QNET ran one recruiting model worldwide — bans, jail terms, and a victim's suicide

QNET, a direct-selling company founded in Hong Kong in 1998 by Vijay Eswaran and Joseph Bismark, grew into one of the world's largest multilevel marketing operations. Its model was pure recruiting: members bought a starter kit for about $10, and for bringing in six new recruits a member could earn a $250 commission — the effective product was the right to recruit others.

That structure made QNET a target wherever it expanded. Nepal called the scheme 'a hundred percent fraud' and banned it in 2003; Sri Lanka followed in 2005, Rwanda, Sudan and Syria in 2009, Saudi Arabia in 2010, Turkey in 2010–11, and Egypt's Dar al-Iftaa issued a fatwa against it in 2012. In Azerbaijan two employees were sentenced to eight years in prison in December 2016 for defrauding roughly 15 citizens of $65,000.

India became the largest battleground. Arrests began in 2003 in Chennai; in 2013 came the first arrests in Andhra Pradesh; by 2016 police had recovered ₹144 crore and filed a 55,000-page charge sheet against the company and its associates. The Enforcement Directorate later provisionally seized another ₹150 crore in properties. In March 2026 police in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka arrested 32 people, saying victims had been promised returns of ₹3–4 crore on investments of ₹5–10 lakh.

The March 2026 round also documented the human cost: a victim from Siddipet, who lost ₹5 lakh, died by suicide in October 2025, leaving a note stating that the company's claims were misleading. Police said more than 68 victims had filed complaints in Telangana alone. QNET has consistently denied that its model is a pyramid, but two decades of bans, prosecutions and now a death attached to its name have made that defence harder to sustain.