CEO Christopher Terry knew his top salespeople were using what he called “predatory marketing” aimed at “minors, 14-16 year olds,” knew their success was “all based on bullshit claims,” knew the FTC was already investigating — and then authorized large cash payments to those same salespeople anyway.

The Machine Built on Manufactured Dreams

Since at least 2018, International Markets Live, Inc. — operating under the names iMarketsLive, IM Mastery Academy, IM Academy, and most recently IYOVIA — has sold “trading education” subscriptions to consumers worldwide. Sign-up fees ran between just over $100 and nearly $500, followed by automatic monthly renewals charging between just under $100 and nearly $400 every four weeks, with additional “Add-On” products stacked on top. This was the machine: get people in the door with promises of wealth, then auto-charge them while they lose money.

The company also recruited those same customers to become salespeople — called “Independent Business Owners” or IBOs — who paid an additional $24.95 per month just to be eligible for commissions. The real product IML was selling was the dream of selling the dream. The more people a salesperson recruited, the more commissions they earned, with the top rank of “Chairman 750” theoretically paying $750,000 per month (enough to buy a median-priced American home every four days).

In November 2024, after years of government warnings and legal actions in multiple countries, IML rebranded the entire operation as “IYOVIA.” According to the FTC, the services offered and marketing methods remain fundamentally identical. The only thing that changed was the name on the door.

The Numbers They Don’t Put in the Instagram Posts

IML’s own Income Disclosure Statement for 2022 showed that nearly 80% of salespeople made less than $500 that entire year. The average annual earnings for that bottom tier: $77.51 (roughly the cost of three months of IML’s own Add-On subscriptions). The median IBO made zero dollars. And those figures did not even account for the $24.95 monthly fee IBOs paid just to participate — once you subtract that, the FTC found that the majority of salespeople lost money.

The complaint documents that between 2020 and 2022, more than 99% of IML IBOs made less than $25,000 a year, and more than 80% made less than $500. Only 0.17% — fewer than two people out of every thousand — made $100,000 or more. That is the math behind the private jets and Rolls-Royces that saturated IML’s social media feeds.

As for the trading education itself: 90% of subscribers dropped the services within six months, and nearly 60% dropped out within the first month. IML never asked its “students” how the training was going, collected no data on whether consumers were actually making money, and admitted to the BBC in writing that there is “no guaranteed return on risk-based investments.” They knew the product didn’t work. They kept selling it anyway.

They Went After People Who Had the Most to Lose

IML’s leadership understood exactly who would be most susceptible to promises of financial freedom. CEO Christopher Terry wrote to top salesperson Jason Brown: “That’s the great thing about network [marketing]…They keep making new 18 year olds everyday.” That is not an accident of marketing. That is a strategy.

The company deployed social media posts with hashtags like #blackwallstreet, #blackexcellence, and #melanin to funnel Black consumers into the recruitment funnel. IML promoted David Imonitie — a Black IBO — as “the highest paid African American Home Based Business Income Earner in the World,” drawing people in with racial pride and economic aspiration. In an internal text message, a salesperson told defendant Jason Brown to send Imonitie to an event in St. Louis because the demographic is “blacks” and “they need to see a [Black person] come up.” Brown responded: “Lol.”

IML salespeople promoted Spanish-language events targeting Latino consumers, and a January 2023 Instagram post stated in Spanish that IML “is designed so that someone who is 11 years old can master it.” France’s financial markets regulator flagged IML as early as December 2017 for “specifically targeting very young people, including high school students.” IML was fully aware that minors were purchasing its services. The company never stopped.

They Used a Pandemic to Feed the Machine

When COVID-19 collapsed the economy in 2020, IML treated it as a sales opportunity. CEO Christopher Terry told IML salespeople on March 17, 2020: “We have the world’s perfect business. Now with the globe falling apart…” Salespeople posted content urging consumers to invest their stimulus checks in IML services, with one post reading: “My Mom used her stimulus check to triple it in minutes.” Another salesperson wrote “let me show you how to turn the pandemic into a BANDemic” — “band” being slang for $1,000.

These were not rogue salespeople acting outside company policy. The FTC’s complaint documents that IML executives actively trained salespeople on how to make these pitches, rewarded the ones who did it best, and protected them from discipline when internal compliance staff tried to intervene.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Dollar Amount Can’t Capture

There is a specific kind of betrayal that happens when someone you trust — a friend, a family member, an Instagram contact who seemed to be doing well — pulls you into something that destroys your finances. IML’s entire recruitment pipeline was engineered to weaponize those relationships. The company’s first contact with a consumer was typically a social media post from a friend or acquaintance who was already an IBO. The scheme traveled through families, church communities, college friend groups, and neighborhood networks. When it collapsed for a recruit, it didn’t just take their money. It took the trust they had in the person who invited them in.

The FTC’s complaint describes a system in which consumers were pitched on three-way calls where a “mentor” handed them off to a higher-ranking salesperson who would make even bigger earnings claims. Consumers were urged to sign up on the spot. Shortly after, that same mentor would call back and push the new recruit to become a salesperson themselves — to recruit two more people and make their own subscription free through the “Two And It’s Free” program. The company turned its victims into recruiters before they had time to realize they were victims. Every person who got pulled in became a link in a chain that pulled in more people, and nearly every person in that chain lost money.

The targeting of Black and Latino young adults was systematic and cynical. IML held a live event titled “Trade Talk with Rich Nation — Teen Edition” featuring photos of a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old with hashtags like #retiredat19 and #retirerich. In Spain, several IBOs were arrested by the National Police for targeting adolescents. In Luxembourg, local police raided an IML sales event and arrested IBOs who had been recruiting secondary school students. These were teenagers — many of them from communities where financial education was already scarce — being sold a fantasy that required them to pay hundreds of dollars a month to access. The fantasy was designed by people who knew it was a fantasy.

One of IML’s most celebrated instructors, Matthew Thayer, was promoted as a star — his trading results were posted online, Defendant Boyd urged the entire salesforce to share Thayer’s wins weekly to “attract people.” Consumers paid for courses taught by a man whose “$15 million trading account” was completely fabricated. When IML discovered the fraud internally, executives deleted the chat thread discussing it and instructed each other: “please DO NOT screen shot and do not blast this in public.” IML’s Director of Education called it a potential “public reputation nightmare.” Not once in that discussion, according to the complaint, did anyone suggest that the consumers who paid for Thayer’s sessions deserved to know the truth. The cover-up was reflexive. The consumers were an afterthought.

Meanwhile, IML’s add-on products — the “strategies” that supposedly told subscribers exactly when to buy and sell — were sometimes literally broken. Products named “Vibrata” and “Delorean” were reported internally as “glitching” and “not working.” Consumers kept getting charged for them anyway, on automatic renewal cycles they had to actively cancel to escape.

The person who lost $300 on binary options trades after following an instructor’s advice, then got hit with another auto-renewal charge while trying to figure out what went wrong — that person does not appear as a named plaintiff in this complaint. They appear as a data point in a chargeback ratio. They appear as one of the tens of thousands of people whose credit card disputes caused IML’s chargeback rate to exceed 1% for three consecutive years. The company’s response to those chargebacks was to find new payment processors, open accounts under affiliate company names, and accept cryptocurrency through a shell company called Assiduous, Inc. — run by CFO Isis Terry — so the money kept flowing.

Legal Receipts: Their Own Words

The following are direct quotes and documented statements from the FTC’s complaint, drawn from internal communications, sworn testimony, and public filings. These are their words, not ours.

“I went through Instagram, I’ve been going through a lot of people’s accounts, and I’m mortified by the lifestyle claims that we have. We’re going to end up getting shut down by the feds. I promise you. This is horrible what’s going on out there… The jets, the watches, the diamonds, the cars… we got to adhere to certain laws that are in place. And if we don’t then there’s consequences. The consequences are that we will be shut down.”

— CEO Christopher Terry, June 2021 message to top IML salespeople — who continued making the same claims after receiving this message, with Terry’s knowledge

“Yes. We CAN do this, will take time and effort but we CAN & SHOULD. We want to be here in 10 years. That happens by staying under the radar.”

— Defendant Alex Morton, responding to a suggestion that salespeople stop using IML’s name on social media to evade FTC detection — June 2020 text exchange

“FTC comes in, they make the law. Top earners go down with the company brother.” [Rosa’s response: they should make the video private so TINA] “can’t find what they can’t find.”

— Defendants Jason Brown and Matt Rosa, private text exchange discussing a sales video featuring jets and luxury cars used for recruitment

“[IML has a] culture that is out of control based on a lack of, or no enforcement of the actual policies and procedures of IML in a standard manner across the complete IML ecosystem… A serious issue that should be addressed is that in many cases, the corporate executives of iMarkets Live, the VP of Sales, and several field Chairmen, have overridden the compliance directives of the in-house compliance team.”

— Outside compliance consultant hired by IML, August 2018 report — seven years before the FTC filed this lawsuit

“[Terry] noted that the team’s success was ‘all based on bullshit claims’ and ‘we have [an] FTC investigation for all their shit that was allowed and encouraged.’ Despite this knowledge, Terry continued to authorize the payment of large sums to Thompson and his team.”

— FTC Complaint, paragraph 128, describing CEO Christopher Terry’s 2021 written acknowledgment of predatory marketing to minors aged 14–16

“Because the demographic is blacks bro[.] They need to see a [Black person] come up[.] Like that’s all they need to see to believe[.] Rich black people[.] Out here man they don’t tell them how to come up so him teaching bro it will be stupid… Avg income is like 30-40k a year… Promote ‘highest paid African American in industry, teaches how to be successful’ or sum like that lol.”

— IML salesperson in a May 2019 text to Defendant Jason Brown, explaining why David Imonitie should be deployed to target Black consumers in St. Louis. Brown replied: “Lol.”

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health: Financial Trauma Is a Health Crisis

Financial loss at the scale IML inflicted — $1.242 billion (enough to fund the entire annual budget of a mid-sized American city) extracted from hundreds of thousands of consumers worldwide — does not stay confined to bank accounts. Research consistently links financial loss and debt to anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, and relationship breakdown. IML concentrated this damage on a specific demographic: young adults who were already financially precarious, often living in communities with limited access to wealth-building tools, and who were often recruited by people they trusted.

The FTC’s complaint describes a company that specifically capitalized on COVID-19 pandemic fear — a period of acute public mental health crisis — to recruit new victims. Salespeople told consumers that their 401(k)s were worthless, that job security was gone, and that IML was the only safety net. People who were already terrified about their economic futures were told to invest their stimulus checks — money designed to keep families housed and fed — into a scheme where the median return was zero dollars. The psychological predation was baked into the pitch.

IML’s products also damaged consumers’ trust in legitimate financial education. When someone pays hundreds of dollars a month for training delivered by instructors who privately admitted they “don’t know shit about trading,” and loses money as a result, the lesson they walk away with may not be “that was a scam.” It may be “trading doesn’t work” or “financial markets aren’t for people like me.” IML contaminated the well for legitimate financial literacy in the communities it targeted most aggressively.

Economic Inequality: Designed to Drain the People With the Least

IML’s operation was a wealth-transfer mechanism. At the top, a tiny group of insiders extracted extraordinary sums: Alex Morton alone received over $76 million (more than the average American earns in 1.5 million lifetimes). At the bottom, the median IBO earned zero dollars while paying $24.95 per month just to remain eligible for commissions that never came. IML’s own 2022 Income Disclosure Statement shows 21 top salespeople and instructors collectively received over $242 million (enough to give $2,420 each to 100,000 families) — money that flowed upward from hundreds of thousands of people who lost it.

The company deliberately targeted Black and Latino communities — groups that already face documented structural barriers to wealth accumulation in the United States. The scheme exploited the real and valid desire for financial self-determination in communities that have been systematically excluded from it. IML packaged racial aspiration as a sales tool. The hashtag #blackwallstreet appeared in recruitment posts for a company whose own data showed that Black consumers who joined were overwhelmingly going to lose money.

The auto-renewal structure compounded the economic damage. Consumers who signed up for a $100+ subscription and failed to cancel within 30 days were charged again. And again. Those who added “strategies” or “Add-On” products faced additional recurring charges, some on separate four-week cycles. A consumer who signed up for a base service and two add-ons, paid the IBO fee, and failed to cancel within two months could easily be out $600–$800 before realizing the product delivered nothing. For a family earning $30,000–$40,000 a year — the demographic IML’s own salespeople described targeting in St. Louis — that represents weeks of rent or groceries.