Complaint Review: eEnglish.org - Singapore Not Applicable

Jimmy Crangle Debbie McLean Andrew Doan Amy Flanagan Amy Flannigan Ekaterina Vargataia International TEFL Organization itefl.orgJimmy CrangleDebbie McLeanAndrew DoanAmy FlanaganAmy FlanniganEkaterina Vargataia

eEnglish.org promises large returns on a "low investment of $15,000-$30,000 for marketing its online TEFL courses as well as other franchise opportunities.  This "franchise" is supposed to give you anywhere from 50%-80% of the proceeds from each sale, but making sales is almost impossible.  I hired a professional marketing team to do Facebook advertising for their TEFL courses and made only 4 or 5 sales or $979 in commissions despite spending $3000/month on marketing the courses.  

The company selling the franchise agreed that the people I had hired to do my marketing were good at what they did, but they warned me that selling franchises for such a large amount of money on the internet was not going to work and they would not be able to track whether the advertising was working because I might only get one sale per month. 

Meanwhile, the director, Jimmy Crangle, suggested that the fact that it only took one franchise sale to justify the marketing cost was a good thing and he encouraged me to keep going despite the fact that I had been spending $3000/month and making nothing for 3+months and my marketing team said that their advertising wasn't working.

The company violated the contract by saying they would never recruit any more investors ever again after October 30, 2018.  Then, they said the exact same thing in August 2019 despite writing in my contract in 2018 that they would never recruit any more investors after October 2018.  They also claimed they would not maintain a force of no more than 50 franchisees despite the fact that the director later claimed he wanted to recruit hundreds of franchisees.

I have since met over 20 former franchisees who have been ripped off for tens of thousands of dollars each and made no more than a couple thousand back.  Many franchisees have also noticed that they did not get credit when people they knew signed up and paid.  Instead, they were simply marked as "cancelled" on the shopping cart website even though they had already paid and could verify that they had specifically used the franchisee's link to sign up.  

This company is promoting a bogus TEFL course that has no independent accreditation and acts as a front for a pyramid scheme of selling franchises to more and more investors without ever being able to fulfill any of their promises to said investors despite taking tens of thousands of dollars from them in exchange for a free iPad and a luxurious training event in Thailand and encouraging everyone to spend thousands of dollars per month on advertising.  This can only go on for a few months before people figure out that they can't make any money, and they have left a trail of broke victims in their wake since they began around 2011.

Whatever you do, stay far, far away from eEnglish.org, itefl.org or anything associated with Jimmy Crangle.  His new marketing website is booster365.com.  I am in a group of former franchisees who is doing everything we can to shut down this scam and expose Jimmy Crangle for what he is.  He deserves to be held accountable and see his day in court.