Information Madness

Speak Asia Online, a company that started showing its paid commercials in NDTV Imagine in last few months is already in controversies.

I came to know about Speak Asia when I read Amit's article on Speak Asia Scam that can affect millions in India. Speak Asia works like this.. You give me $200 as an enrollment fee and in return, I will pay you $40 per month for the next 12 months. You make a neat profit of $280 with no effort. If you can convince some of your friends to join the program, you get a commission on their earnings as well and so on. Its a classic Pyramid scheme.

Apparently, Amit @ Labnol.org removed his article that was posted earlier about Speak Asia Scam. So I am quoting his points that he made about the Speak Asia's legitimacy.

Is Speak Asia Legit or a Scam?

So is Speak Asia Online a legit business? Common sense says no and there are reasons to support that:

#1. The company’s website - speakasiaonline.com – suggests that they are based in Singapore and the contact address listed on the website seems to match with the Whois information of their website domain. They claim to have a certificate from ACRA (Singapore’s compliance authority) but a quick search suggests the company is no longer eligible for receiving the “Certificate of Compliance.”

The records, publicly available at acra.gov.sg, also suggest that the company “SPEAKASIA ONLINE PTE. LTD.” was previously known as “HAREN TECHNOLOGY PTE. LTD.” and “PAN AUTOMOTIVES PTE. LTD.” but little do we know about their past operations.

#2. The company says their revenues will exceed 5m this year but if you Google the names of their top executives – Harendar Kaur (CEO) and Tarak Bajpai (India head) – there’s absolutely no information. That’s very surprising especially when these people are handling a successful and global business of this scale.

#3. In order to become a member of Speak Asia Online, all you need is a bank account and the company will directly transfer monthly revenues to your bank account from United Overseas Bank (UOB) Singapore. They require no documentation or proofs even when we have such strict banking rules in India around foreign transactions.

#4. The USD:INR currency exchange rate fluctuates around the INR 45 mark but Speak Asia makes all payments at INR 50. That’s 10% above the market price and no sensible for-profit company in the world would be willing to lose money like that.

#5. Speak Asia reps told me over phone that they are distributing millions of dollars every week to their Indian subscribers. This is when the company has no office in India, there’s no support center to assist customers and above all, Speak Asia Online is not even a registered business in India.

#6. Speak Asia mentions their Singapore contact address as “10 Ubi Crescent, #07-68, Ubi Techpark, Singapore 408564.” A quick search on Google suggests that several companies in Singapore are sharing that office space. As Divya Manian notes, this likely means that the address is used by a third party to register companies to, and no real business operates there.

Now Star News has exposed the Speak Asia Scam.. Check out the video of Speak Asia Online Scam.

Looks like The so called "CEO"s of the SpeakAsiaOnline.com held a press conference with journalists to answer their questions to cover their @$$. The person Manoj Kumar is talking but not answering the questions satisfactorily. Here is the recorded live press conference.