ACN MLM Review (Updated 2023): Is It A Scam Or Legit?

ACN Reviews: Full Review

What is ACN?

In 1993, in Concord, North Carolina, ACN (American Communication Network) was started by a group of young entrepreneurs who had multiple combined years of experience in direct sales.

• Tony Cupisz
• Mike Cupisz
• Greg Provenzano
• Robert Stevanovski

For additional information, go to their site at www.acninc.com.

They decided to start their own MLM company due to their own training dissatisfaction (mainly trial and error) with other companies.

ACN is now an international company with Independent Business Owners promoting telecom services using network marketing.

As of now, ACN is the largest distributor of telecommunication services world-wide. The 2nd largest was a company called Excel Communications but is defunct.

What Products Does ACN Offer?

What ACN offers is pretty simple, it's residential and business services. This is how these services are broken down:

Residential Services:

Home phone services:

For $24.99 per month you can use your high-speed internet connections to make unlimited calls from your home to over 80 mobile and landline destinations.

High-speed Internet:

ACN offers nationwide high-speed internet services with :

• Frontier
• Verizon
• Centurylink
• AT&T

Based upon the service provider you decide upon, the pricing will range anywhere from $20 - $100/month.

Wireless service:

You can utilize this phone plan program on either a contract or no contract basis with 3 different pricing plans (purple, green and yellow) based on the feature you use. In addition, you have to ability to sign up others on a "friends and family" plan.

Purple pricing plan range: $23-$64 per month
Green pricing plan range: $23-$79 per month
Yellow pricing plan range: $23-$69 per month.

XOOM energy:

Xoom energy is a natural gas service by ACN that provides two plans:

SureLock - The price of your service is guaranteed to never fluctuate
SimpleFlex - With this plan your monthly rate will go up or down depending on your usage, but you can cancel or switch whenever you need to

Television:

ACN is also a provider of satellite television through DirecTv and Dish. Their packages start at $39.99.

Home security and automation:

ACN also offers home security and automation through Vivint, a leader in the industry. With this service you get notifications for control over your smart home and 24/7 security surveillance with video monitoring.

You can get these services for a down payment of $50 and no activation costs.

Business Services:

With the business services package, you get everything in the Residential Services package along with the following:

Anovia payment and processing:

ACN offers payment and credit card processing through Anovia offering the following:

• Credit
• Debit
• Gift Card
• e-Checks
• e-Commerce

You have three options:

• No upfront cost for mobile card reader - $25 / month
• No contract plan - $20 / month
• Purchase a Swipe terminal with low-cost transaction rates - $15 / month

How Does The ACN Compensation Plan Work?

There are 3 ways acn independent business owners generate income.

Monthly Residual Commissions

Eventually, when an IBO starts building a team or recruits and they increase their billings, the commissions that an ACN IBO generates from that team will be their primary residual income source.

Basically, you start making money from the efforts of the people you recruited in your team. And as your teams start growing, the system that you earn residual income from will continue to grow.

These are pretty hard to come by though, and you'll have to work your ASS off for them.

Personal Commissions

The personal commissions that you receive is a percentage of the total income that you've generated based on the customers that you've personally signed up to the ACN service plans.

The percentage that you receive from ACN will be 2-8% of the total monthly bill of your customer.

So, let's say you have a personal base of 39 customers that uses about $1,000 per month of ACN Services; you will get paid 2% of that total. This is a residual income of $20 / month from those customers.

Consequently, the more customers you have signed up, the more money you make.

I actually like this about ACN as they make it a point to incentivize their reps in the area of retail sales. This is something that more MLMs should do.

With that said, I doubt that most people would even bother trying to sign up 39 customers just to earn 1-3% of their total bill.

Personal commissions are a little bit easier to get...but you still have to work SUPER HARD. Odds are you'll likely work harder at this than that 9-5 you decided to quit.

BUT YOU WON'T HAVE MORE MONEY TO SHOW FOR IT!

Team Residual Commissions

Team residuals is the money you make from the people that you sign up and their customers, and the people they sign up and their customers.

Ahhhh, the worst payment method of all. In my opinion it's SELLOUT money. You have to sell people on the dream you were sold into just so you can have a chance at more money.

I'm sure by now you realize how (not so clean) MLM money like this can be, and you're probably put off by it.

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But if you want to keep chasing after shrimpy commissions and selling people left and right...check out the ACN payment plan below:

Although this diagram doesn't offer much information, it does show that you earn 23% commissions going as deep as 7 levels.

Now this may seem like a killer compensation plan, this is only 23% of the profits from ACN.

So, no matter what service you sign up customers to use, about 1/4 of your ACN billings will be going to people above you.

As a result, ACN really has a hard to with offering services to your customers at competitive prices.

Of course, they still want to make some money on their end, so they'll need to pay out these commissions over and above their overhead.

So how much money are you able to make on each level?

In order to answer that question, we had to look at the ACN compensation plan from 2019. This will show you everything that ACN IBOs do to earn their commissions.

ACN provided the diagram below to help us better understand:

It's pretty clear from this diagram that if you want to make it big with ACN, you have to build a strong downline. The more money your downline spends with ACN, the more money you make.

And, of course, the best way to grow your downline is for your members to recruit other ACN IBOs... and on and on. The is the MLM way.

Customer Acquisition Bonuses

The bonuses you receive for customer acquisition are up-front and one-time only for recruiting new ACN customers.

Next, when one of your personal recruits become team trainers, you'll get paid anywhere from $90-275 base on your rank.

And to become a team trainer, your recruit has to sign up for the $499 initiation package and then turn around and sign up 6-8 customers within a certain amount of time.

I know what you're thinking... "this is getting paid for signing customers up", but it's not. These bonuses will be paid out only when the people you recruit 'level up' within 30 days.

This is what most MLMs call their 'quick start bonus'. It's simply an incentive to get people up and running ASAP.

In ACN, this tactic is called 'tap-rooting'.

The goal here is to get ACN IBOs to recruit as much as they can while they're brand new to the program and still excited. We've discovered that an IBO that has to sign up at least one member into their downline, the chances are they will stay with the MLM.

An explanation of the points system for all the services is laid out in the full compensation plan, but that's only relevant to your specific area.

How To Join ACN As An Independent Business Owner?

So, if you want to be an ACN IBO, the first thing you'll need to do is complete an ACN business owner agreement.

You'll need to pay a $499 'application fee' which must be submitted with the letter of intent and is basically just a business startup fee.

After becoming IBO you'll be able to start selling ACN's services to your customers through your own website.

Just keep in mind that you are an independent business owner of ACN and not an employee.

Which is great because you can set your own hours and run your business the way you want. You're actually paying to be in business for yourself and not paying to be an employee.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Is It Hard To Make Money With ACN?

The MLM business model has inherent problems, so making money is pretty hard across the board, not just with ACN.

In 2014, Jon Taylor mentioned in his book, Multi-level Marketing Unmasked, that 99.7% of the people who sign up with MLM companies typically lose money.

So what are you waiting for? Check out something that ACTUALLY works instead!

So, the chances that you will make money are virtually zero, no matter what you are told by a company.

If you're a good salesperson, then you might be in the .03% of people that can sell products. And MLM companies rely on this so that they don't have to spend a lot of money on advertising.

What they do instead is create a huge network of loyal people to buy their products who wouldn't buy them otherwise unless there was a promise of financial freedom attached.

As I mentioned earlier, the compensation plan looks great, but you're also paying for commissions. Remember that 23% of your ACN service bill will be paid out in commissions to the people above you.

From what we've seen in ACN customer reviews, they feel that the services offered are too expensive and very low quality.

On top of that, many other customers don't like the fact that they couldn't cancel services leading them to believe ACN to be a scam.

Is ACN A Pyramid Scheme?

When the issue of this business model being a pyramid scheme comes up, it's usually because people question whether it's legal or not to make money by signing people up to the business.

Legally, this is not the case since the business also makes money from the selling of actual services that people want or need. Only when you make money by recruiting people would it be considered a pyramid scheme.

In 1979, the FTC brought a case against Amway claiming it to be an illegal pyramid scheme even though they sold actual products.

The court case went on for nearly 4 years after which it was decided that Amway was not a pyramid scam, but that they offered a business opportunity.

This may sound like semantics, but in their contracts members are told that they need to make sales.

This ruling opened the flood gates for other MLMs (such as the ACN opportunity) to join the fray provided that their goal is customer acquisition and not just 'sign up bonuses'.

But, even though something is technically legal, doesn't mean it's ethical.

As a matter of fact, in 2005 ACN was accused of being a pyramid scheme in Australia. Today, ACN still operates in Australia, so I'm guessing they either changed some things up or they won their case.

Is The ACN Legit Or A Scam?

Since ACN has stood the test of time (24 yrs), the company appears to be legit.

Of course, every company will run into their fair share of customer complaints whether or not they offer people true products or services. This isn't localized to MLMs or other such companies.

In general, their customer service has been the biggest area of complaints that we've seen.

The problems that come up with customer services are that these ACN reps (aka, business owners) spend so much time putting out fires from customers while at the same time trying to recruit new people.

Another issue is that as a rep, you spend so much time keeping up with the services and wrapping your head around the rate structure just to have ACN pull the rug out from under you 'for the good of your business.'

What they fail to disclose to you is that the services that you have after the change are no longer under your original contract with ACN and you end up paying more money for the same services before you realize the change occurred.

Of course, this wouldn't really be a big deal if the vast majority of ACN IBOs made decent money, but the fact is that less than 1% of ACN reps actually do make money from the ACN opportunity.

As it is, ACN is somewhat of a clunker in the MLM world.

They manage to offer new services here and there so that the next ACN opportunity seeker will consider them as an option, but they haven't nailed down a way to make those dreams come true overall.

So, if you're dead set on working with an MLM, you can do much better than ACN.

But, when it comes to building a lasting online business, you have plenty of other options.

Keep in mind, I don't get paid to promote any of the programs I review. I personally think Network Marketing is a dead business model, where you end up losing way too much money.

Are There Any Alternatives To ACN?

At the end of the day, it's possible to make money with ACN... so long as you're ok with being a salesperson and can persuade other people to sign up with ACN services.

But don't forget that in order to earn residual income, you'll need to recruit people into your downline. This is where the real money is.

So, given that, this may not be right for everyone, and there are other MLM options out there for you.

There are even many different alternatives to Multi Level Marketing, such as:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Dropshipping
• Amazon FBA
• Blogging
• Freelancing

...all of which you can make a decent amount of money to a great deal of money.

However, these business models are often too reliant on outside influences, so you frequently find yourself willing to work without a safety net.

What if you could have all the upside potential of an e-commerce business, none of the headaches of dealing with your Network Marketing downline, and all the passive income potential of Real Estate Investing?

What I mean is that there is one business model that allows you all these things.

It’s called Digital Leasing.

What Is My #1 Recommended Business Model In 2024?

Our review team has come across a program in the real estate industry that is next level!

Although it’s not real estate in the traditional sense, it’s all digital.

Yup, Digital Leasing!

Where Multi Level Marketing falls short is in scalability.

There’s only so much time in a day and there’s only so many people you can reach to sell by yourself.

MLM companies know this! Which is why they push so hard for you to recruit for your downline…you can’t get rich with it as a one man/woman show.

But what if you could make even more money off of little local websites without having to spend hundreds of dollars on overpriced products and a bunch of time recruiting people to sell under you?

With this Digital Leasing program, you can make recurring monthly income without constant sales to your friends and constant recruitment!

Sound too good to be true? Of course it does! But it isn’t…in fact, business owners wish they had this skill!

All you have to do is build and rank a LOCAL website and forward the jobs off to a business owner in town, you could even email it to them!

This works for literally any service based business, tree service, plumbing, towing, etc.

How do you get paid and how much?

Simple, after you forward the jobs off to a business owner and he makes some money off of them, you simply ask to make the deal beneficial for each other.

A fair price to charge per lead, depending on the industry is 10-20%…let’s just use the tree service industry for example and go by worst case scenario.

Let’s say you build and rank the site and only 10 jobs a month come in. The average tree service job is anywhere from $500-$2000!

That means at bare minimum you have an asset worth $500 a month!

See why they call it Digital Leasing now? That’s a rent payment.

The great thing is how easy it is to scale. You don’t have to worry about:

• Your upline getting paid before you
• Begging your friends and family to buy from you
• Recruiting people all the time

But as it is with ACN… You only get what’s left of the pie if you meet a monthly quota…

The course we recommend actually allows you to collect HUGE FLAT RATE DEALS. Truly passive income!

The training program takes making money online to a whole other level. The owner of the program walks you through how to build and rank a site hand in hand, with the occasional voice over when he is sharing his screen.

You will learn the importance of keywords, website name, how to send call notifications via email, backlinking, etc.

Once the training program is completed you will also have access to a Facebook group much better than the ACN group in our opinion. This group is much more active.

Unlike MLMs, where you’re getting maybe $10 per sale, you could be getting 10-20X THAT.

A business will always want more leads and another job. In fact it doesn’t even matter that the job isn’t coming from their website name…they see it as it is…expanding Digital Leasing.

Unlike ACN, more people have been able to walk away from their 9-5 job as well.

Digital Leasing allows you to have total passive income with most of your day being spent WITH your friends, NOT selling to them.

Now, I know you probably have tons of questions…

So, check this out to learn more.