Telexfree
American multi-level marketing company

Telexfree (stylized as TelexFREE), a trade name owned by Telexfree Inc., was a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme disguised as an internet phone service company. Prosecutors have described it as the largest fraud of all time in terms of the number of people affected - more than 1 million, with victims in various countries. The brand became best known for its operations in Brazil held by Ympactus Comercial Ltda after it was involved in an ongoing investigation and trial for operating a Ponzi scheme, and later for having its operations suspended in the US by SEC under the charges of operating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi and pyramid scheme.
Telexfree Inc. owns the rights to the Telexfree brand worldwide. The company was created by Carlos Roberto Costa, Carlos Nataniel Wanzeler and James Matthew Merrill after the change of its former corporate name Common Cents Communications Inc., which was incorporated in Massachusetts. According to the Company Registration Office of Massachusetts, Telexfree Inc. started to use this corporate name on February 15, 2012.
Telexfree Inc. is a sister company of many other companies that operates TelexFree Marketing Plan, which belongs to the same founders and also share the same website.
The public source identifies “Telexfree” as american multi-level marketing company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Telexfree, American and multi-level.
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This entry incorporates text from “Telexfree” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.