exists in any of the 90-plus markets, in any language, so nobody outside the company knows what the median consultant earns. Points accrue when you buy, not when a sale to a real customer is verified. Every rank requires recruited lines - 2, then 3, then 5 - so selling alone earns zero network commission at any volume. A €125 to €312.50 monthly personal quota gates all network pay and the semester requirement rose from 200 to 300 points on 1 March 2026. The filed accounts show a €22.5 million loss on €189.9 million of revenue. And the "+31% to $590M" figure circulating in the trade press is an outside estimate of retail volume, running at roughly 2.2× the filed statutory revenue in the years where both exist - not the company’s revenue, and not audited. Meanwhile the one thing that does work is unglamorous: buy at 50% off, sell at catalog, keep €17.50 a bottle, and use none of the plan.

1

If you want the fragrance, price it per millilitre before you sign anything

The mainstream line is €0.50 per millilitre at catalog. Lidl is about €0.08, Aldi about €0.09, Mercadona €0.06 to €0.12 and Zara €0.15 to €0.30 for the same job. If you specifically want a high-concentration extrait with all-day wear, that is a genuine reason to pay more, and the Luxury line at €1.04 per millilitre partly earns it - but then compare it against Dossier and ALT Fragrances, not against the supermarket, and against Dior Sauvage at €1.10 per millilitre before you conclude the premium tier is a bargain. A consultant kit bought purely for the discount is a purchase obligation of €375 every six months, not a discount card.

2

Do the retail business and skip the network entirely

The one profile that reliably makes money buys the €149.90 kit, clears it in about nine bottles, sells ten to fourteen a month and keeps roughly €142 to €200 after samples, packaging and travel - using no downline, no points and no rank. The network plan adds nothing to that cohort and the monthly quota subtracts from it. If you are going to do this at all, be a small merchant, not a builder.

3

Never publish, forward or recite a list matching numbers to designer brands

This is the single most under-disclosed risk in the whole offer and nobody in the recruitment chain will tell you. Under L’Oréal v Bellure and the smell-alike authority that followed it in Spain and at the Tribunale di Torino, the comparison list is the unlawful act, there is no defense that it is true, and the liability lands on whoever publishes it - which is you, not the company. Get any instruction to "explain the equivalences" in writing, and read it as what it is.

4

Ask three questions in writing before you enrol, and keep the answers

One: is the judicial administration still in force, and who is the administrator? Two: where is the current, dated compensation plan PDF and the general terms and conditions, published on the company’s own domain - the site returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval, so ask a human. Three: how does the company implement the Law 173/2005 art. 4 buyback, at what percentage, in what condition and over what window? If any of the three comes back vague, that is the answer, and it costs you nothing to have asked because registration is free.

The filed accounts say €189.9 million of revenue and a €22.5 million loss; the figure everyone repeats says $590 million - and one of those two numbers was filed with a registry.
Scorecard

Nine dimensions, weighted

Comp structure & KoscotDoes the plan pay for recruitment or for sales to real customers?
20%
4.5
The credits are real and they come first. There is no enrollment bounty of any kind - six languages of plan documentation were read and not one described a payment for signing somebody up, which in this sector is genuinely uncommon and is the strongest single fact in the plan’s favor. Registration is free, there is no autoship, no annual fee and no minimum monthly order, and the dealer margin is a straightforward 50% off catalog on a single unit with no volume condition. A participant who only ever buys at €17.50 and resells at €35 has a coherent little trading business and owes the plan nothing. Against that, three structural features. First, points accrue on purchase, not on verified resale: every euro of buying generates about 0.80 points, one point being roughly €1.25 of consultant-price volume, and there is no retail-sales-verification rule, no registered-customer volume requirement and no equivalent of a 70% rule anywhere in the plan. It cannot distinguish a consultant who sold a hundred bottles from one who bought a hundred. Second, this is a stairstep-differential plan - commission on each first line is your rank percentage minus that line’s percentage, multiplied by their volume - and every rank from the bottom up requires a minimum number of personally recruited lines: 2 at Partner (500 points, 4%) and Junior Leader (1,500 points, 8%), 3 at Senior Leader (3,500 points, 12%), Team Leader (7,000 points, 16%), Amethyst (15,000 points, 23%), Onyx (25,000 points, 25%) and Sapphire (50,000 points, 26%), and 5 from Emerald (100,000 points, 28%) through Ruby (200,000, 29.5%), Diamond (400,000, 30.5%), Manager (800,000, 32.5%), Senior Manager (1,600,000, 33.5%), World Manager (3.5m, 34%), Top Manager (7m, 34.5%) and President (15m, 35%). Selling does not substitute: a consultant moving €10,000 of product a month with no recruits earns the dealer margin and exactly zero network commission. Third, a monthly personal quota of €125, €187.50 or €312.50 depending on tier gates every euro of network pay, and the semester activity requirement rose from 200 to 300 points on 1 March 2026. Note also that the widely circulated claim of a level-based structure - 10% on level one, 5% on level two, 3% thereafter - is inconsistent with the company’s own 2018 plan document and with every non-English reconstruction, and is assessed here as incorrect. The top three ranks require organizations moving more volume than the company’s entire filed revenue, and are aspirational furniture rather than attainable positions.
Securities exposureAny passive return on capital? Howey, staking, tokens, withdrawal friction.
15%
9.5
This dimension measures one thing only: capital handed over by the recruit against a promise of return. On that test this is one of the cleanest files graded on this site, and it is important to say why the number is high without implying the company is therefore good overall - the criminal proceedings, the seizure and the judicial administration do not move this number at all, because none of them is a securities exposure to the participant. There is no token, no staking, no yield, no revenue-share investment, no capital account and no passive return of any kind on offer. Registration costs nothing. What the recruit buys is a physical starter kit at consultant pricing, from about €60 for the LITE kit up to €619.90 for the top one - product at wholesale, not licenses, training modules or branded stationery, which is a categorically different object. The collaborator agreement itself expressly disclaims the relationship: a Collaborator is stated not to be an employee, agent, affiliate, securities holder, joint venturer, mandatary or beneficiary of the company. And Law 173/2005 art. 4 layers statutory protection on top, by operation of law whether or not the company advertises it: a 10-day right of withdrawal from the consultancy contract, a requirement that the company repurchase at least 90% of the cost of unsold stock within 30 days of termination, and a prohibition on requiring purchase as a condition of participation. It is not a 10 for one reason: the €125 to €312.50 monthly personal quota is a genuine recurring capital outlay made in the expectation of network pay, and money laid out every month in expectation of a return from other people’s activity is the faint securities-shaped shadow in an otherwise clean structure.
Ownership & track recordWho runs it, what did they run before, and what happened to it.
15%
1.5
This is the lowest number on the page and it is the reason the grade sits where it does. Operazione "Paradise World", Procura di Trani, 30 May 2024: the founder, chief executive and legal representative taken into custodia cautelare in carcere alongside the co-founder and the company accountant, a fourth person placed under house arrest, a fifth banned from entrepreneurial activity for six months, nine natural persons under investigation and the company itself an investigated party under D.Lgs. 231/2001. A €355,000,000 preventive seizure - roughly half in bank accounts, half in some 200 properties, cash and luxury goods - expressly included the investigated company, which was entrusted to a court-appointed judicial administrator. On 3 April 2025 the founder and the accountant were placed under house arrest again, on an allegation of continuing to run the group in breach of the interdiction, with a further €18 million seized against invoices for objectively non-existent transactions. What lifts this from a distant governance story to a participant-facing risk is the alleged mechanism. Prosecutors say the principals were "fittiziamente qualificati come venditori porta a porta" - fictitiously classified as door-to-door sellers under Law 173/2005 - to obtain an effective IRPEF rate of about 18% against the 43% otherwise applicable. That is the identical legal container into which every ordinary consultant is placed, and which is entirely proper for a genuine part-time seller under the €5,000 threshold. Now the necessary counterweight, and it is not a formality. These are allegations. Every measure listed above is a pre-trial precautionary measure ordered on a standard of serious indications of guilt, which is a threshold for detention and not a determination of criminal liability. There is no conviction. There is no committal for trial, no Riesame outcome and no first-instance judgment that could be located, and no finding of liability by any court or regulator anywhere. The defendants are presumed innocent. The company continues to trade, ship to 90-plus countries and file accounts under judicial supervision. It scores 1.5 rather than the site floor precisely because nothing has been adjudicated - a floor score is reserved for files where something has been.
Product reality & demandWould a rational buyer purchase this if no income offer existed?
12%
6.5
There is a real manufacturer here and it should be said plainly. Roughly 4,000 SKUs across fragrance, color cosmetics, skincare, the Brilhome home-care line, food supplements, Italian food and accessories; 146 to 167 employees; shipping to more than 90 countries; an own-brand app; and product retailed by independent third parties on marketplaces to buyers who have never heard of the compensation plan and have no income motive whatever. That last point is the one that matters most on this dimension: genuine end demand exists independent of the opportunity. The fragrance line is stated at 20% to 30% essence concentration, higher than the 15% to 20% typical of designer eau de parfum, and if accurate that is a real product difference rather than marketing air - though no independent laboratory verification of the concentration could be located. Against that: Trustpilot sits at 3.0 across 1,161 reviews, which is aggregated consumer sentiment and not a finding by anyone, with recurrent complaints about delivery, customer service and - more concerningly - ingredient irritation in both the fragrance range and the Brilhome cleaning line. On regulatory status, stage-label it precisely. Cosmetics sold in the EU must be notified through the Cosmetic Products Notification Portal under art. 13 of Regulation 1223/2009. The CPNP is a notification portal, not an approval system: no authority reviews, tests, assesses or approves a product before or because of notification, and any marketing that presents CPNP registration as an EU approval or safety endorsement is misdescribing it. The CPNP is also not a public register, so no Chogan-specific notification status could be confirmed or denied. What can be reported is that no EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) alert naming the brand was located - a product-safety notification is not a finding against a business model, and its absence is not a certificate of safety, but eight years of trading at scale without one is a genuine point in the company’s favor. Marked down finally for category sprawl: perfume, degreaser, collagen sachets and jewelry in one catalog optimises for points per household rather than category expertise.
Participant economicsReal cost in, realistic money out, and whether they publish the numbers.
10%
2.5
No income disclosure exists. Not a thin one, not an old one - none, in any of the 90-plus markets the company says it serves. Searches were run in Italian, English, German, French, Romanian, Polish and Latvian across the corporate site, the country storefronts and the distributor field, and nothing was found in any of them. The rank-by-rank income tables that circulate online, running from about €2,500 a month at Amethyst to €105,000 a month at Manager, are authored by independent distributors, carry their own disclaimers that they are not official company material, and are not company data. European direct sellers are generally not obliged to publish disclosures, so this is the sector norm rather than an outlier - but a norm is still an absence, and it means nobody outside the company knows what the median consultant earns. What can be reconstructed is arithmetic from the company’s own two published figures: €189.9 million of wholesale revenue divided across the 160,000 consultants it claims is about €1,187 of purchasing per consultant per year, roughly €99 a month at consultant prices, before any cost of selling and before the very large fraction who buy only for themselves. On the cost side the numbers are firm: the monthly personal quota of €125, €187.50 or €312.50 is payable whether or not a single other person in the organization ever orders anything, and the semester requirement of 300 points is about €375 every six months just to keep consultant pricing, with a 350-point reactivation order after a lapse. Free entry is a genuine mitigation and it is credited here - the participant is not out a joining fee, an annual renewal or an autoship, and that is why this is 2.5 and not lower. The absence of any published outcome data is not a mitigation and is not credited.
Price-to-valueWhat the same capability costs on the open market.
8%
4.0
The mainstream equivalence line is €35 for 70 millilitres at catalog, which is €0.50 per millilitre. The open market supplies the identical job - smell like an expensive designer fragrance without paying designer prices - at Lidl for roughly €0.08 per millilitre on the Suddenly and G. Bellini ranges, Aldi Lacura at about €0.09, Mercadona own-label equivalences at €0.06 to €0.12, and Zara at €0.15 to €0.30 across the Emotions and main ranges. So the customer is paying a two- to sixfold premium over the open market own dupe tier, before the designer originals are considered at all. The 30-millilitre format at €18 is worse still at €0.60 per millilitre. Two things cut the other way and both are real. Chogan is materially cheaper than the direct-to-consumer clone houses - Dossier at roughly €0.54 to €0.90 per millilitre and ALT Fragrances at €0.65 to €0.82 - and dramatically cheaper than the originals, with Dior Sauvage at about €1.10 per millilitre at boutique price and Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 at about €4.29. And the Luxury line at €52 for 50 millilitres, €1.04 per millilitre at a stated 30% extrait concentration, partly earns its price: a buyer who wants eight-hour longevity is not served by a five-euro supermarket bottle, and that is a genuine product difference rather than a marketing story. At the consultant price of €0.25 per millilitre the range is competitive with Zara, which is precisely why so many registered consultants are in fact self-consumers who never sell anything. Buying at €17.50 what you would otherwise pay €35 for is a rational thing to do. It is simply not a business.
Payout sustainabilityCan the company fund the plan out of margin, or only out of inflow?
8%
3.5
This is the hardest number in the file and it comes from filed accounts rather than from anybody’s opinion. The three-year statutory series runs €67,861,279 of revenue with a €1,538,600 profit in 2022, €140,720,469 with a €2,408,278 profit in 2023, and €189,911,985 with a net loss of €22,459,167 in 2024 - so revenue grew 107.4% and then 34.9%, and the net result swung by roughly minus 1,032% into an 11.83% negative net margin. Share capital is €150,000. Set alongside a €355 million preventive seizure and a further €18 million seized in April 2025, that is a company distributing commissions out of a loss-making trading position rather than out of comfortable margin. On paper the model can fund the plan: take €100 of catalog-price product and €50 is the selling consultant dealer margin, €50 is the company gross revenue, of which up to €17.50 - 35% of wholesale, and only at the very top rank - can flow back out as network commission, leaving at least €32.50 for cost of goods, packaging, logistics, staff, marketing, overhead and tax. In practice the residual after all of that was 1.71% of revenue in 2023 and minus 11.83% in 2024. Note also that the "67% payout" figure quoted in the direct-selling trade press is computing against retail volume and counting the dealer discount as commission; measured against the company’s own revenue the network ceiling is 35%, and the realized rate will be well below it because most volume is generated by consultants whose upline sits only one or two percentage bands above them. Two honest caveats: a net loss is not a finding of wrongdoing, and EBITDA and the balance sheet are paywalled, so no view is taken here on liquidity or solvency.
Marketing conductIncome claims, regulator run-ins, hype, deadline stacking.
7%
3.0
Three things sit on this dimension. First, there is no income disclosure at all against which any claim could be measured - and against that vacuum the distributor field runs a dense volume of income claiming across social channels, with "€100 to €500 a month is common" as the standard entry pitch and third-party rank tables running to €105,000 a month at Manager, all of it unverifiable in either direction. The company’s own site contributes vanity metrics of the same family: more than 100 new Managers every month, more than 160,000 consultants, figures that are unaudited and mutually inconsistent with distributor-published headcounts. Second, and more distinctive, the entire product architecture is brand evocation. Fragrances are sold as numbers - No. 16, No. 94, No. 118, No. 129 - with olfactory descriptions, and the number is worthless as a marketing asset unless the buyer knows which designer original it corresponds to. The company itself stays clean: it sells codes, publishes no comparison list, and offers a search-by-note tool instead. The correspondence is supplied by the network, on consultant-authored comparison lists, in WhatsApp messages, Instagram captions and marketplace listings. That matters legally, because the governing authority is the CJEU judgment in L’Oréal v Bellure, Case C-487/07 (18 June 2009), applied by the English Court of Appeal at [2010] RPC 23: a comparison list matching a smell-alike to a trade-marked original is unlawful comparative advertising under what is now art. 4(g) of Directive 2006/114/EC, and the mark proprietor can stop it under trade-mark law even without confusion, dilution or tarnishment, with no defense that the comparison is true. Spanish courts applied that line against a smell-alike chain through to the Supreme Court and ordered the defendant to renumber its product codes, because the numbers themselves had become the vehicle of the association; the Tribunale di Torino applied it in a case brought by Chanel, holding equivalence tables to violate the proprietor’s exclusive rights. The exposure lands on the consultant who publishes the list, not on the company, and no recruitment material read in six languages mentions it once. Third, and stated squarely as the mitigation: no AGCM proceeding of any kind naming this company could be located, no EU Safety Gate alert naming the brand was found, and no trade-mark action naming the company as defendant was found anywhere. The marketing conduct scored here is the field conduct and the disclosure vacuum, not an adjudicated finding, because there is not one.
Operator terms & exitWho owns the customer, what you forfeit, how hard it is to leave.
5%
5.5
The good part goes first because there is a lot of it and it is unusually good for this sector. Registration is free. There is no annual renewal fee in any market that could be located, no compulsory autoship, and no minimum monthly order - all three confirmed independently in German, Latvian and Italian consultant sources. The kit is optional in principle and is product at wholesale rather than a license or a training bundle. And Law 173/2005 art. 4 supplies statutory rights that most of this sector does not offer at all: a 10-day right of withdrawal from the consultancy contract, a company obligation to repurchase at least 90% of the cost of unsold stock within 30 days of termination, a prohibition on requiring purchase as a condition of participation, a requirement that demonstration material be proportionate to the volume of business, and a rule that remuneration consist solely of commissions on transactions that, having been accepted, were regularly executed. Those rights bite whether or not the company publishes them, and a consultant who is refused can enforce them. Against all that: the consultant owns nothing. The customer, the storefront, the order history and the data all sit with the company; the personalized e-commerce site is supplied by the company and is not an asset the consultant can sell. The qualification bar was raised unilaterally from 200 to 300 points per rolling six months on 1 March 2026, with a 350-point minimum reactivation order after a lapse, and the monthly personal quota has roughly quadrupled from the €50 to €75 stated in the company’s own 2018 plan document - that is the kind of change a participant cannot plan around, and the direction of travel on ongoing purchase obligations is upward. And the general terms and conditions could not be retrieved at all: the company’s site returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval and the terms page timed out repeatedly, so how the buyback is implemented in practice, and whether it is published at all, is unknown.
Weighted composite
4.67
D

Dimension profile

Further from center is better. Hover any point.

Comp structure& Koscot 4.5 Securitiesexposure 9.5 Ownership &track record 1.5 Product reality& demand 6.5 Participanteconomics 2.5 Price-to-value 4.0 Payoutsustainability 3.5 Marketingconduct 3.0 Operator terms& exit 5.5

Hard caps that bind here

Non-binding ceiling at D nothing here binds, and the entry exists to say so precisely. The weighted arithmetic on the nine dimensions already lands at 4.67, which is squarely in the D band, so this ceiling describes where the file sits rather than pulling it anywhere. What the ceiling rests on is narrow and factual: criminal proceedings arising from Operazione "Paradise World" remain pending and untried against the founder, the co-founder and the company itself under D.Lgs. 231/2001, and the company remains subject to a €355 million preventive seizure and to a court-appointed judicial administration whose current status could not be established. The participant-facing consequence of that, and it is the only reason a ceiling is written at all, is that a self-employed incaricato who builds a customer base inside a company under judicial administration has no contractual claim on that customer base or downline if the administration disposes of the business, and no visibility into whether the commission machinery - which is part of what is under investigation - will keep functioning. That risk is unknowable to the recruit and is not disclosed at the point of sale. Now say at length what this ceiling does NOT rest on, because a reader must not be able to infer a charge this report has not made. It does not rest on a conviction: there is none. It does not rest on any finding of liability by any court or regulator anywhere: there is none. It does not rest on an AGCM proceeding: no istruttoria, no provvedimento, no accepted commitments and no consumer alert naming the company could be located, and AGCM is an active pyramid-selling enforcer that has fined operators in this space in the millions of euros. It does not rest on a consumer-protection action in any member state: none was found in Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Romania or the United Kingdom, including from a Polish regulator currently among the most aggressive pyramid enforcers in Europe. It does not rest on a product-safety alert: no EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) notification naming the brand was located. It does not rest on a trade-mark judgment against this company: none was found, and the settled line of authority in this field has been applied to other smell-alike sellers rather than to this one. And it does not rest on the exit terms, which are better than most of this sector offers - Law 173/2005 art. 4 gives a statutory 10-day withdrawal right and a repurchase of at least 90% of unsold stock within 30 days, enforceable whether or not the company publishes it. Three things would make a cap actually bind: a conviction in the Trani proceedings; an adverse AGCM finding under Annex I point 14 of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive or the Codice del Consumo; or an insolvency event following a second consecutive loss-making year.

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. Chogan "Piano Crescita 2018" - official growth and compensation plan hosted on chogangroup.com: 50% consultant discount, stairstep differential ("differenza imprenditoriale") from 4% to 23%, Manager Zone company-turnover dividend, car bonus, and the €50/€75 monthly minimum personal purchase gate (PDF)
    Compensation planTier 1Chogan Group S.p.A. · 2018archived copy

    Chogan Group S.p.A. corporate storefront and legal footer, and the company’s official 2018 growth and compensation plan PDF hosted on its own domain - the highest-authority plan document obtained, giving the stairstep-differential architecture, the 50% dealer discount worked example (€33.00 catalog / €16.50 consultant), the car bonus, the turnover dividend and the then-current €50-€75 monthly personal purchase gate

    Not established by this document: The corporate storefront and legal footer at chogangroup.com could not be retrieved directly (the site returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching), so no URL is given for the footer itself. The €33.00 catalog / €16.50 consultant worked example was not located in the retrieved plan text, though the 50% dealer discount it illustrates is stated there.

  2. Chogan "Piano Marketing 2018" - parallel edition of the same plan showing the 17%/23% variant of the qualification ladder and the €75 minimum personal purchase (third-party hosted copy)
    Compensation planTier 3Chogan Group S.p.A. (copy hosted on Yumpu) · 2018archived copy
  3. RegistroAziende - CHOGAN GROUP S.P.A. (P.IVA 07872640722), turnover and profit/loss 2022–2024: €67,861,279 / €1,538,600; €140,720,469 / €2,408,278; €189,911,985 / −€22,459,167
    Corporate registryTier 3RegistroAziende.it (commercial mirror of the Italian Registro Imprese)archived copy

    Filed statutory accounts as reproduced by commercial mirrors of the Registro Imprese (ufficiocamerale.it, fatturatoitalia.it, registroaziende.it, atoka.io) - 2022 revenue €67,861,279 and profit €1,538,600; 2023 revenue €140,720,469 and profit €2,408,278; 2024 revenue €189,911,985 and net loss €22,459,167; share capital €150,000; ATECO 46.45.00; headcount 146-167. Not certified visure and not an audit

    Not established by this document: These are commercial mirrors of Registro Imprese data, not certified visure and not audited accounts, exactly as the report states. The ufficiocamerale.it and fatturatoitalia.it pages named in the prose were not returned by search; three equivalent mirrors plus a fourth carrying the REA number are cited instead.

  4. Aziende.it - Chogan Group S.p.a.: ATECO 46.45, share capital €150,000, 146 employees (2024), registered office Via Adriano Olivetti 24, 00131 Roma, CCIAA di Roma
    Corporate registryTier 3Aziende.it (commercial mirror of the Italian Registro Imprese)archived copy
  5. Atoka - Chogan Group Spa, revenue €189.9m (2024), trend +35.0%, share capital €150.0k, 50–249 employees
    Corporate registryTier 3Atoka (SpazioDati S.r.l.)archived copy
  6. CompanyReports.it - Chogan Group S.p.a., REA RM 1577890, codice fiscale and P.IVA 07872640722, ATECO 46.45
    Corporate registryTier 3CompanyReports.it (AdCapital Srl)archived copy
  7. La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, "Fatture per operazioni inesistenti, interdetti ma continuano a gestire le società: arrestati in due" (3 April 2025) - Paradiso and Scricco placed under house arrest for managing companies under judicial administration; €4m of false invoices in 2023; €13.7m issued as door-to-door sellers at an effective 18% against a top rate of 43%
    ReportingTier 3La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno · 2025-04-03archived copy

    La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, 30 May 2024 and April 2025; Telesveva; Networker Magazine; Barletta News24City, 3 April 2025; Vivere Barletta - Operazione "Paradise World", the five precautionary measures, the nine indagati and the D.Lgs. 231/2001 position of the company, the €355,000,000 preventive seizure and the judicial administration, the alleged 18% against 43% IRPEF mechanism, and the April 2025 re-arrests with a further €18 million seized

  8. Barletta News24City, "Ai domiciliari titolare e commercialista della Chogan Spa" (3 April 2025) - nine indagati in the original case, three jailed, €355m seized, and a further €18,000,000 preventive seizure ordered by the GIP of Trani
    ReportingTier 3Barletta News24City · 2025-04-03archived copy
  9. Ore12, "Operazione 'Paradise World' della Guardia di Finanza. Frode fiscale, sequestrate 355 milioni" (30 May 2024) - full Guardia di Finanza statement: five indagati, seizure of over €355,000,000, the D.Lgs. 231 administrative-liability charge against the company, and the 18% IRPEF mechanism against the 23% lowest personal band
    ReportingTier 3Ore12 (reproducing the Guardia di Finanza / Procura di Trani statement) · 2024-05-30archived copy
  10. Quinto Potere, "Frode fiscale con fatture false, 4 arresti a Barletta" (30 May 2024) - GIP Anna Lucia Altamura's custody order; named indagati Michelangelo Paradiso, Liborio Scelzo, Pietro Luigi Scricco, Arcangela Fumarulo and Christian Scelzo
    ReportingTier 3Quinto Potere · 2024-05-30archived copy
  11. PugliaViva, "Maxi frode fiscale da 355 milioni di euro: coinvolta una società di Barletta" (30 May 2024) - names Chogan as the società per azioni concerned
    ReportingTier 3PugliaViva · 2024-05-30archived copy
  12. ANSA via EspansioneTv, "Frode fiscale con fatture false, gip 'indagati spregiudicati'" (30 May 2024) - ten natural persons under investigation plus one cosmetics company
    ReportingTier 3ANSA (published by EspansioneTv) · 2024-05-30archived copy
  13. Legge 17 agosto 2005, n. 173 - "Disciplina della vendita diretta a domicilio e tutela del consumatore dalle forme di vendita piramidali", full consolidated text (arts. 1–7)
    RegulatorTier 1Parlamento della Repubblica Italiana · 2005-08-17archived copy

    Legge 17 agosto 2005 n. 173 (parlamento.it, full text) with an article-by-article practitioner summary - art. 1 definitions, art. 3 tesserino and the €5,000 threshold, art. 4 the ban on requiring purchase, the 10-day withdrawal, the ≥90% buyback within 30 days and the executed-transactions rule, art. 5 the pyramid ban, art. 6 presumptive indicators and penalties of six months to a year or €100,000-€600,000

  14. Legge 17 agosto 2005, n. 173 - official publication, Gazzetta Ufficiale Serie Generale n. 204 of 2 September 2005 (in force 17 September 2005)
    RegulatorTier 1Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana · 2005-09-02archived copy
  15. Legge 173/2005 on Normattiva (portale della legge vigente) - currently-in-force consolidated version
    RegulatorTier 1Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato - Normattiva · 2005-08-17archived copy
  16. Directive 2005/29/EC (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive), consolidated text - Annex I point 14, pyramid promotional schemes
    RegulatorTier 1European Union - EUR-Lex · 2005-05-11archived copy

    Directive 2005/29/EC Annex I point 14 and its transposition at arts. 20-26 of the Codice del Consumo (D.Lgs. 206/2005), with CJEU authority on the cumulative three-limb test (4finance, C-515/12; Loterie Nationale, C-667/15); AGCM public case releases and press archive, searched for any proceeding naming the company - none located

    Not established by this document: No URLs were retrieved for the two CJEU authorities on the cumulative three-limb test (4finance UAB v Valstybinė vartotojų teisių apsaugos tarnyba, C-515/12, and Loterie Nationale, C-667/15), nor for arts. 20–26 of the Codice del Consumo (D.Lgs. 206/2005). The AGCM finding is a negative one - a search of AGCM case releases returned no proceeding naming Chogan - and a negative finding has no URL to cite.

  17. Commission Notice - Guidance on the interpretation and application of Directive 2005/29/EC (2021/C 526/01), §3.2 Pyramid schemes - Annex I No 14 (PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1European Commission - EUR-Lex · 2021-12-29archived copy
  18. Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products - full text including art. 4 (Responsible Person), art. 11 (Product Information File) and art. 13 (notification to the CPNP)
    RegulatorTier 1European Union - EUR-Lex · 2009-11-30archived copy

    Regulation (EC) 1223/2009 arts. 4, 11 and 13 with the European Commission CPNP user manual and an Italian practitioner summary - Responsible Person, Product Information File, and CPNP as a notification portal that involves no review, assessment or approval; EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) searched for any alert naming the brand - none located

    Not established by this document: The European Commission CPNP user manual and the Italian practitioner summary were not located. The EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) search is a negative finding - no alert naming the brand - and has no citable URL.

  19. Judgment of the Court (First Chamber), 18 June 2009, L'Oréal SA and Others v Bellure NV and Others, Case C-487/07 - full text (PDF)
    Court recordTier 1Court of Justice of the European Union (via EUR-Lex) · 2009-06-18archived copy

    L’Oréal SA v Bellure NV, Case C-487/07 (CJEU, 18 June 2009), applied by the Court of Appeal at [2010] RPC 23; Directive 2006/114/EC art. 4(g) as transposed by D.Lgs. 145/2007; the Spanish smell-alike line through the Alicante EU Trade Mark Court and the Provincial Court of Alicante to the Supreme Court, including the renumbering remedy; Tribunale di Torino (Business Division) on equivalence tables in the Chanel case; art. 20 Codice della Proprietà Industriale and art. 2598 no. 2 Codice Civile

    Not established by this document: No URLs were retrieved for the Court of Appeal's application of the CJEU ruling at [2010] RPC 23, for Directive 2006/114/EC art. 4(g) or its Italian transposition at D.Lgs. 145/2007, for the Spanish smell-alike line (Alicante EU Trade Mark Court, Provincial Court of Alicante, Tribunal Supremo, including the renumbering remedy), for the Tribunale di Torino decision on equivalence tables in the Chanel case, or for art. 20 Codice della Proprietà Industriale and art. 2598 no. 2 Codice Civile.

  20. Summary of the judgment in Case C-487/07, L'Oréal v Bellure - operative findings on Art. 3a(1)(g) and (h) of Directive 84/450 (comparison lists and "imitations or replicas") (PDF)
    Court recordTier 1Court of Justice of the European Union (via EUR-Lex) · 2009-06-18archived copy
  21. Case C-487/07 - reference for a preliminary ruling from the Court of Appeal (Civil Division), England and Wales, 5 November 2007 (the five referred questions)
    Court recordTier 1Court of Justice of the European Union (via EUR-Lex) · 2007-11-05archived copy
  22. OJ C 180/6 (1 August 2009) - official notice of the judgment in Case C-487/07 (PDF)
    Court recordTier 1Official Journal of the European Union · 2009-08-01archived copy
  23. Riccardo Di Gasparro, "Il piano marketing Chogan Group: la guida" - independent distributor rendering of the qualification ladder: 4% from €50, 6% from €200, 9% from €600, 12% from €1,300, 17% from €3,500, 23% from €7,000
    Compensation planTier 3riccardodigasparro.com (independent network-marketing site) · 2019-08-23archived copy

    Current compensation-plan reconstructions cross-checked across four independent distributor renderings in three languages (Latvian, French, German) and agreeing on every number - the rank ladder from Partner (500 points, 4%) to President (15,000,000 points, 35%), the 100/150/250 monthly active-point gate, the 2/3/5 minimum-lines requirement and the 0.80-points-per-euro conversion; plus the German consultant documentation of the 300-point semester rule effective 1 March 2026 and the 350-point reactivation order

    Not established by this document: The four distributor renderings in Latvian, French and German that the report relies on were not individually located, and no source was retrieved for the current rank ladder from Partner (500 points, 4%) to President (15,000,000 points, 35%), the 100/150/250 monthly active-point gate, the 2/3/5 minimum-lines requirement, the 0.80-points-per-euro conversion, the 300-point semester rule effective 1 March 2026 or the 350-point reactivation order. The Italian renderings cited above corroborate the older percentage ladder and the 50% discount only.

  24. Riccardo Di Gasparro, "Tutto sull'azienda di network marketing Chogan Group" - 50% consultant discount, network bonuses between 4% and 23%, car bonus at manager level
    Compensation planTier 3riccardodigasparro.com (independent network-marketing site) · 2020-02-18archived copy
  25. Filippo Martin, "Chogan Recensione: Cos'è, Piano Compensi" - independent rendering giving 50% on direct sale and 3%–20% on downline sales
    Compensation planTier 3filippomartin.com (independent review site) · 2023-05-18archived copy
  26. Trustpilot company profile - Chogan Group (www.chogangroup.com), TrustScore 3.0 across 1,161 reviews; "Hasn't replied to negative reviews"
    Open-market comparisonTier 4Trustpilot A/Sarchived copy

    Company storefront and authorized reseller price lists - Olfazeta 70 mL at €35.00, 30 mL at €18.00, Luxury 50 mL 30% essence at €52.00, collagen face cream at €26.90, Brilhome degreaser at €15.90, SKINAIL collagen at €139.00; kit range €60 LITE / €149.90 OLFAZETA / €309.90 GOLD / €349.00 BRILHOME / €619.90 PLATINUM; Trustpilot company page at 3.0 across 1,161 reviews

    Not established by this document: No URL was retrieved for the Chogan storefront or authorized-reseller price lists carrying the individual prices in the report (Olfazeta 70 mL €35.00 and 30 mL €18.00, Luxury 50 mL 30% essence €52.00, collagen face cream €26.90, Brilhome degreaser €15.90, SKINAIL collagen €139.00) or for the five starter kits (€60 LITE, €149.90 OLFAZETA, €309.90 GOLD, €349.00 BRILHOME, €619.90 PLATINUM). chogangroup.com returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval.

  27. Trustpilot Italy locale view - Chogan Group, 2,9 across 1.136 recensioni
    Open-market comparisonTier 4Trustpilot A/Sarchived copy
Unable to verify

What we could not get

  • EBITDA and the balance sheet, for any year. All four Italian data services paywall it; one returned a 404 and another a 403 to automated retrieval. The nota integrativa that would explain the €22.5 million 2024 loss could not be retrieved either, so no cause for the loss is asserted here - the obvious hypothesis, a provision recognizing the tax assessment, is unverified speculation and is treated as such.
  • The company’s own general terms and conditions, consultant agreement, and the current dated compensation-plan PDF. The company’s site returns HTTP 403 to automated retrieval and the terms page timed out repeatedly. Say precisely what that means: these documents could not be retrieved, not that they do not exist. The plan figures on this page are reconstructed from four independent distributor renderings in three languages that agree on every number, anchored to the company’s own 2018 plan document for the architecture.
  • Itemised starter-kit contents for any of the five current kits. Kits are described by theme rather than by SKU on every accessible source, so the €149.90 kit is assumed to hold roughly €300 of catalog-price product at the standard 50% discount - an inference, not a fact. Free-shipping thresholds, car-bonus and turnover-dividend amounts, and Ambassador program thresholds are likewise unretrieved.
  • Any development in the criminal proceedings since April 2025. No committal for trial, no Tribunale del Riesame outcome on the custodial measures or the seizure, no first-instance judgment, no reported release, and no confirmation of whether the judicial administration remains in force in 2026. The absence of reported follow-up is normal for Italian tax proceedings of this scale and is emphatically not evidence that the case was dropped - but it means this report cannot tell a reader how the case stands today.
  • The full visura camerale, the current board, the shareholder register and the group perimeter. Free mirrors withhold directors and shareholders. The €355 million seizure is far larger than the company’s own filed revenue, which strongly implies a wider group including real property that could not be mapped. Any prior venture or prior legal matter involving the founders before 2016 also returned nothing - a gap in the record, not a clean bill of health.
  • SEARCHED AND NOT FOUND - and these belong on the page as green flags rather than as gaps. No AGCM proceeding of any kind naming the company: no istruttoria, no provvedimento, no accepted impegni, no consumer alert. No EU Safety Gate (RAPEX) alert naming the brand. No trade-mark proceeding naming the company as defendant. No consumer-protection or competition action in Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Romania or the United Kingdom. For regulators of that visibility, in a market that size, sustained absence is itself a finding of a kind.
  • Whether the company issues the numbered tesserino di riconoscimento required by Law 173/2005 art. 3, and how it implements the art. 4 buyback in practice. The statutory rights exist regardless; the company’s implementation of them could not be checked. The personal active-points threshold is also reported inconsistently across sources at 80, 100/150/250 and 500 - the 100/150/250 series is the most consistently reported and is what is used here.
  • DISPROVED RATHER THAN UNVERIFIED - the widely repeated "+31% to $590M". It is a direct-selling trade publication’s estimate, never reconciled to a filed bilancio, and across 2022-24 that publication’s series runs at roughly 2.2× the filed statutory revenue because it measures retail volume rather than turnover. The filed accounts say €189,911,985 for 2024, with a €22,459,167 net loss. Put both figures side by side: the growth direction is right at the revenue line, up 34.9%, and the profit direction is catastrophically wrong. Also assessed as probably incorrect: a widely cited English-language description of a level-based plan paying 10%, 5% and 3%, which is inconsistent with the company’s own 2018 document and with every non-English reconstruction.

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

Chogan - frequently asked

QIs Chogan a pyramid scheme?
No court and no regulator has found it to be one, and no AGCM proceeding naming the company could be located at all. The applicable tests are Italian Law 173/2005 art. 5 and Annex I point 14 of the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, both of which ask whether compensation derives primarily from introducing new participants rather than from selling goods. On the published plan there is no enrollment bounty of any kind - six languages of plan documentation and not one payment for signing somebody up - and commission is calculated on purchase volume. That places it on the right side of the literal test. The structural criticisms are specific and real. Points accrue when a consultant buys, not when a sale to a verified customer is made, and there is no retail-sales-verification rule or equivalent of a 70% rule anywhere in the plan. And every rank requires a minimum number of personally recruited lines - 2 at Partner and Junior Leader, 3 through Sapphire, 5 from Emerald upward - so a consultant selling €10,000 of product a month with no recruits earns the 50% dealer margin and exactly zero network commission. It sits in the ambiguous middle of the purchase-volume category, and no regulator has ever tested it.
QThe founder was arrested - what actually happened, and what does it mean?
Stage-labeling matters more here than anywhere else on this page. On 30 May 2024 the Procura di Trani obtained precautionary measures in Operazione "Paradise World": pre-trial detention for the founder and chief executive, the co-founder and the company accountant, house arrest for a fourth person and a six-month ban from entrepreneurial activity for a fifth. Nine natural persons are under investigation and the company itself is an investigated party under D.Lgs. 231/2001. A €355,000,000 preventive seizure covering bank accounts and roughly 200 properties expressly included the company, which was entrusted to a court-appointed judicial administrator. On 3 April 2025 the founder and the accountant were placed under house arrest again on an allegation of continuing to run the group in breach of the interdiction, with a further €18 million seized. Every one of those is a pre-trial precautionary measure ordered on a standard of serious indications of guilt, which is a threshold for detention and not a finding of criminal liability. There is no conviction. No committal for trial, no review-court outcome and no first-instance judgment could be located. The defendants are presumed innocent. What it means for a participant is separate from guilt or innocence: a consultant’s entire asset is a relationship with a company someone else is now running under court supervision, and there is no contractual claim on that customer base or downline if the administration disposes of the business.
QIs the $590 million revenue figure real?
Not as a company figure. It comes from a direct-selling trade publication as an estimate of 2025 sales and has never been reconciled to a filed set of accounts. The filed statutory accounts for Chogan Group S.p.A. show revenue of €189,911,985 for 2024 with a net loss of €22,459,167, following €140,720,469 and a €2,408,278 profit in 2023 and €67,861,279 and a €1,538,600 profit in 2022. For the two years where both figures exist, the trade estimate runs at roughly 2.2× the filed number. The most likely honest explanation is that they measure different things: statutory revenue is wholesale, the money consultants pay at the 50%-off consultant price, while the trade series behaves like an estimate of retail sales volume. Both can be true and neither is dishonest - they are simply not the same number. The direction matters too: filed revenue did grow 34.9% in 2024, so the growth signal is right at the top line, but the same year produced a €22.5 million loss on €150,000 of share capital, which is the line the headline omits.
QIs it legal to tell customers which designer perfume a Chogan number corresponds to?
That is the riskiest thing a seller can do, and it is the single most under-disclosed risk in the whole offer. The fragrance itself is lawful - there is no exclusive right in an olfactory composition in the EU, and a perfumer may lawfully reproduce any scent. The liability attaches to the comparison. In L’Oréal v Bellure (C-487/07, 18 June 2009) the Court of Justice held that comparison lists matching smell-alike perfumes to trade-marked originals are unlawful comparative advertising under what is now art. 4(g) of Directive 2006/114/EC, and that the mark proprietor can stop them under trade-mark law even without confusion, dilution or tarnishment - with no defense that the comparison is true. Spanish courts applied that against a smell-alike chain through to the Supreme Court and ordered it to renumber its product codes, because the numbers themselves had become the vehicle of the association. The Tribunale di Torino applied the same line in a case brought by Chanel. The company sells numbers, publishes no comparison list and stays clean; the person who supplies the correspondence in a WhatsApp message, an Instagram caption, a marketplace listing or a printed table is the person a rights holder writes to. No trade-mark proceeding naming this company as defendant could be located.
QWhat does it cost to join, and does Chogan publish what consultants earn?
Registration is free, and there is no annual fee, no compulsory autoship and no minimum monthly order in any market checked - genuinely the lightest entry terms graded on this site. An optional starter kit unlocks consultant pricing and runs from about €60 for the LITE kit through €149.90, €309.90 and €349.00 to €619.90 for the top one; the kit is product at wholesale rather than licenses or training. The ongoing obligations are where the money leaves. To be paid any network commission you must personally generate 100 active points a month (about €125 of purchasing) for the 4% to 8% bands, 150 points (€187.50) for 12% to 16%, or 250 points (€312.50) for 23% and above - payable whether or not anyone else orders. And from 1 March 2026 you must generate 300 points, about €375 of purchases, every rolling six months simply to keep consultant pricing, up from 200, with a 350-point reactivation order after a lapse. On earnings: no income disclosure exists. Searches in Italian, English, German, French, Romanian, Polish and Latvian found nothing in any of the 90-plus markets. European direct sellers are generally not required to publish one, so this is the sector norm rather than an outlier - but it is still an absence, and it means nobody outside the company knows what the median consultant earns.
Who wrote this report

Author, editor and publisher

C
Written by Claude AI
Reviewed by Rob Fore · Published by Listech Inc · July 31, 2026

This report was researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from primary documents - Chogan’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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Chogan is graded D as of July 31, 2026. Grades move when the evidence moves - a new income disclosure, a regulatory action, a rewritten compensation plan. Leave your address and you will get one email if this one does.

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Corrections

Every factual claim on this page is sourced, and the ones we could not stand up are named in the unable to verify list above. If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from Chogan than from a reader.

Write to corrections@opportunitygrade.com. Point at the specific sentence and send the document that contradicts it - a plan document, a filing, an income disclosure, a policy page. We will check it against the primary source, correct the page if it is wrong, and say in the report that it was corrected and when. A grade moves if the evidence moves it.

This address reaches a person, not a form. We do not require a takedown demand, an NDA or a lawyer to accept a correction, and we do not remove a report because a company disputes its conclusion - only because the underlying facts turn out to be wrong.

Other published reports

Every report is written to stand alone. Graded on the same nine weighted dimensions and the same six legal tests. Twelve of 107, spread across the grade bands.

See all 107 published reports →