If you’re a network marketer and you’ve been in business for awhile at some point you may be offered a chance to buy mlm genealogy lists. Many people consider these to be the creme de la creme of mlm leads because they are people who are already familiar with our industry. However there are some things I feel it is important to warn you about.

Tonight I received a phone call offering to sell me MLM Genealogy leads. Let’s call this woman Ms. B.

Ms. B. told me she had a list of YTB people to sell. She said she had heard some bad things about YTB and that the company might be shutting down. She said she had about 8400 names, phone number, email, and address for YTB people to sell and she was calling me because she thought someone in my company might be interested in them. She thought these people might be looking for a new opportunity.

Being an ethical guy, little warning bells started going off in my head…

After she gave me her pitch I asked a few questions.

Question 1.
Why aren’t you using the leads yourself? Why are you trying to sell them?

Ms. B answered.
She has a lot of MLM experience but she prefers to be a leads broker and she has a lot of experience brokering these kind of leads. Her family were MLMers but she never really got into that side of the business.

More warning bells are going off for me. Why doesn’t she do MLM? Did she sell these to family members or friends already? If they are so great why isn’t she working them?

Question 2.
How many times are you going to sell these leads?

Ms. B answered.
Anyone selling you leads would be lying if they said they didn’t sell them multiple times. However she said since it was a small list she would only sell these 3-6 times and would give me 3 months exclusivity before selling them to anyone else in my company.

This was pretty honest. She is right leads companies sell leads more than once.

Question 3.
How fresh are these leads?

Ms. B answered.
18-24 months old.

More warning bells are going off now. If they are 18-24 months old, why are they just now going up for sale? Has she been selling them for the last 18 months? Did the person generating the leads already milk the leads as much as they could before selling them off to someone else?

Question 4.
How were these leads generated? Were they from an existing YTB members genealogy list?

Ms. B answered.
These names were generated from web sites of YTB members on the internet. Someone wrote a program to capture the names, emails, phone, and address of YTB members from the internet.

At this point I’m livid with anger. You see I run web marketing web sites for my company. I HATE people like this. This person is what we call a “scrapper”. They scrape the content of web sites. They find someone who has YTB marketing web sites and they scrape the content to find the name, email, address, phone, etc.

If you’re someone like me that runs marketing web sites for team members of my company, what happens is this person points a computer program we call a “bot” which is short for robot. They point the bot at your web site. Then the bot tries a bunch of different combinations of usernames until it find someone that exists. It then scrapes the content off the site for the name, email, phone, etc. and puts that info a database. It then continues trying more variations of usernames.

Besides this being unethical it is also a computer attack. They generate tens of thousands of requests or even hundreds of thousands of requests on the web site in order to find a few thousand names. It can even temporarily break a web site, cause a web site to perform poorly, etc.

In addition I feel this is unethical behavior. I feel that people who try and steal genealogy lists are bad apples. I would hate for someone to attack my downline and try and steal them all away for some new opportunity and I would never want to do that to someone else.

Ms. B. couldn’t believe that I was upset. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t understand that this is they way business is done. She claimed that because this information was freely available on the internet that I was upset.

Needless to say the phone call ended shortly thereafter and I won’t be recommending anyone to her.

I hate people like this. She isn’t a networker so she has no idea how dirty her behavior is. She can never truly understand because she doesn’t have a downline. Or maybe this is one reason why she doesn’t do MLM herself and only brokers MLM genealogy leads.

What do you think? Have you ever bought a genealogy list? Have you ever bought lists that were generated from spamming/scraping web sites? Have you ever had someone attack your downline to try and steal them away to another company?

- Ben

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