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Cashback and shopper loyalty · Binary MLM bolted onto a merchant rebate program

Lyconet

The domain no longer serves a usable site. As of 30 July 2026 lyconet.com fails on an expired TLS certificate, and myworld.com and cashbackworld.com both redirect to a Dubai domain-brokerage listing offering the names for sale in a $100,000–$250,000 bracket. The operating companies entered Austrian insolvency in August 2025.

Reviewed July 30, 2026 Founded Founded 2003 in Austria as Lyoness; rebranded through Lyconet, Cashback World and myWorld; the Lyoness entities went insolvent in autumn 2023 and the myWorld and Lyconet entities in August 2025 Confidence: Medium-High
FGRADE
0.8/10
Weighted composite

COLLAPSED - INSOLVENT, DOMAINS FOR SALE

Nobody can join this today and nobody should try: myWorld International AG filed in Graz on 4 August 2025 with €22.7 million of liabilities and 2,049 creditors, Lyconet Austria GmbH followed two days later stating that no restructuring was intended, and the consumer domains are now brokerage listings priced between $100,000 and $250,000.

The question you came with

Can you actually make money with Lyconet?

NO No - not on the numbers this company publishes

No, and not because of the economics. Nobody can join this today. myWorld International AG filed for insolvency in Graz on 4 August 2025 with €22.7 million of liabilities against €15.07 million of assets and 2,049 creditors, on a proposed 20% quota over two years. Lyconet Austria GmbH filed two days later and stated that no restructuring was intended. As of 30 July 2026 lyconet.com serves an expired certificate, and myworld.com and cashbackworld.com both redirect to a Dubai domain brokerage listing them for sale between $100,000 and $250,000.

If somebody is still promoting this to you, that is the fact to check first, and the earnings record is why it matters. Italy's competition authority reconstructed the numbers from company records covering March 2019 to August 2020. Of 20,000 to 40,000 active Marketers, 56 earned more than €10,000 and fewer than 1,000 earned more than €1,000. Between 5,000 and 10,000 received exactly zero despite having bought products.

The company's own North American disclosures said the same thing in its own voice. A United States median monthly commission of $0.38, which is about $4.56 a year, against an entry of €299 to €1,299. In Canada, 95% of Marketers earned $0 in 2022. And on 11 January 2024 Austria's Supreme Court declared unlawful all 47 clauses put before it from three versions of the membership agreements and compensation plans, on grounds of intransparency and abusive termination rights. The entire contract stack, voided.

Two things were real and belong on the record. The free shopper tier really was free and really paid cashback, commonly 1 to 2% in store, across a genuine mainstream merchant network. And income disclosures were published in the United States and Canada at a time when many programs published none, which counts precisely because the numbers were damning. Austria's consumer association holds that because the clauses were voided rather than reformed, affected consumers may reclaim payments made. Against an insolvent counterparty that is worth much less than it sounds.

What it costs to be in
€60 – $3,000

that is the nominal band this was ranked at and it understates the top of the range by roughly three to four times. The confirmed Italian tiers were free (Loyalty Program Starter), €299 (Loyalty Program Reseller) and €1,299 (Loyalty Program Infinity), on top of which sat Campaign & Reseller Packs at €50–€2,000, an Easy Shop Plus subscription at €50–€150 a month and Customer Cloud positions at €1,500 / €3,000 / €4,500. An Austrian attorney’s reconstruction of the Cloud path puts the realistic initial outlay at approximately €2,600; Spanish police describe €2,000 up front plus €99–€399 a month, which is €4,376–€11,576 over two years. The honest published range is €0 for a shopper, €299–€1,299 for Marketer entry, and €2,600–€11,500+ for the path actually sold at events.

What would have to change
  • An operating company. The insolvency proceeding would have to produce one, and until it does there is no counterparty to join, no plan to qualify under and nobody in a position to pay a commission.
  • Compensation paid on something other than points a participant could buy. Italy's competition authority found the means of obtaining Shopping Points consisted essentially in purchasing costly Lyconet products and packages, and three national authorities reached that conclusion independently.
  • A contract a court can read. Austria's Supreme Court voided all 47 clauses put to it, and the appellate court recorded that it could not determine from the contract when a participant would earn compensation or in what amounts.
  • Creditors paid. There are 2,049 of them in the Graz filing on a proposed 20% quota over two years, and consumers who won in court before the insolvency were already reporting that winning did not get them reimbursed.

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.

56
Italian Marketers who earned more than €10,000
out of 20,000–40,000 active - the regulator’s own reconstruction, not a company figure
74%
Share of all money members paid in Norway in 2016 that went on discount coupons and customer shares
not on shopping - and only about 7% of it came back to members
€22.7m
Liabilities of myWorld International AG at its Graz insolvency filing
against €15.07m of assets, 2,049 creditors and a 20% quota over two years
$100k–$250k
Asking bracket for the myworld.com and cashbackworld.com names
both now redirect to a Dubai domain-brokerage listing; lyconet.com serves an expired certificate

Legal status

CONTESTED - AND THE LETTER GRADE IS NOT A LEGALITY VERDICT. Three public authorities issued pyramid-scheme prohibitions or sanctions: Italy’s AGCM (an administrative sanction of €3.2 million in January 2019 and a further €3 million against myWorld Italia S.r.l. and Lyconet Italia S.r.l. in decision PS11517 of 25 January 2021), Norway’s Lotteritilsynet (a cease order of 31 May 2018, upheld on appeal by Lotterinemnda on 27 January 2019), and Poland’s UOKiK (decision DOZIK-12/2019 of 30 December 2019, prohibiting the practice and ordering refunds of voucher deposits). Beyond that the file is lighter and must be labeled precisely: one confirmed central-bank warning listing (Russia’s CBR, 1 June 2021 - a register entry, not an adjudication); consumer-body warnings in Austria, Germany, Portugal and Poland, which are not regulators’ findings; civil refund judgments in Austria and Switzerland finding an illegal Schneeballsystem; an arrest in Madrid on 23 July 2025 of the Spanish managing director, which is neither a charge nor a conviction; criminal charges filed in Greece in 2015 with no located outcome; an open Austrian economic-crime prosecutor investigation with no charging document sighted; a Swedish investigation closed with no action and a Philippine SEC inquiry closed with no action. And two courts found the opposite: the Australian Federal Court dismissed the ACCC’s pyramid-selling case in October 2015, and the Vienna Regional Court decided in April 2016 that the scheme was not a pyramid scheme. The widely repeated claim that this was "banned in ten-plus countries" is not supported; three national prohibitions is the honest count, and it is already a heavy file.

Confidence: Medium-High

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

Start with the fact that decides everything else for a reader in 2026: this is not a live income opportunity, it is a European insolvency estate. myWorld International AG filed for a restructuring proceeding at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz on 4 August 2025 with €22.7 million of liabilities against €15.07 million of liquidation-value assets, 2,049 creditors, 116 employees and a statutory minimum offer of 20% payable over two years. Lyconet Austria GmbH followed on 6 August 2025 with €5.7 million of liabilities, 565 creditors and a filing recording that no restructuring was intended - that is, liquidation. The Lyoness predecessor entities had already gone insolvent in autumn 2023. Consumer-facing sites went dark in August and September 2025. Checked on 30 July 2026, lyconet.com fails on an expired TLS certificate and serves nothing usable, while myworld.com and cashbackworld.com both issue 302 redirects to a Dubai-run domain-brokerage listing that offers the names for sale in a "$100,000 – $250,000" bracket and does not mention either brand.

Two things were sold here and a reader needs to keep them apart, because a person who only ever used the free card was in a completely different position from a Marketer. Cashback World, later branded myWorld, was the free shopper side: register at no cost, get a card and later an app, shop at partner merchants, receive a rebate advertised at up to 5% and in practice commonly 1–2% in store, plus a loyalty currency called Shopping Points and a Friendship Bonus of up to 0.5% on purchases by shoppers you personally referred. No purchase quota, no renewal, no downline, nothing to lose beyond the time. Lyconet was the paid Marketer side: entry tiers at €0, €299 and €1,299, Campaign and Reseller Packs at €50–€2,000, an Easy Shop Plus subscription at €50–€150 a month, and Customer Cloud positions at €1,500, €3,000 or €4,500, all paying commissions calculated on Shopping Points accumulated by the Marketer and their recruitment genealogy through a binary left-and-right "Balance Program" with coaching overrides.

The good things about the free side were real and should be said before anything else. The merchant network was genuine and mainstream - named national retail and fuel partners across Europe, including Poland’s Orlen, and top-flight football sponsorships that were real commercial relationships. The shopper tier really was free. And real cashback really was paid: Italy’s competition authority records €1–3 million paid to Italian users over a thirteen-month window. That is small, but it is not zero, and it is why the company had a defense to make at all. Two courts accepted a version of it - the Australian Federal Court dismissed the ACCC’s pyramid-selling case in October 2015, and the Vienna Regional Court decided in April 2016 that the scheme was not a pyramid scheme. Any honest file carries those.

The formal boundary between the two sides broke in three places, and every regulator that looked found the same three breaks. First, the two sides shared one currency: Shopping Points were earned by shoppers and also obtained by buying Lyconet packages and vouchers, and because the compensation plan paid on points without distinguishing the source, a Marketer could buy their way up the career ladder rather than sell their way up. AGCM found the means of obtaining points "consist essentially in the purchase of costly Lyconet products and packages." Second, regulators refused to evaluate the sides separately: Norway’s Lottery Appeals Board found on 27 January 2019 that the loyalty program and the network-marketing program functioned as one integrated scheme despite their formal separation. Third, an Austrian court found an "untrennbarer Zusammenhang" - an inseparable connection - between the company’s vouchers and Lyconet’s operations. The free side existed and was genuine. The paid side did not derive its economics from the free side; it derived them from itself.

What that meant in money is the part worth sitting with. On the only full inflow breakdown ever published by a public authority - Norway’s 2016 figures, reproduced in the appeal board’s decision - of NOK 206.5 million that members paid the company, NOK 166.9 million, about 74%, was purchases of discount coupons and customer shares, and only NOK 11.4 million of that, about 7%, came back to members. Merchant-side loyalty flows were NOK 19.3 million, under a tenth of everything members paid in. On the Italian regulator’s reconstruction, 56 Marketers out of 20,000–40,000 active cleared €10,000, fewer than 1,000 cleared €1,000, and more than 5,000 received exactly nothing despite having bought products. The company’s own US disclosure put the median monthly commission at $0.38.

Where a euro paid by members actually went

Norway, 2016 - reproduced in the Lottery Appeals Board’s decision of 27 January 2019, the only complete inflow breakdown ever published by a public authority for this operation. Shares of total member payments to the company, NOK 206.5 million.

74% 17% 9%
Members buying discount coupons and customer shares - the Lyconet side (74%)Other member payments (17%)Payments arising from the merchant-side loyalty business (9%)
ProductPricePays
Cashback World / myWorld shopper registration
Card and later an app, cashback advertised at up to 5% and typically 1–2% in store, Shopping Points, and a Friendship Bonus of up to 0.5% one level deep. No quota, no renewal, no downline. This part was genuinely free and genuinely worked - and the Norwegian regulator’s 2018 file records that only 21% of issued cards were ever used.
€0
one-time
merchant-funded
Loyalty Program Reseller (LPR)
The practical Marketer entry point in the Italian tier structure confirmed by AGCM. Career level 1 alone requires 5,000 Shopping Points, so at this level the plan’s career table is essentially unreachable.
€299
one-time
generates Shopping Points into the upline
Loyalty Program Infinity (LPI)
The Reseller tier plus a €1,000 Campaign and Reseller Pack. This is the tier actually promoted at events. With Easy Shop Plus on top, year one runs €1,899–€3,099.
€1,299
one-time
generates Shopping Points into the upline
Campaign & Reseller Packs
Sold as marketing and advertising credits; economically, the mechanism that converts cash into Shopping Points and therefore into career advancement. The effective commission on a €1,000 pack depends on the upline’s career level - a figure the Austrian appellate court said it could not calculate from the contract.
€50 – €2,000 each
repeatable
per-point rate by career level
Easy Shop Plus subscription
Required for Customer Cloud eligibility and a continuing source of points. Twelve months at the low end is €600 a year on top of entry.
€50 – €150 / month
monthly
recurring Shopping Points
Limited Edition Discount Voucher (LEDV)
One "share" of a regional Customer Cloud. A court-appointed economics expert in Austrian proceedings found that no real countervalue exists for the discount vouchers, that the model and the point calculations are largely opaque, and that substantial total-loss risk exists.
€1,500 each
per unit
promised 3.7–9.3 cents per point monthly
Customer Cloud position
One, two or three shares. Marketed as paying monthly passive income over a stated six-year life, explicitly without requiring recruitment, with customer acquisition controlled exclusively by the operator. No registered prospectus was located in any jurisdiction.
€1,500 / €3,000 / €4,500
one-time per share
passive monthly distribution, as promised
myWorld Share Points (MSP)
Marketed as convertible into company shares at a planned IPO. Share capital was reportedly raised from €100,000 to €12 million ahead of the announced flotation. The IPO never happened, and Slovenian counsel expects holders to rank as subordinated claims in the insolvency - behind ordinary creditors.
accrued or purchased
ongoing
Background check

Who runs it, and what they ran before

HF
Hubert Freidl
Founder (2003) and long-serving chief executive; described as sole shareholder of Glenside Holding GmbH, the renamed Lyconet Holding GmbH

The track-record test does not apply in the usual way here, because the prior venture is not a different company - it is the same company under a previous name. Lyoness became Lyconet became myWorld became Cashback World, each rebrand following adverse legal attention, and the entity chain shifted from Austria to Switzerland to Dubai and Bulgarian vehicles. The prior entity went insolvent in autumn 2023; the successor entity went insolvent in August 2025. Stage-labeling his criminal exposure precisely: in 2012 Austria’s economic-crime prosecutor, the WKStA, was granted jurisdiction over complaints - an investigation, not a charge. In 2015 he and Lyoness were cleared in a criminal matter - an inquiry closed without conviction. Fresh complaints were filed in 2016 - a referral, not a charge. Investigative reporting in July 2025 describes him as the primary target of an active WKStA fraud investigation said to be nearing completion; no charging document has been sighted by this review, and an investigation is not a finding. He is reported to reside in Dubai and to be running a new advisory venture there since April–May 2026, which is journalism rather than a record.

JG
Joaquin Garcia de la Brena
Managing Director, Lyoness Spain SL and MWS MyWorld Customer & Retail Services Spain SL; head of Spanish operations since 2011

Arrested in Madrid on 23 July 2025 by Spain’s National Police in connection with an alleged pyramid fraud, confirmed by a police release of 31 July 2025. The stage label matters: this is an arrest inside an ongoing criminal investigation - "Operación Peldaño", opened March 2023 - and it is neither a charge nor a conviction. The police account describes 803 complainants, €5 million in losses claimed among them and more than €52 million in total claimed Spanish losses, and a field model of a €2,000 entry plus €99–€399 a month sold on promises of "passive, recurring and lifetime income" of up to €50,000 a month. The primary police release was not directly retrieved by this review.

Gn
Governance note
A contradiction on the record, and what it is worth

Investigative reporting states that UK Companies House filings list the founder as a Person with Significant Control over successor entities after 2015, contradicting an account he gave that he had left operational control in that year. The outlet describes this as verified against primary registry documents; this review did not re-pull the filings and records it as unverified here. It is included because it goes to the one question a prospective participant in any successor vehicle would need answered - whether the person at the top of two consecutive insolvencies is still at the top - and not because anything in it is established.

Gn
Governance note - where the brand went
The domains, checked 30 July 2026

lyconet.com does not serve a usable site: the fetch fails on an expired TLS certificate. www.myworld.com and www.cashbackworld.com both issue HTTP 302 redirects to mediaworld.agency, a domain-brokerage listing page run out of Dubai that solicits acquisition inquiries in a "$100,000 – $250,000" budget bracket and mentions neither Lyconet nor myWorld. Whether that broker has any connection to the group’s former Dubai advertising vehicle, mediaWorld Advertising International FZE, is not established - the name coincidence is striking and is not evidence of a link. The consumer-facing sites were disabled in August–September 2025 per trade reporting.

Registered address

Graz, Styria, Austria
Until 2019 the contracting counterparty for most European members was a Swiss company, Lyoness Europe AG of Buchs, St. Gallen, while the member, the recruiter and the money were in Austria, Italy, Poland or Spain - which routed disputes to a foreign forum. Austria’s Supreme Court closed that door in OGH 4 Ob 69/19d on 28 May 2019, holding that Lyoness Austria GmbH operated as a branch of the Swiss entity so members could sue at home. No audited consolidated accounts for any entity in the chain were located in any period. The insolvency figures - €22.7 million of liabilities against €15.07 million of liquidation-value assets, 2,049 creditors, 116 employees, 47 foreign subsidiaries and a statutory minimum 20% quota payable over two years - are debtor-stated figures accepted into a court process and reported by Austrian creditor-protection associations and press, not audited financials. A separate tax exposure of more than €50 million is asserted by tax authorities and is a creditor’s assertion, not an adjudicated liability.

Compensation plan

What has to be true for you to get paid

To coverYou need
Recover a €299 Reseller entry, no further purchases ~8,000 Shopping Points
career level 1 needs 5,000 points and pays $0.0375 per point; the annual activity requirement of 350 points in the Balance Program, or 5 direct lines at 150 points each, must also be met to be paid at all
Recover a €1,299 Infinity entry plus €50/month for a year - €1,899 ~50,000 Shopping Points
at level 1 rates, which is the plan’s own level 5 threshold; fewer than 1,000 of 20,000–40,000 active Italian Marketers earned more than €1,000 gross
Recover the Cloud path - ~€2,600 for one share plus qualifying vouchers, unit and subscription ~40,000 points allocated over six years
at the 6.5-cent midpoint of the promised 3.7–9.3 cents per point, about 555 points a month; the Polish Cloud’s advertised initial allocation of 1,500 points was described in the company’s own material as an assumption only, with no guarantee
Recover the Spanish field model - €2,000 entry plus €99–€399/month ~133,000 Shopping Points
€4,988 in year one at the midpoint; recovering it at level 1 rates sits above the plan’s level 4 threshold of 60,000 points and approaches level 5

Read this twice

Every one of these is gross of tax, ignores the participant’s own labor, and assumes the pricing structure AGCM confirmed. The cross-check is the part that matters. In Italy, 56 people out of 20,000–40,000 active Marketers cleared €10,000 gross in the regulator’s review window; fewer than 1,000 cleared €1,000; and more than 5,000 received exactly zero despite having bought products. Scenario D’s year-one cost alone is half of that €10,000 threshold, which means the number of Italian Marketers who could have run it profitably is, on the regulator’s own figures, in the low dozens. Two honest caveats belong here in the company’s favor. The first scenario genuinely can break even - €299 is recoverable by someone who builds real volume, and the plan does not make that impossible. And the free shopper tier has no break-even problem at all, because it costs nothing: a person who registered, used the card where they already shopped and never bought a Lyconet product was never at risk of losing money, only of receiving a worse rebate than an open-market portal would have paid. The break-even arithmetic is a Marketer problem, not a shopper problem, and the report should not blur the two. What settles the Marketer question is that the currency in which break-even is denominated - Shopping Points - was purchasable, so the fastest route to break-even was always to spend more, which is precisely the mechanism three regulators identified.

Run your own numbers

Drag the sliders. Nothing here is stored or sent.

-
Cumulative net, after costs
Retained referred shoppers -
Commission that month -
Total commissions earned -
Total you paid in -
Net -

The Friendship Bonus - "up to 0.5%" on purchases made by shoppers you personally referred, one level deep - is the only element of this plan that is genuinely merchant-funded, and it is the only element modeled here. At 0.5% of a shopper spending roughly €500 a month that is about €2.50. Every larger number in the compensation plan pays on genealogy volume in a currency participants could buy, which three authorities found was funded predominantly from other participants’ package and voucher purchases rather than from merchants. Cost is a €1,299 marketer package spread across a year; the realistic path documented in the file runs €2,600 to €11,500 and up. Read the whole thing as historical: the operating entities entered insolvency proceedings in August 2025, the consumer sites went dark, and the present-day figure at every slider position is zero. Your own subscription cost of $108/mo is included.

Your money

What it costs to replace this yourself

What the same capabilities cost on the open market. The consumer capability being sold on the free side is a rebate on shopping you were doing anyway; the capability being sold on the paid side is the right to earn on other people’s shopping. Both are priced below against ordinary, unaffiliated alternatives anybody can buy today without joining anything.

What they sell youWhat you'd use insteadYour cost
Cashback on retail and online purchases - up to 5%, typically 1–2%Mainstream cashback portals and browser extensions - TopCashback, Quidco, Rakuten, Honey and their European equivalents€0
Card-linked rebates across many merchantsA cashback credit or debit card, or a bank’s card-linked-offer program€0 – €150/yr
In-store points on groceries and fuelAn ordinary supermarket or fuel-retailer loyalty card€0
Friendship Bonus of up to 0.5% on a referred shopperStandard refer-a-friend bonuses at the same portals€0 (typically €5–€25 per referral)
Loyalty Program Reseller / Infinity - €299 / €1,299 for the right to earn on referralsAn ordinary affiliate network account, paid on actual sales, no entry fee€0
Campaign & Reseller Packs - €50–€2,000 of "advertising credits"Buying ads directly from the large ad platforms, pay-per-use, and keeping the audiencepay per use, no entry fee
Easy Shop Plus - €50–€150 a monthNo subscription required to receive cashback anywhere on the open market€0
Merchant loyalty program for a shop ownerA mainstream loyalty-software vendor, no obligation to recruit anybody~€25 – €300 / month
Customer Cloud - €1,500–€4,500 for a promise of passive income from a pool of shoppersA prospectus-backed collective investment or listed shares in a retail-loyalty operator, with audited accounts and a secondary market€0 – €10 per trade
Total as sold
€1,899 – €11,500+ in year one on the paths actually sold
Total, built yourself
€0 for the cashback, plus optional card fees

Price-to-value

The exercise is unusually one-sided because the underlying capability is not scarce. Cashback on shopping is free, everywhere, from a dozen mainstream providers with better rates and faster payouts and no program attached. What Lyconet sold was not the rebate - it was the right to earn on other people receiving the rebate, at €299 to €1,299, plus a monthly subscription, plus packs, plus €1,500–€4,500 for a promise of returns from the same free capability. A shopper who wanted the cashback could have had it free and still can. A Marketer who paid for the right to earn on it was buying access to a market that, on the regulator’s own numbers, paid 56 people in Italy more than €10,000.

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 19% 6% 0%
Free Cashback World shopper - registered at €0, used the card where they already shopped, never bought a Lyconet productPaid Lyconet Marketer - the €1,299 Infinity tier promoted at events, plus Easy Shop Plus at €50 a monthCustomer Cloud buyer - the €2,600 Cloud path - qualifying vouchers, a balance unit, a subscription and at least one €1,500 LEDV

Free Cashback World shopper

registered at €0, used the card where they already shopped, never bought a Lyconet product

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 21% €0
6 mo 21% €0
1 yr 21% €0
3 yr 20% €0
5 yr 19% €0

Paid Lyconet Marketer

the €1,299 Infinity tier promoted at events, plus Easy Shop Plus at €50 a month

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 3% −€1,400
6 mo 4% −€1,600
1 yr 5% −€1,850
3 yr 6% −€3,000
5 yr 6% −€4,200

Customer Cloud buyer

the €2,600 Cloud path - qualifying vouchers, a balance unit, a subscription and at least one €1,500 LEDV

HorizonP(profit)Median
3 mo 0% −€2,600
6 mo 0% −€2,900
1 yr 1% −€3,200
3 yr 1% −€4,000
5 yr 0% −€4,500

Methodology note. These are MODELED outcome ranges, not claims, not promises and not any individual’s reported result - and because the operation is now insolvent they are a reconstruction of what happened rather than a forecast of what could. ANCHORED to public-authority figures: AGCM’s Italian reconstruction of 20,000–40,000 active Marketers, of whom 56 earned more than €10,000, fewer than 1,000 earned more than €1,000 and more than 5,000 received exactly zero despite buying products; the company’s own US disclosure showing a median monthly commission of $0.38, an average of roughly $275 a year and 46% earning nothing; the Canadian disclosure showing 99% of Marketers between $0.01 and $1,000 averaging $61.58, and 95% earning $0 in 2022; the Norwegian regulator’s 2018 finding that only 21% of issued Cashback World cards were ever used, which is where the free-shopper profile’s participation share comes from; and the confirmed price stack of €299 / €1,299 entry, €50–€150 monthly, €50–€2,000 packs and €1,500–€4,500 Cloud positions. MODELED by us: the euro amounts at each horizon, the share of each cohort in cumulative profit, and the cohort definitions, none of which the company segmented. Three calibration notes, two of which cut in the company’s favor. The free shopper genuinely cannot lose money and is shown accordingly - a median of exactly €0 reflects that four in five cards were never used at all, not that the rebate was fake. The top of the Marketer cohort was really, substantially paid: career bonuses ran to $75,000, balance bonuses to $24,000 and coaching overrides took 20% of an entire downline’s balance commissions. And the Cloud cohort is shown as never reaching profit because that is what the evidence says: no payout history was demonstrated, a court-appointed expert found no real countervalue and substantial total-loss risk, a consumer who won in court in 2021 was still refused reimbursement, and the counterparty became insolvent in 2025 with holders of the related share instrument likely subordinated.

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
The company’s own websites and back office
GONE
lyconet.com fails on an expired TLS certificate as of 30 July 2026 and serves nothing usable. myworld.com and cashbackworld.com both 302-redirect to a Dubai-run domain-brokerage listing soliciting acquisition offers in a "$100,000 – $250,000" bracket, with no mention of either brand. The consumer sites were disabled in August and September 2025 and the Marketer back office went with the insolvency. Any site or app still presenting itself under these names should be treated as unconnected until proven otherwise.
The written advertising and media policy
NOT RETRIEVABLE
The official Lyconet advertising policy could not be obtained, because the domains are dead and the back office is gone. Everything below is reconstructed from the contract terms the Austrian Supreme Court examined, from regulators’ descriptions of how promotion actually happened, and from journalism - not quoted from a current policy. That gap is itself a finding: a participant today has no way to check what they agreed to.
Confidentiality obligations on Marketers
STRUCK DOWN AS UNLAWFUL
The Austrian Supreme Court singled out the confidentiality obligations imposed on Marketers as excessive and struck them, on 11 January 2024, as part of a judgment voiding all 47 clauses put before it across three plan versions. A rule that stops participants discussing their own business is a rule that stops the next recruit finding out.
Explaining the compensation plan accurately
IMPOSSIBLE ON THE COURT’S OWN FINDING
The appellate court recorded that it could not determine from the contract when a participant would earn compensation or in what amounts, and held "Bonus Units", "Upline", "Lifeline" and "Customer Units" to be incomprehensible even after reading the whole rulebook. A Marketer could not have described the plan correctly to a prospect even in good faith.
TikTok and social recruitment
THE PRIMARY CHANNEL IN PRACTICE
The Italian outlet Fanpage published an investigation headlined, in translation, "‘This is how you can get rich without effort’: investigation into Lyconet, the pyramid scheme booming on TikTok." That is journalism rather than a regulatory finding, but it describes what the recruitment funnel actually looked like and who it was aimed at.
Field income claims
EXTREME AND UNPOLICED
Spanish police describe promises of "passive, recurring and lifetime income" of up to €50,000 a month. The company’s own US disclosure put the median monthly commission at $0.38. No functioning income-claim compliance regime is evidenced anywhere in the file, and AGCM made two separate findings of misleading and non-transparent commercial practice.
Brand-legitimacy borrowing
HEAVILY USED
Top-flight football sponsorships and a national fuel-retailer loyalty partnership were used in the field as proof of legitimacy - including after Poland’s consumer authority had publicly warned about the company. The commercial relationships were real; what was done with them in recruitment conversations is the issue.
Off-book cash collection
REPORTED IN AT LEAST ONE MARKET
Slovenian participants report handing cash directly to higher-ranking Marketers without official documentation, pitched as opportunities in digitalisation and real estate. This is journalism reporting participant accounts, not an established finding - but whatever the written rules said, it describes what part of the channel did.
Criticising the company publicly
LITIGATED AGAINST
myWorld Austria GmbH sued the Vorarlberg Chamber of Labor, a statutory consumer body, over a February 2020 consumer warning and sought an injunction against future statements - then withdrew the claim hours before trial on 6 September 2021. How an operator treats a statutory watchdog is a material fact for anyone weighing whether to become one of its promoters.
The evidence

Red flags and green flags

Red flags

15
1Pay was calculated in a currency the participant could buy
Shopping Points drove every meaningful element of the plan, and Italy’s AGCM found in decision PS11517 that obtaining them "consists essentially in the purchase of costly Lyconet products and packages." The plan’s own 50% rule permitted 100% of personal and personally-referred points to count toward a career level. Self-funded advancement was not a loophole; it was the mechanism.
274% of member money went on coupons and customer shares, and about 7% of it came back
Norway’s Lottery Appeals Board, 27 January 2019, on Lyoness Norway’s 2016 figures: NOK 166.9 million of NOK 206.5 million in total member payments went on discount coupons and customer shares, with NOK 11.4 million returned. Merchant-side loyalty flows were NOK 19.3 million. This is the clearest single statement anywhere that the plan was funded by participants rather than by merchants.
3A binary with genealogy-only bonuses sat on top of a retail rebate
Balance Commissions on matched left and right legs, Balance Bonuses of $600 to $24,000, National, Continental and International Bonus Units generated purely by downline depth, and coaching overrides of 20% and 5%. None of it pays on sales to anyone outside the program.
4Capital-in instruments with a promised passive return and no prospectus
Customer Clouds at €1,500, €3,000 and €4,500, promising 3.7–9.3 cents per Shopping Point monthly over a stated six-year life and marketed as requiring no recruitment. A court-appointed economics expert found no real countervalue for the vouchers and substantial total-loss risk. No registered prospectus was located in any jurisdiction.
5Three national authorities issued pyramid-scheme prohibitions or sanctions
Italy’s AGCM twice - €3.2 million in January 2019 and €3 million in decision PS11517 of 25 January 2021; Norway’s Lotteritilsynet in a cease order of 31 May 2018 upheld on appeal on 27 January 2019; and Poland’s UOKiK in decision DOZIK-12/2019 of 30 December 2019. Separately, Russia’s central bank added the brand to a register of companies showing signs of a pyramid scheme on 1 June 2021 - a warning listing, not an adjudication.
6Austria’s Supreme Court voided the entire contract stack
All 47 clauses from the membership agreements and compensation plans across versions 3-2019, 9-2019 and 1-2021, declared unlawful on 11 January 2024 for intransparency, abusive termination rights and excessive confidentiality - including the finding that the court itself could not work out when or how much a Marketer earned.
7Serial rebranding tracking legal pressure
Lyoness became Lyconet, myWorld and Cashback World, the holding vehicle was renamed from Lyconet Holding GmbH to Glenside Holding GmbH in 2019, and the entity chain moved through Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria and Dubai. Each rebrand followed adverse legal attention.
8The same operation went insolvent twice under two names
The Lyoness entities in autumn 2023 with a claims deadline of 27 February 2024; myWorld International AG and Lyconet Austria GmbH in August 2025, with €22.7 million and €5.7 million of liabilities and 2,614 creditors between them, a 20% quota over two years on one and no restructuring intended on the other.
9Criminal exposure at the top and in the field - labeled precisely
An open Austrian economic-crime prosecutor investigation in which investigative reporting describes the founder as the primary target, with no charging document sighted; the Spanish managing director arrested in Madrid on 23 July 2025, which is not a charge and not a conviction, with 803 complainants and more than €52 million in claimed Spanish losses; and charges filed in Greece in 2015 with no located outcome. None of that is a finding of guilt against anyone.
10Field claims of up to €50,000 a month against a published median of $0.38
The Spanish police account describes promises of "passive, recurring and lifetime income" at that level. The company’s own US income disclosure put the median monthly commission at thirty-eight cents - about $4.56 for the year.
11Mass social-media recruitment aimed at the young
Fanpage’s Italian investigation described the program as the pyramid scheme booming on TikTok. That is journalism, not a regulator’s finding, but it is a description of the actual funnel by a national outlet.
12The company sued a statutory consumer watchdog and abandoned the case at the courthouse door
myWorld Austria GmbH against the Vorarlberg Chamber of Labor, over a February 2020 consumer warning, withdrawn hours before trial on 6 September 2021 rather than face witness testimony about the corporate interconnections.
13Winning in court did not get participants paid
A consumer who bought multiple Cloud positions from 2017, received no payouts and won their case in 2021 reported the company still refusing to reimburse. That was four years before the insolvency made collection academic.
14Only 21% of issued Cashback World cards were ever used
From the Norwegian 2018 disclosure. The consumer product that justified the whole structure - and on which the company’s entire defense rested - had minimal organic demand.
15The brand’s own domains are now for sale
Checked 30 July 2026: lyconet.com fails on an expired TLS certificate, and myworld.com and cashbackworld.com redirect to a Dubai domain-brokerage listing offering the names in a "$100,000 – $250,000" bracket. Meanwhile the estate offers creditors twenty cents on the euro over two years.

Green flags

9
1The free shopper tier really was free, and it really worked
No purchase, no quota, no renewal, no downline. Register at €0, get a card and later an app, shop at partner merchants, receive a rebate. That is a genuine and uncommon separation between a loyalty product and a compensation plan, and it means a person who only ever used the free card was never exposed to the losses this report describes.
2The merchant network was real and mainstream
Named national retail and fuel partners across Europe - Poland’s Orlen among them - and sponsorships of top-flight football clubs. These were real commercial counterparties with real contracts, not fabricated logos on a landing page.
3Real cashback was really paid
Italy’s competition authority records €1–3 million of cashback paid to Italian users over a thirteen-month window. Small against €5–10 million of career commissions in the same period, but it is not zero and it was not fictional.
4Income disclosures were published in two markets
The United States and Canada, at a time when many programs published none. The figures are damning - a US median monthly commission of $0.38, 46% earning nothing, 95% of Canadian Marketers earning $0 in 2022 - which is precisely why publishing them counts for something.
5Two courts found it was not a pyramid scheme
The Australian Federal Court dismissed the ACCC’s pyramid-selling case in October 2015, and the Vienna Regional Court decided in April 2016 that the scheme was not a pyramid scheme. Those are the findings that went the other way and a fair file has to carry them plainly rather than bury them.
6The corporate structure proved penetrable
Austria’s Supreme Court held in OGH 4 Ob 69/19d on 28 May 2019 that the Austrian company operated as a branch of the Swiss contracting entity, letting European members sue at home instead of in Switzerland. Hundreds of civil judgments followed.
7Consumers who litigated generally won
Swiss courts ordered repayment of CHF 9,960.14 on a CHF 13,200 voucher purchase, upheld on appeal, on the basis that the payments were made without legal ground; Austrian courts voided the contracts; Poland ordered refunds of voucher deposits within four months plus corrective notices in newspapers of 100,000-plus circulation. The legal route out was unusually strong.
8The regulators published reasoned decisions with real numbers
AGCM’s file and the Norwegian appeal board’s decision are unusually informative documents that set out cohort counts, inflow breakdowns and payout shares rather than issuing a bare warning. That is why this report can be quantitative at all, and it is a credit to those authorities rather than to the company.
9The insolvency went through a proper court process
Filed at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz with recognized creditor-protection associations publishing figures. Participants at least have a defined, documented claims route - which is more than the collapse of an offshore vehicle usually leaves behind.
What would move this grade

We would like to be wrong about this

Upward

  • A published, audited split showing that the majority of Marketer commissions were funded from merchant commission rather than from participants buying packages and vouchers, together with elimination of purchase-satisfiable qualification - career levels reachable only on volume from customers who are not Marketers and never become them.
  • A registered prospectus or a reasoned exemption opinion for the Cloud, voucher and share-point instruments, with a demonstrated redemption history - and an EU-market income disclosure published annually with medians rather than averages and net of costs.
  • Withdrawal or overturn on appeal of the Italian, Norwegian and Polish decisions, plus a solvent successor honouring pre-insolvency voucher and cashback balances in full under a management team with no continuity to the previous operation.

Downward

  • A charge or indictment from the Austrian economic-crime prosecutor, which is currently an investigation with no charging document sighted, or a conviction in the Spanish proceeding, which is currently an arrest only.
  • Confirmation with case numbers of the reported Vienna Higher Regional Court ruling of June 2024 and the reported Supreme Court ruling of January 2025, both currently secondary reporting only, or primary confirmation of the reported €27.9 million tax-evasion figure.
  • Evidence that a successor vehicle is recruiting from the same participant lists under a new brand, or a final insolvency quota below 20% or abandonment of the restructuring plan altogether.
The better trade

Grade is F at 0.81 out of 10. A real merchant network and a genuinely free shopper card, bolted to a paid program that three national authorities found had the constituent elements of pyramid selling - and that is now an Austrian insolvency estate.

The fair reading starts with the separation, because it is the thing most often muddled and both the company and its critics had reasons to muddle it. Cashback World and myWorld were the free side: no cost, no quota, no downline, a card and an app, a rebate at partner merchants that were genuinely mainstream, and real money paid out - €1–3 million to Italian users in thirteen months on the regulator’s own reconstruction. Somebody who registered free, used the card where they were already shopping and never bought a Lyconet product lost nothing. They received a slightly worse deal than an open-market cashback portal would have given them, and that is the whole of it. Two courts, in Australia in October 2015 and in Vienna in April 2016, found the operation was not a pyramid scheme, and any honest account has to carry that.

Lyconet was the other side, and it is where the grade comes from. Entry at €299 or €1,299, packs at €50–€2,000, a subscription at €50–€150 a month, Cloud positions at €1,500–€4,500 - all paying on Shopping Points accumulated through a binary genealogy, in a currency that could be bought rather than earned. AGCM found the means of obtaining those points consisted essentially in buying costly Lyconet products and packages. Norway’s appeal board found the two sides functioned as one integrated scheme and published the inflow: 74% of everything members paid went on discount coupons and customer shares, about 7% of which came back to them, against merchant-side loyalty flows of 9%. Poland prohibited the practice and ordered refunds of voucher deposits. Of 20,000–40,000 active Italian Marketers, 56 cleared €10,000 and more than 5,000 got nothing at all despite having bought product. The company’s own US disclosure put the median monthly commission at thirty-eight cents.

What is left today is an estate and a set of dead domains. myWorld International AG filed in Graz on 4 August 2025 - €22.7 million of liabilities, €15.07 million of assets, 2,049 creditors, a statutory minimum 20% quota over two years - and Lyconet Austria GmbH filed two days later stating that no restructuring was intended. Austria’s Supreme Court had already declared all 47 contract clauses unlawful on 11 January 2024, which in principle entitles affected Austrian consumers to reclaim everything they paid; in practice the counterparty is insolvent, holders of the share-point instrument are likely subordinated, and a consumer who won in court back in 2021 was still being refused reimbursement then. Checked on 30 July 2026, lyconet.com serves nothing behind an expired certificate and the two consumer domains redirect to a Dubai brokerage offering the names for sale between $100,000 and $250,000. The correct posture toward anything using these names now is that it is not this company until proven otherwise.

1

If you are owed money, you are a creditor, not a customer - act like one

The route is the Austrian insolvency process, not the company. myWorld International AG is at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz with a statutory minimum offer of 20% over two years; Lyconet Austria GmbH stated no restructuring was intended. Austria’s Supreme Court voided all 47 clauses on 11 January 2024, and the consumer association’s position is that affected consumers may reclaim all payments made - so take the judgment and the clause ruling to a consumer body or a lawyer in your own country, and expect the argument to be strong and the recovery to be small. Holders of the share-point instrument should assume subordination.

2

Take the free cashback, which costs nothing, from somewhere that still exists

The capability at the center of this - a rebate on shopping you were doing anyway - is free at mainstream cashback portals and browser extensions, free on a supermarket or fuel loyalty card, and free or near-free on a cashback debit or credit card. Rates are generally better, payouts faster, and there is no card that four in five holders never use. Nobody needs to buy a package to receive a discount.

3

If you want to earn on other people’s shopping, use an affiliate network

Ordinary affiliate networks pay commission on sales you actually generate, charge nothing to join, publish their rates, and let you keep the audience and the domain you built. That is the honest version of the thing Lyconet charged €299–€1,299 for the right to do, and it does not depend on anybody below you buying anything.

4

Treat any successor using these names as unrelated until it proves otherwise

The domains are brokerage listings now, the operating companies are insolvent, and the founder is reported to be running a new advisory venture in Dubai - reporting, not a record. If something appears under a familiar name and a familiar plan, ask for the registered entity, the audited accounts, the prospectus for any instrument promising a return, and the income disclosure. This file is what happens when nobody asks.

Three quarters of everything members paid went on coupons and customer shares, and about seven per cent of it came back - and the two consumer domains are now for sale between $100,000 and $250,000.
Scorecard

Nine dimensions, weighted

Comp structure & KoscotDoes the plan pay for recruitment or for sales to real customers?
20%
1.0
Two elements of this plan were genuinely merchant-funded and they are the reason this is a 1 rather than a 0: the cashback itself, advertised at up to 5% and in practice commonly 1–2% in store, and the Friendship Bonus of up to 0.5% on purchases made by shoppers the member personally referred, which is one level deep and costs nothing to earn. Everything above those two rebates pays on genealogy volume in a currency the participant could buy. Career Bonuses of $300 to $75,000 attach to Shopping Point thresholds; the per-point commission rises from $0.0375 to $0.09375 with career level; Balance Commissions pay on matched left and right binary legs; Balance Bonuses run from $600 to $24,000 on personal units; National, Continental and International Bonus Units pay on pure genealogy depth; and coaching overrides pay 20% of Coaching Level 1 Balance Commissions and 5% of Level 2. The decisive point is that Shopping Points were source-agnostic. Italy’s AGCM put it directly in decision PS11517: marketer remuneration is tied to the Shopping Points accumulated each month, and the means of obtaining those points "consist essentially in the purchase of costly Lyconet products and packages." The plan’s own 50% Evaluation Rule caps a single direct line at half a career level’s points while allowing 100% of personal and personally-referred points to count - read as an economic instruction, that says a Marketer may fund their own advancement entirely out of their own purchases. Three national authorities reached the same conclusion independently.
Securities exposureAny passive return on capital? Howey, staking, tokens, withdrawal friction.
15%
0.0
This dimension is not about the retail cashback wrapper and it is not about whether the company was listed, funded or private. It asks one question: did the participant hand capital to the operator against a promised return. Here the answer is documented on the face of the operator’s own marketing. Customer Cloud positions were sold at €1,500, €3,000 and €4,500 for one, two or three "shares", bought through Limited Edition Discount Vouchers at €1,500 each, on top of roughly €2,400 of qualifying vouchers, a €50 balance unit and a live Easy Shop Plus subscription. What was promised was a proportional share of a regional pool of shoppers’ Shopping Points, paid out monthly as passive income at a stated 3.7 to 9.3 cents per point, over a stated six-year life, and marketed explicitly as requiring no recruitment, with customer acquisition controlled exclusively by the operator. Capital in, common enterprise, expectation of profit, from the efforts of others - all four elements, from the seller’s own material. No registered prospectus was located in any jurisdiction. An economics expert instructed in Austrian proceedings found that "no real countervalue exists for the discount vouchers", that the entire business model and the Shopping Point calculations were "largely opaque", and that a substantial total-loss risk existed beyond ordinary insolvency risk. Separately, myWorld Share Points were marketed as convertible into company shares at a planned IPO that never happened, and Slovenian counsel expects those holders to rank as subordinated creditors - behind ordinary creditors. Withdrawal friction was total: a consumer who bought Clouds from 2017, received nothing and won in court in 2021 reported the company still refusing to reimburse.
Ownership & track recordWho runs it, what did they run before, and what happened to it.
15%
0.0
The usual founder-track-record question does not apply cleanly, because the prior venture is the same venture renamed. Lyoness, founded 2003, became Lyconet, myWorld and Cashback World in a sequence of rebrands, each following adverse legal attention, with the holding vehicle renamed from Lyconet Holding GmbH to Glenside Holding GmbH in 2019 and the contracting entity moved between Austria and Switzerland. The Lyoness entities went insolvent in autumn 2023 with a claims deadline of 27 February 2024. The successor entities went insolvent in August 2025 - myWorld International AG into a restructuring proceeding at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz on 4 August, and Lyconet Austria GmbH on 6 August with the creditor-protection filing recording that no restructuring was intended. That is the same structure failing twice with the same person at the top. Stage-labeling the rest precisely, because it matters: Austria’s economic-crime prosecutor has an open investigation in which investigative reporting describes the founder as the primary target - an investigation, with no charging document sighted, and emphatically not a finding. The Spanish managing director was arrested in Madrid on 23 July 2025 - an arrest inside an ongoing investigation, not a charge and not a conviction. A 2015 Austrian criminal matter was closed with the founder cleared. No audited accounts exist for any entity in the chain in any period.
Product reality & demandWould a rational buyer purchase this if no income offer existed?
12%
3.0
This mark has to be earned before the criticism, and it is. The merchant network was real: Cashback World signed genuine, named, mainstream retail and fuel partners across Europe, including the Polish national fuel retailer Orlen, and the group sponsored top-flight football clubs. Those were real commercial counterparties, not fabricated logos. The shopper tier really was free - no purchase, no quota, no downline, just a card or an app and a rebate. And real cashback really was paid: the Italian authority’s own file records €1–3 million paid to Italian users over a thirteen-month window. Small against €5–10 million of career commissions in the same window, but not fictional. For a shopper who joined free and used the card where they were already shopping, this was a mildly useful and unremarkable European cashback program, slightly worse than the best open-market alternatives and not harmful. Two things hold the score to a 3. The Norwegian regulator’s 2018 file records that only 21% of issued Cashback World cards were ever used, which says the card existed largely as a compliance artifact for the recruitment funnel rather than as a consumer product with organic demand. And the paid tier sold access to a capability the free tier already had: a Marketer paying €299 or €1,299 was not buying cashback, which was free, but the right to earn on other people’s cashback.
Participant economicsReal cost in, realistic money out, and whether they publish the numbers.
10%
1.0
The best evidence here is not a company disclosure but a regulator’s reconstruction from company records. Covering March 2019 to August 2020 in Italy, AGCM found 25,000–35,000 Lyconet Marketers enrolled against 200,000–250,000 Cashback World registrations, 20,000–40,000 Marketers active by August 2020, 15,000–25,000 who received any commission at all, more than 5,000–10,000 who received exactly zero despite having bought products, fewer than 1,000 who earned more than €1,000, and 56 who earned more than €10,000. Taking the midpoint of the active band, that is 0.19% clearing €10,000 gross - before deducting a €299–€1,299 entry, a €50–€150 monthly subscription, packs and vouchers. The company’s own North American disclosures point the same way: a US median monthly commission of $0.38, which is about $4.56 a year and a 65-year payback on a €299 entry with no cost of living and no attrition, alongside an average of roughly $275 and 46% earning nothing; the Canadian statement shows 99% of Marketers between $0.01 and $1,000 averaging $61.58, and 95% earning $0 in 2022. The 1 rather than a 0 credits one real thing: disclosures were published in the United States and Canada at a time when many programs published none, and the numbers being damning is exactly why publishing them counts. No EU-market income disclosure was located, which is itself telling given that three European authorities had to reconstruct earnings from company data.
Price-to-valueWhat the same capability costs on the open market.
8%
1.0
Price the capability against what it costs on the open market and the arithmetic is not close. Cashback on retail and online purchases - the core consumer capability - costs €0 at mainstream cashback portals and browser extensions such as TopCashback, Quidco, Rakuten and their European equivalents, with no subscription, no package, no quota and payout straight to a bank account. Card-linked rebates across many merchants come free or with a €0–€150 annual fee on a premium card. Refer-a-friend bonuses at those same portals are free and typically pay a flat €5–€25. Supermarket loyalty cards cost nothing. A shop owner wanting a loyalty program can buy one from a mainstream software vendor for roughly €25–€300 a month with no obligation to recruit anybody, and a small business wanting advertising can buy it pay-per-use from the large ad platforms and keep the audience. Against that, Lyconet charged €299–€1,299 for the right to earn on a capability that is free, €50–€2,000 a time for "campaign and reseller packs" whose value the Austrian appellate court said it could not calculate from the contract, €50–€150 a month for a subscription whose main function was Cloud eligibility, and €1,500–€4,500 for a promise of passive returns from that same free capability. The 1 rather than a 0 reflects that the underlying rebate, once obtained, was genuinely paid.
Payout sustainabilityCan the company fund the plan out of margin, or only out of inflow?
8%
0.0
Two independent public-authority datasets, in two countries, using the company’s own records, say the plan was funded from participant inflow rather than merchant margin. Norway’s Lottery Appeals Board, in its decision of 27 January 2019, reproduced Lyoness Norway’s 2016 figures: of NOK 206.5 million in total member payments to the company, NOK 166.9 million - about 74% - was members buying discount coupons and customer shares, while payments arising from the merchant-side loyalty business were NOK 19.3 million, under a tenth of inflow. Of that NOK 166.9 million, NOK 11.4 million came back to members: about 7%. The Board also found roughly 81% of active participants bought these products, making member payment a practical requirement despite no formal obligation. Italy’s AGCM, covering 2019–2020, found Marketer purchases of Lyconet products of €8–12 million, total commissions paid to Marketers of €5–10 million of which cashback to users was only €1–3 million, and expressly rejected the argument that compensation derived from real economic activity - finding instead that entrant fees and product purchases, not genuine retail transactions, funded commissions. A plan funded that way is arithmetically dependent on recruitment growth, and it ended exactly as that structure ends: the company’s own stated reasons for filing were declining purchasing behavior and revenues significantly below projections, two insolvency applications were filed in early 2025, a rescue through third-party capital failed, and the filing followed on 4 August 2025.
Marketing conductIncome claims, regulator run-ins, hype, deadline stacking.
7%
1.0
Italy’s AGCM made two findings of misleading and non-transparent commercial practice, in January 2019 and again in decision PS11517 of 25 January 2021, under Articles 20, 21, 22 and 23(1)(p) of the Codice del Consumo - administrative sanctions of €3.2 million and €3 million respectively. In the field the claims were extreme: Spanish police describe promises of "passive, recurring and lifetime income" of up to €50,000 a month, against a published US median monthly commission of $0.38. Recruitment ran heavily through social media aimed at the young - the Italian outlet Fanpage published an investigation headlined, in translation, "‘This is how you can get rich without effort’: investigation into Lyconet, the pyramid scheme booming on TikTok" - and recognition marketing included a luxury car handed to a Slovenian Marketer at a 2023 arena event, with the plan document itself referencing unspecified "life-changing seminars". Slovenian participants report handing cash directly to higher-ranking Marketers without documentation. And in a category of its own: myWorld Austria GmbH sued the Vorarlberg Chamber of Labor, a statutory consumer body, over a February 2020 consumer warning, seeking an injunction against future statements, and withdrew the claim hours before trial on 6 September 2021. The 1 rather than a 0 is for the only written restraint this file documents - income disclosure statements published in the United States and Canada. No functioning income-claim compliance regime is evidenced anywhere, and the official advertising policy could not be retrieved because the company’s own domains are gone.
Operator terms & exitWho owns the customer, what you forfeit, how hard it is to leave.
5%
0.0
On 11 January 2024 Austria’s Supreme Court, on a representative action brought by the consumer association VKI, declared unlawful all 47 clauses put before it from Lyconet membership agreements and compensation plans across three versions - 3-2019, 9-2019 and 1-2021. The grounds were intransparency, abusive termination rights reserved to the operator and excessive confidentiality obligations imposed on Marketers. The appellate court recorded that it could not determine from the contract when a participant would earn compensation or in what amounts, and held terms including "Bonus Units", "Upline", "Lifeline" and "Customer Units" to be incomprehensible even after reading the whole rulebook. That is the entire contract stack, voided. Around it: the company owned the shopper relationship and the merchant relationship outright, so a departing Marketer took nothing; vouchers and Limited Edition Discount Vouchers were prepayments that were functionally non-refundable, which is why Poland’s UOKiK had to order refunds of deposits paid for vouchers and gift cards within four months and require corrective notices in newspapers of 100,000-plus circulation; and winning did not mean being paid, with a consumer who won in court in 2021 reporting continued refusal to reimburse. Historically the contract named a Swiss counterparty, pushing European members to litigate abroad until the Supreme Court closed that route in 2019. The one genuine positive - that because the clauses were voided rather than reformed, VKI’s position is that affected Austrian consumers may reclaim all payments made - is now worth little, because the counterparty is insolvent.
Weighted composite
0.81
F

Dimension profile

Further from center is better. Hover any point.

Comp structure& Koscot 1.0 Securitiesexposure 0.0 Ownership &track record 0.0 Product reality& demand 3.0 Participanteconomics 1.0 Price-to-value 1.0 Payoutsustainability 0.0 Marketingconduct 1.0 Operator terms& exit 0.0

Hard caps that bind here

Ceiling at F - non-binding a cap would have rested on five separately sufficient facts, each sourced to a public authority or a court: pyramid-scheme prohibitions or sanctions from three national authorities (Italy’s AGCM in 2019 and again in 2021, Norway’s Lotteritilsynet in a cease order of 31 May 2018 upheld by Lotterinemnda on 27 January 2019, and Poland’s UOKiK in decision DOZIK-12/2019); the Austrian Supreme Court declaring all 47 contract and compensation-plan clauses unlawful on 11 January 2024, having found it could not determine from the contract when or how much a participant earned; the insolvency of myWorld International AG on 4 August 2025 and of Lyconet Austria GmbH on 6 August 2025 with no restructuring intended; capital-in instruments sold against a promised passive return with no prospectus located in any jurisdiction; and a court-appointed expert’s finding of no real countervalue and substantial total-loss risk. It should be said plainly that the cap does no work here. The weighted arithmetic on the nine dimensions lands at 0.81 out of 10, which is far below any ceiling a cap could impose, and the F is earned on the nine numbers themselves rather than imposed from outside them. The cap is recorded because a reader is entitled to know what would have held the grade down had the arithmetic come out higher - not because it changed the result.

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. AGCM provvedimento n. 28508, procedimento PS11517 - myWorld Italia S.r.l. / Lyconet Italia S.r.l., full decision text (PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), Italy · 2020-12-22archived copy

    AGCM (Italy), decision PS11517, provvedimento 28508, 25 January 2021, and the accompanying press release - €3 million in administrative sanctions against myWorld Italia S.r.l. and Lyconet Italia S.r.l. under Articles 20, 21, 22 and 23(1)(p) of the Codice del Consumo, finding the constituent elements of pyramid selling; cohort figures of 200,000–250,000 Cashback World registrations, 25,000–35,000 Marketers enrolled, 20,000–40,000 active, more than 5,000–10,000 at zero, fewer than 1,000 above €1,000 and 56 above €10,000; cashback of €1–3 million against career commissions of €5–10 million. Earlier AGCM press release of January 2019 recording a €3.2 million penalty

  2. AGCM press release, 25 January 2021 - "PS11517 – Sanzione complessiva di 3 mln a myWorld Italia e Lyconet Italia"
    RegulatorTier 1Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), Italy · 2021-01-25archived copy
  3. AGCM press release, 14 January 2019 - "PS11086 – Vendita piramidale e promozione ingannevole, sanzione da oltre 3 milioni a Lyoness" (€3.2 million)
    RegulatorTier 1Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), Italy · 2019-01-14archived copy
  4. AGCM provvedimento n. 27491, procedimento PS11086 - Lyoness Italia S.r.l., full decision text (PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), Italy · 2018-12-19archived copy
  5. Lotterinemndas vedtak 27. januar 2019, sak 2018/0236 - Lyoness Europe AG og Lyoness Norway AS, klage over pålegg om stans av pyramidelignende omsetningssystem (redacted public version, PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1Lotterinemnda (Norwegian Lottery Appeals Board), via Klagenemndssekretariatet · 2019-01-27archived copy

    Lotterinemnda (Norway, Lottery Appeals Board), decision of 27 January 2019, redacted PDF - appeal dismissed and Lotteritilsynet’s cease order of 31 May 2018 upheld; Cashback World and Lyconet treated as one integrated scheme; 2016 figures of NOK 206.5 million in total member payments, NOK 166.9 million on discount coupons and customer shares, NOK 19.3 million from the loyalty business and NOK 11.4 million returned to members; approximately 81% of active participants buying these products

  6. Klagenemndssekretariatet notice - "Offentlig versjon av Lotterinemndas vedtak overfor Lyoness"
    RegulatorTier 1Klagenemndssekretariatet (Secretariat for the Norwegian Appeals Boards) · 2019-02-28archived copy
  7. Lotteritilsynet decision of 31 May 2018 - "Lyoness, Lyconet, Cashback World, myWorld – vedtak med pålegg om stans av ulovleg pyramidevirksomhet i Noreg" (PDF)
    RegulatorTier 1Lotteri- og stiftelsestilsynet (Norwegian Gaming and Foundation Authority) · 2018-05-31archived copy
  8. Lottstift news release - "Lyoness er eit ulovleg pyramideliknande omsetningssystem"
    RegulatorTier 1Lotteri- og stiftelsestilsynet (Lottstift), Norway · 2019-02-12archived copy
  9. Lottstift news release - Lotteritilsynet reports Lyoness to the police, 1 October 2019 (police later shelved the report for capacity reasons)
    RegulatorTier 1Lotteri- og stiftelsestilsynet (Lottstift), Norway · 2019-11-19archived copy
  10. Decyzja Prezesa UOKiK nr DOZIK-12/2019 of 30 December 2019 against Lyoness Europe AG - full decision text (PDF copy; Art. 7 pkt 14 u.p.n.p.r., cessation as of 7 March 2019, PLN 193.70 in costs)
    RegulatorTier 1Prezes Urzędu Ochrony Konkurencji i Konsumentów (UOKiK), Poland · 2019-12-30archived copy

    UOKiK (Poland), decision DOZIK-12/2019 of 30 December 2019 against Lyoness Europe AG - breach of Article 7 point 14 of the Act on Countering Unfair Market Practices, practice prohibited from 7 March 2019, refunds of voucher and gift-card deposits ordered within four months, consumer notification within two weeks and corrective notices in newspapers of at least 100,000 circulation; monetary element recorded as 193.70 PLN in procedural costs

    Not established by this document: UOKiK's own decision register at decyzje.uokik.gov.pl indexes DOZIK-12/2019 but its document views are served only through Domino view URLs carrying volatile Count/Expand/Seq/Start parameters, and every attempt to fetch one returned HTTP 400. Rather than emit an unstable register URL, the full decision text is cited from a retrievable PDF copy whose content was read and matched against the operative parts described in the prose (Art. 7 pkt 14, cessation 7 March 2019, PLN 193.70 procedural costs, four-month refund and two-week notification obligations).

  11. Gazeta Prawna, "Lyoness to piramida finansowa. Działający w 47 krajach program lojalnościowy okazał się ściemą" - reporting on decision DOZIK-12/2019
    ReportingTier 3Dziennik Gazeta Prawna · 2020-02-12archived copy
  12. OGH 21 November 2023, 2 Ob 182/23p - VKI v Lyconet Austria GmbH, Verbandsklage on 47 clauses, full text (RIS)
    Court recordTier 1Oberster Gerichtshof (Austrian Supreme Court), via Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (RIS) · 2023-11-21archived copy

    VKI press release and OTS release on the Austrian Supreme Court judgment of 11 January 2024 - all 47 clauses from Lyconet membership agreements and compensation plans, versions 3-2019, 9-2019 and 1-2021, declared unlawful for intransparency, abusive termination rights and excessive confidentiality; the appellate court unable to determine when or in what amount a participant would earn; VKI position that consumers may reclaim all payments made. Konsument consumer page on the same, including the reader who won in 2021 and was refused reimbursement

    Not established by this document: The original APA-OTS wire copy of the VKI release could not be located at an ots.at URL; the Austrian Parliament's reproduction of the same OTS text in written question 18031/J is cited in its place, alongside the VKI's own release.

  13. VKI press release, 11 January 2024 - "OGH beurteilt 47 Klauseln von Lyconet als gesetzwidrig"
    ReportingTier 2Verein für Konsumenteninformation (VKI), Austria · 2024-01-11archived copy
  14. verbraucherrecht.at case note - "47 Klauseln von Lyconet gesetzwidrig" (identifies the judgment as OGH 21.11.2023, 2 Ob 182/23p; clause versions 3-2019, 9-2019 and 1-2021)
    ReportingTier 2Verein für Konsumenteninformation (VKI) - verbraucherrecht.at · 2024-01archived copy
  15. Konsument (VKI) consumer page - "Lyconet-Cashback: Urteil – App, Aktie, Auszahlung"
    ReportingTier 2Konsument / Verein für Konsumenteninformation (VKI), Austria · 2024-02-22archived copy
  16. Parliamentary question 18031/J (XXVII. GP) reproducing the VKI/OTS release of 11 January 2024 in full
    RegulatorTier 1Parlament Österreich (Austrian Parliament) · 2024-02-28archived copy
  17. ORF Steiermark, 4 August 2025 - "Cashback-Firma myWorld ist insolvent" (€22.7m liabilities, €15m assets, 116 employees, 2,049 creditors, 20% quota over two years)
    ReportingTier 3ORF Steiermark (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) · 2025-08-04archived copy

    Leadersnet and KSV1870 on the myWorld International AG restructuring proceeding opened at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz on 4 August 2025 - €22.7 million of liabilities, €15.07 million of liquidation-value assets, 2,049 creditors, 116 employees, 47 foreign subsidiaries, 20% quota over two years, approximately €5 million of voucher-related debt, stated causes of declining purchasing behavior and revenues significantly below projections; ORF Steiermark on Lyconet Austria GmbH’s filing of 6 August 2025 - €5.7 million, 565 creditors, 43 employees, no restructuring intended

    Not established by this document: No Leadersnet article on the myWorld restructuring could be located, and KSV1870 does not publish a retrievable case page for either proceeding (its insolvency case pages are suppressed on data-protection grounds). Every figure above is therefore a press or creditor-association report of the debtors' own court filings, not a retrieved court record.

  18. ORF Steiermark, 6 August 2025 - "Nach Lyoness nun auch Lyconet insolvent" (Lyconet Austria GmbH: €5.7m, 565 creditors, 43 employees, no restructuring intended)
    ReportingTier 3ORF Steiermark (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) · 2025-08-06archived copy
  19. Die Presse, 4 August 2025 - "Lyoness-Nachfolger myWorld International AG insolvent", reporting the AKV / KSV1870 / Creditreform figures and the Landesgericht Graz timetable
    ReportingTier 3Die Presse (Vienna) · 2025-08-04archived copy
  20. JUVE Österreich, 6 August 2025 - "Kanzleitrio soll Grazer Cashback-Plattform sanieren" (AKV figures including €56.3m of contested tax liabilities excluded from the €22.7m)
    ReportingTier 3JUVE Verlag für juristische Information · 2025-08-06archived copy
  21. weekend.at, 6 August 2025 - AKV report of the Konkursverfahren opened over Lyconet Austria GmbH at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz (€5.74m passiva, administrator Graf Isola)
    ReportingTier 3weekend.at, citing Alpenländischer Kreditorenverband (AKV) · 2025-08-06archived copy
  22. Mag. Dr. Josef Fromhold, "Die Clouds" - reproducing the findings of the expert report of Mag. Andrea Komposch (no real countervalue for the discount vouchers, opaque Shopping Point calculation, total-loss risk)
    ReportingTier 3Rechtsanwalt Mag. Dr. Josef Fromhold, Vienna · 2020-08-30archived copy

    Mag. Dr. Josef Fromhold, "Die Clouds", reproducing the expert report of Mag. Andrea Komposch instructed in Austrian proceedings - no real countervalue for the discount vouchers, the business model and Shopping Point calculations largely opaque, substantial total-loss risk; the Cloud qualification path of approximately €2,600 comprising Premium Marketer status or 2,400 Shopping Points via €2,400 of vouchers, a €50 balance unit, an active Easy Shop Plus subscription and one €1,500 Limited Edition Discount Voucher

    Not established by this document: The Komposch expert report itself is not published; it is available only as quoted and paraphrased (with paragraph numbers) in the Fromhold page cited above.

  23. HG Wien 4 June 2021, 48 Cg 30/20a - case summary describing the €2,400 Shopping Point / LEDV qualification path (published by claimant's counsel)
    Court recordTier 3Rechtsanwalt Mag. Dr. Josef Fromhold, Vienna (Handelsgericht Wien judgment) · 2021-06-04archived copy
  24. OLG Wien 8 February 2021, 33 R 102/20t - appellate finding that the Lyconet Compensation Plan cannot be reconstructed even after intensive study (published by claimant's counsel)
    Court recordTier 3Rechtsanwalt Mag. Dr. Josef Fromhold, Vienna (Oberlandesgericht Wien judgment) · 2021-02-08archived copy
  25. Lyconet Compensation Plan, US edition (company document, 21pp; Balance Categories 1–5, Balance Bonus $600–$24,000, Balance Commission tables, Bonus/Transfer/Customer Units) - mirrored copy
    Compensation planTier 3Lyconet (document mirrored on idoc.pub) · 2014archived copy

    Lyoness/Lyconet Compensation Plan, US edition - career levels 1–8 at 5,000 to 2,500,000 Shopping Points, Career Bonuses of $300 to $75,000, per-point commission of $0.0375 to $0.09375, the 50% Evaluation Rule, Balance Categories at 50 to 4,000 points per unit, Balance Bonuses of $600 to $24,000, National, Continental, International and Additional Bonus Units, Coach Bonus of 20% and Senior Coach Bonus of 5%, and the annual activity requirement of 350 Balance Program points or 5 direct lines at 150 points each

    Not established by this document: No copy of the compensation plan survives on a Lyoness, Lyconet or myWorld domain - lyconet.com and lyoness.com were taken down in August–September 2025 - so every citation here is a third-party mirror of the company's own PDF.

  26. Lyconet Compensation Plan US - second mirrored copy (full text)
    Compensation planTier 3Lyconet (document mirrored on pdfcoffee) · 2014archived copy
  27. Lyconet Compensation Plan Us - Scribd copy
    Compensation planTier 3Lyconet (document mirrored on Scribd) · 2014archived copy
  28. Lyconet Compensation Plan Overview, mo-en-lyconet-compensation-plan-2018-07 (2018 edition)
    Compensation planTier 3Lyconet (document mirrored on Scribd) · 2018-07archived copy
  29. AK Vorarlberg press release - "My World Austria gescheitert: Klage gegen AK Vorarlberg kurz vor Verhandlung zurückgezogen" (suit of 30 March 2020 against the release of 28 February 2020; "untrennbarer Zusammenhang" finding)
    ReportingTier 2Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte für Vorarlberg (AK Vorarlberg) · 2021-09archived copy

    AK Vorarlberg press release, September 2021 - myWorld Austria GmbH’s suit against the Chamber of Labor over a February 2020 consumer warning withdrawn hours before trial on 6 September 2021, and a court finding of an "untrennbarer Zusammenhang" between the vouchers and Lyconet’s operations; discussion of OGH 4 Ob 69/19d of 28 May 2019 on the Austrian branch finding that reopened the home forum

  30. OGH 28 May 2019, 4 Ob 69/19d - Lyoness Europe AG, Austrian branch/"Niederlassung" jurisdiction ruling, full text (RIS)
    Court recordTier 1Oberster Gerichtshof (Austrian Supreme Court), via Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (RIS) · 2019-05-28archived copy
  31. Vorarlberger Nachrichten, 6 September 2021 - "Illegales Pyramidenspiel zu Recht kritisiert" (withdrawal hours before the Landesgericht Feldkirch hearing)
    ReportingTier 3Vorarlberger Nachrichten · 2021-09-06archived copy
  32. AK Vorarlberg press release - "Neuer Lack auf alten Pyramidenspielen" (the February 2020 consumer warning the suit attacked)
    ReportingTier 2Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte für Vorarlberg (AK Vorarlberg) · 2020-02-28archived copy
  33. Policía Nacional press release, 31 July 2025 - arrest in Madrid of the Spanish representative of a loyalty/recommendation scheme; 803 complainants before Juzgado Central de Instrucción 1 of the Audiencia Nacional, €5m claimed losses, €52m illicit benefit
    RegulatorTier 1Policía Nacional - Dirección General de la Policía, Ministerio del Interior (Spain) · 2025-07-31archived copy

    BehindMLM company archive (trade blog - journalism and commentary, not a primary record) reporting the Spanish National Police release on the arrest of Joaquin Garcia de la Brena on 23 July 2025, the 803 complainants and the €2,000 plus €99–€399 monthly model; the Russian central bank listing of 1 June 2021; the Greek charges of 2015; the Canadian and US income disclosure figures; the 2018 Norwegian card-usage disclosure of 21%; and the Customer Cloud pricing. Fanpage.it investigation into TikTok recruitment; EUalive on Slovenia; St. Galler Tagblatt on the Swiss refund judgments; WP SportoweFakty and Gazeta Prawna on the Polish sponsorships and the 2017 UOKiK warning

    Not established by this document: Not located, and recorded as such: the Fanpage.it TikTok-recruitment investigation; the EUalive item on Slovenia; the St. Galler Tagblatt piece on the Swiss refund judgments (a BehindMLM report of the Zug Court of Appeal decision is cited instead); the WP SportoweFakty piece on the Polish sponsorships; the Bank of Russia list entry of 1 June 2021; and any record of the Greek charges of 2015.

  34. ABC, 31 July 2025 - reporting the €2,000 entry payment (2011–2014) and €99–€399 monthly payments (from 2015) in the Spanish case
    ReportingTier 3ABC (Madrid) · 2025-07-31archived copy
  35. BehindMLM - "myWorld's Joaquin Garcia de la Brena arrested in Spain" (trade blog; names the individual the Spanish release leaves unnamed)
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2025-08-02archived copy
  36. BehindMLM - "Lyoness collapses, myWorld & Lyconet websites disabled"
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2025-09-01archived copy
  37. BehindMLM - "myWorld Review: Cashback World, Lyconet & Lyoness in 2021" (compensation-plan reconstruction and income figures)
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2021-02-21archived copy
  38. BehindMLM - "Lyconet Review: Unit commissions that don't add up" (2014 review of the US compensation plan)
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2014-12-16archived copy
  39. BehindMLM - "Lyoness a pyramid scheme according to Swiss Court of Appeal" (Zug Cantonal Court of Appeal refund judgment)
    ReportingTier 3BehindMLM · 2017-03-30archived copy
Unable to verify

What we could not get

  • The live content of lyconet.com. The fetch failed on an expired TLS certificate and the host was additionally blocked by the research session’s egress policy, so no page was rendered. The conclusion that the site is dead rests on the certificate failure plus the documented site shutdown of August–September 2025, not on a retrieved page - and by the same token, nothing about what the domain might display to another visitor is asserted here
  • Whether mediaworld.agency, the Dubai brokerage that myworld.com and cashbackworld.com now redirect to, has any connection to the group’s former Dubai advertising vehicle, mediaWorld Advertising International FZE. The name coincidence is striking and is expressly not evidence of a link
  • Primary insolvency court documents. The creditor-protection association has suppressed its case pages on data-protection grounds and another association’s page returns a 404, so every insolvency figure quoted here is a press or creditor-association report of a debtor’s court filing rather than an audited or directly retrieved record
  • Any charging document from Austria’s economic-crime prosecutor. The description of the founder as the primary target and the status of the investigation as nearing completion are investigative reporting only, and there is no indictment on the record. The Spanish National Police release itself was likewise not directly retrieved, and the Greek prosecution’s outcome - charges in 2015 - could not be located in any form
  • The original US and Canadian Income Disclosure Statement PDFs. Both hosting mirrors were unreachable, so the $0.38 median, the 46% zero-earner share, the $61.58 Canadian average and the 95% zero figure for 2022 are secondary reproductions of company documents. Whether any EU-market income disclosure ever existed could not be established either way
  • Case numbers for the reported Vienna Higher Regional Court ruling of June 2024 and the reported Supreme Court ruling of January 2025, both of which would harden the Austrian record considerably if confirmed; and the reported Polish asset seizure of about $6.4 million, the German account seizures, a UK subsidiary’s compulsory liquidation and a South African pyramid classification, all of which are campaigner-sourced with no primary documents
  • The current European compensation-plan document. The plan figures used here come from the US edition plus the Italian regulator’s reconstruction; the euro career-tier table circulating in the same period is a trade-blog reproduction of a company document rather than the document itself, and prices for events, seminars and travel, the streaming device and the €2,999 AI avatar product could not be checked against any company price list
  • Regulator-level status in Croatia, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Latvia, Estonia and several other markets where regional Clouds were organized. No regulator notice, warning listing, sanction or judgment was located for any of them. That is a gap in the research, not a finding of clean status - and it cuts both ways

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

Lyconet - frequently asked

QIs Lyconet still operating in 2026?
No. myWorld International AG filed for a restructuring proceeding at the Landesgericht für Zivilrechtssachen Graz on 4 August 2025, reporting €22.7 million of liabilities against €15.07 million of liquidation-value assets, 2,049 creditors, 116 employees and a statutory minimum offer of 20% payable over two years. Lyconet Austria GmbH followed on 6 August 2025 with €5.7 million of liabilities and 565 creditors, and the creditor-protection filing recorded that no restructuring was intended - that is, liquidation. The Lyoness predecessor entities had already gone insolvent in autumn 2023. Consumer-facing sites were disabled in August and September 2025. Checked on 30 July 2026, lyconet.com fails on an expired TLS certificate and serves nothing usable, while myworld.com and cashbackworld.com both redirect to a Dubai-run domain-brokerage listing offering the names for sale in a $100,000–$250,000 bracket, with no mention of either brand on the destination page. Anything currently presenting itself under these names should be treated as unconnected until it proves otherwise.
QWas Cashback World itself a scam?
No, and it is worth separating the two sides carefully, because a person who only ever used the free card was in a completely different position from a paid Marketer. Cashback World, later branded myWorld, cost nothing to join: register at €0, receive a card and later an app, shop at partner merchants and receive a rebate advertised at up to 5% and in practice commonly 1–2% in store, plus a Friendship Bonus of up to 0.5% one level deep on shoppers you referred. There was no purchase quota, no renewal and no downline. The merchants were genuinely mainstream, including a national fuel retailer in Poland, and real cashback was really paid - Italy’s competition authority records €1–3 million paid to Italian users over a thirteen-month window. The qualification is that Norway’s regulator found only 21% of issued cards were ever used, which suggests the card functioned largely as an entry point to the paid program rather than as a consumer product with organic demand.
QWas Lyconet banned in more than ten countries?
No, and that claim, common in campaigner material, overstates a record that is already heavy without it. Three public authorities issued prohibitions or pyramid-scheme sanctions: Italy’s AGCM, with a €3.2 million penalty in January 2019 and a further €3 million in decision PS11517 of 25 January 2021; Norway’s Lotteritilsynet, with a cease order of 31 May 2018 upheld on appeal by Lotterinemnda on 27 January 2019; and Poland’s UOKiK, in decision DOZIK-12/2019 of 30 December 2019. Beyond that the instruments are lighter and different in kind: one confirmed central-bank warning listing in Russia on 1 June 2021, which is a register entry rather than an adjudication; consumer-body warnings in Austria, Germany, Portugal and Poland, which are not regulators’ findings; civil refund judgments in Austria and Switzerland; an arrest in Madrid on 23 July 2025 that is neither a charge nor a conviction; criminal charges in Greece in 2015 with no located outcome; and investigations closed with no action in Sweden and the Philippines. Two courts found the other way entirely - the Australian Federal Court dismissed the ACCC’s pyramid-selling case in October 2015 and the Vienna Regional Court decided in April 2016 that the scheme was not a pyramid scheme.
QHow much did Lyconet Marketers actually earn?
The strongest evidence is a regulator working from company records rather than a marketing document. Covering March 2019 to August 2020 in Italy, AGCM found 20,000–40,000 active Marketers, of whom 15,000–25,000 received any commission at all, more than 5,000–10,000 received exactly zero despite having bought products, fewer than 1,000 earned more than €1,000, and 56 earned more than €10,000. At the midpoint of the active band that is 0.19% clearing €10,000 gross, before deducting a €299–€1,299 entry, a €50–€150 monthly subscription, packs and vouchers. The company’s own North American disclosures agree in direction: a US median monthly commission of $0.38, about $4.56 for the year, with an average of roughly $275 and 46% earning nothing; and a Canadian statement showing 99% of Marketers between $0.01 and $1,000 averaging $61.58, with 95% earning $0 in 2022. Publishing those disclosures at all was more than many programs did, and it is the reason this report can quote them.
QWhat were the Customer Clouds, and can that money be recovered?
On the face of the company’s own marketing they were investment instruments. A position cost €1,500, €3,000 or €4,500 for one, two or three shares, bought through Limited Edition Discount Vouchers at €1,500 each, on top of roughly €2,400 in qualifying vouchers, a €50 balance unit and a live monthly subscription. What was promised was a proportional share of a regional pool of shoppers’ Shopping Points, paid monthly as passive income at a stated 3.7 to 9.3 cents per point over a stated six-year life, explicitly without requiring recruitment, with customer acquisition controlled exclusively by the operator. No registered prospectus was located in any jurisdiction, and a court-appointed economics expert in Austrian proceedings found no real countervalue for the vouchers, calculations that were largely opaque, and substantial total-loss risk. On recovery: Austria’s Supreme Court voided all 47 contract clauses on 11 January 2024, and the consumer association’s position is that affected consumers may reclaim all payments made - but the counterparty is insolvent, one debtor intends no restructuring, the other offers a statutory minimum 20% over two years, holders of the myWorld Share Points instrument are expected to rank as subordinated claims, and a consumer who won their case in 2021 reported still being refused reimbursement.
Who wrote this report

Author, editor and publisher

C
Written by Claude AI
Reviewed by Rob Fore · Published by Listech Inc · July 30, 2026

This report was researched and written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, working from primary documents - Lyconet’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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