Fortune HiTech Marketing Review and Profile

Fortune HiTech Marketing no longer appears to be active as a direct sales company.

Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing was shut down by federal and state regulators in January 2013 and is no longer active. The FTC later identified the operation as a pyramid scheme, and its owners and corporate entities were permanently banned from multilevel marketing.

Original Npros business profile for Fortune HiTech Marketing, preserved below for archival purposes:

Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, commonly known as FHTM, was founded in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2001 by network-marketing executives Paul C. Orberson and Thomas A. Mills. Orberson served as president, while Mills served as chief executive officer. The company expanded throughout the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada and also established Canadian and United Kingdom entities. During its final four years, FHTM enrolled more than 350,000 participants.

FHTM marketed a mixture of third-party household services and proprietary health and beauty products. Its offerings included Dish Network television, cellular-phone service, Frontpoint home security, Xoom Energy, Taxbot, identity-theft protection, roadside assistance and web-conferencing services. The company's proprietary lines included True Essentials nutritional supplements and Envy Organics personal-care products. The FTC found that many of the relationships promoted as corporate "partnerships" were ordinary affiliate arrangements and that True Essentials and Envy Organics accounted for nearly half of FHTM's reported product sales during its 2010ââ'¬"2011 fiscal year.

Independent Representatives paid an enrollment fee that varied from $99 to $299 and had risen to $249 by September 2012. To qualify for commissions and recruitment bonuses, participants were generally required to generate 1,000 volume points through products or services, often by purchasing monthly bundles costing between $100 and $400. Ranks included Manager, Regional Sales Manager, Executive Sales Manager, National Sales Manager, Platinum Sales Manager and Presidential Ambassador. Advancement normally required both monthly qualifying volume and increasingly large downline organizations; for example, Regional Sales Manager required six qualified Managers, while National Sales Manager required a downline of 636 Managers.

Retail and service commissions were typically less than 2% of the underlying purchase or monthly bill, while recruitment bonuses could pay at least $100 for each new downline participant at Regional Sales Manager and at least $190 at National Sales Manager. An FTC analysis of FHTM records found that more than 88% of compensation paid from 2006 through June 2011 was connected with recruitment. The agency also found that more than 90% of representatives earned less than $15 annually, despite typical annual participation expenses of at least $1,500. Additional incentives included fast-start bonuses, company-paid travel, BMW allowances and housing payments for senior representatives.

FHTM had already reached settlements with regulators in North Dakota, Montana and Texas before the federal case, without admitting wrongdoing. The Texas settlement provided approximately $1.3 million for participants. On January 24, 2013, a federal court halted FHTM's operations, froze its assets and appointed a receiver at the request of the FTC and the attorneys general of Kentucky, Illinois and North Carolina. The receiver subsequently determined that recruitmentââ'¬"not outside product salesââ'¬"was the company's principal business. More than 98% of participants lost more than they earned, at least 88% failed to recover their enrollment fees and 94% did not renew after their first year.

A final settlement entered on May 9, 2014, imposed a judgment of more than $169 million, suspended after the defendants surrendered assets valued at least $7.75 million, including assets from Orberson's estate. Mills and the FHTM corporate entities were permanently banned from MLM activity and prohibited from making misleading earnings or product claims. In November 2016, the FTC mailed 285,361 refund checks totaling more than $3.7 million. A second distribution in September 2022 sent another $1,484,338 to 102,178 recipients. FHTM never resumed operations, and FHTM.net no longer represents an active company or business opportunity.