Penney Ooi is a member of the President Council at World Financial Group (WFG), a notorious MLM scam.
Also, she is an Investment Advisor Representative with Transamerica Financial Advisors, Inc.
She is the Executive Chairperson of World Financial Group as well.
Penney Ooi has been a part of the MLM firm for nearly 3 decades. She graduated from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale with a bachelor’s degree in finance in 1990.
Penney Ooi’s World Financial Group has thousands of victims and has received tons of complaints. In the following review, I will highlight how she runs this scam and why you should avoid dealing with it at all costs.
After all, Penney’s company has grown substantially over the last few years. In 2019, it had over 40,000 associates. Moreover, the company had paid out around $790 million to its associates in 2018.
Certainly, it looks like an interesting prospect. But the reality is way different:
About World Financial Group:
Penney Ooi’s World Financial Group is an MLM company based in Georgia. The company sells financial and insurance products through its distributors in the US, Puerto Rico and Canada.
Their headquarters is at 11315 Johns Creek Parkway, Johns Creek, Georgia 30097-1517.
Its parent organizations are Aegon NV and AEGON Asset Management Services Inc.
Similarly, its subsidiaries include WFG Reinsurance Limited, WFG Properties Holdings LLC and WFG China Holdings, Inc.
Beginning in 2001, this MLM company has grown substantially in the last two decades.
Is the World Financial Group Legit? Or, is Penney Ooi Running a Scam?
On paper, there is nothing wrong in Penney Ooi’s MLM company. However, the way it operates is highly unethical and puts its employees and customers in unfavorable positions.
As a multi level marketing company, it hires you as an associate and asks you to recruit new associates.
They encourage you to kick off with a ‘fast start’ where you must recruit 3 new members and attend the three training sales in the first month of your tenure.
This tactic alone is a huge red flag. It pressurizes new recruits to market the company aggressively as soon as they join the firm.
When your associates buy or sell any products, you will get a percentage of the commissions. That’s the only effective way to make money at the World Financial Group.
Penney Ooi’s company is a simple MLM firm and this business model is extremely flawed. MLM scams are extremely common and 90% of the people who get involved only suffer losses.
For example, Boyd Parker is a UK-based MLM scammer who has received tons of complaints for scamming young graduates.
Why You Should Not Become a World Financial Group Associate:
Even if you ignore the various drawbacks of this being an MLM company, the company has additional red flags indicating it’s a scam.
When you look at their contract levels, you can see how many commissions you can earn per product.
For example, if you have a contract level of 100%, you get 100% of the 1st year commissions on top of your commission structure.
In legitimate companies, people get 80% contract levels which may rise up to 140% or higher within a year or two. On the other hand, Penney Ooi’s company pays its associates only 36%.
Similarly, a WFG Marketing Director earns 51% while a Senior Marketing Director earns 64%.
While these numbers might have changed a little by now, you may now understand how terrible their payout is.
As a World Financial Group associate, you will only make money on the commissions from your sales and those of your recruits’. Most of your initial sales would come from the products you sell to your newly recruited associates.
Moreover, Penney Ooi and her team put a lot of pressure on new associates to pursue sales aggressively.
Hence, you might start asking your friends and family to begin buying from you. That can cause your relationships with them to suffer as a result.
The poor commission percentages make it more difficult to consider World Financial Group’s products a good way to make money.
Furthermore, most of the returns of your hard work will end up in the pockets of Penney Ooi and the upper management of the firm instead.
Additional Red Flags of Working For Penney Ooi:
Penney Ooi is running a MLM scam. As part of such a pyramid scheme, you will have to make misleading pitches. Then, you will focus on recruiting more people and ask them to recruit further associates.
The pitch for all pyramid schemes remains the same. You will recruit 3-5 people and earn from their sales. Then, those recruits will get 3-5 people each to join the scheme and earn commissions from them.
According to the pitch, you will be earning commissions from all of them and get rich.
However, selling these misleading pitches to a person you don’t know is extremely difficult. Hence, most MLM associates tend to sell these schemes to their friends, colleagues and family members.
This damages their reputation and alienates them from others.
Moreover, WFG sells financial products and relies on people who don’t have the necessary qualifications to market them. As a customer, you will be facing a ton more risk with Penney Ooi’s company than with any legitimate financial services firm.
Also, it’s extremely difficult to climb to the top of an MLM chain. The fact that the customers of the company are also its associates shows just how flawed the entire business model is.
However, there’s more.
In the following section, I have shared the numerous World Financial Group reviews I found online. This way, you will understand why you should not trust Penney Ooi and her firm:
What People Say on Penney Ooi and the World Financial Group
When I did some digging online, I found a ton of content exposing how Penney Ooi and WFG prey on others.
According to the tons of World Financial Group reviews online, the company is a scam. It is a pyramid scheme whose job interviews involve attending a promotional meeting of the company.
I’m not the one saying all this.
The following reviews of Penney Ooi and the World Financial Group explain the company perfectly:
“Penney Ooi Runs a Pyramid Scheme” – MLM Scam Exposed on Reddit
Here, a Reddit user has shared a post Penney Ooi had posted on social media. In this post, she is basically saying that being skeptical is worse than getting scammed. Certainly, it’s not a good comparison.
Many Reddit users have called out her quote as being nonsensical. One user highlights that they nearly fell into this trap. Their boss from an old job had contacted them.
However, when they asked about the job description, the recruiter highlighted that they will need to recruit others and sell insurance.
Luckily, that person didn’t sign up.
Another user highlights that taking advice from Penney Ooi about scams is equal to taking advice from a scammer on the topic.
Another Reddit Post Exposing Penney Ooi:
Here, the redditor points out that Penney Ooi is essentially running a pyramid scheme.
However, if you question them, they claim it’s not a pyramid scheme as they are illegal.
Still, World Financial Group recruits people to sell excessively expensive life insurance products and the person who recruits them and the person who recruited them above, all get a certain percentage.
What makes things problematic is that WFG doesn’t give any financial training. No.
They only teach you to purchase an overpriced life insurance product.
Moreover, Penney Ooi and her team advise against researching online. Why?
Because if you look up the company online, you are among the 91% (the poor diaspora), according to Penney Ooi.
However, she says if you don’t do any online research, you are well on your way to enter the top 9% (the rich diaspora).
Certainly, it makes no sense. Penney doesn’t want you to look up the numerous World Financial Group reviews available online.
They bash the company and expose its MLM scam.
Employee Reviews of Penney Ooi and World Financial Group:
Penney Ooi Disguises an MLM Scam as a Legit Insurance Brokerage
Here, the reviewer says working at WFG is horrible. The company is an MLM disguising itself as an insurance broker.
They encourage you to recruit or sell to the people around you. Otherwise, you will find it difficult to make any money.
Also, WFG doesn’t pay any salary. You will only earn commissions.
Another scam of a similar nature is Symmetry Financial Group. It has received a ton of complaints for posing as a legitimate company when it’s a MLM scam.
The reviewer says the company tells you that’s what you signed up.
However, the company preys on people who are desperate for a job.
The reviewer warns others and recommends looking deep into the company. Finally, the reviewer doesn’t recommend working under Penney Ooi at WFG.
Not a Good Place to Work At
Here, the reviewer highlights the same issue: Penney Ooi is running a pyramid scam.
He highlights that the jobs at World Financial Group look rather attractive.
But, you end up spending your own money and get no returns on your hard work.
It’s a pyramid scheme.
They Teach Families Wrong Stuff About Finances to Earn Higher Commissions
The above reviewer highlights that WFG feeds families wrong information about finances to benefit itself.
They highlight how Penney Ooi’s company makes families overpay without getting any clarity on their financial benefits.
The reviewer says the company has no pros. It is all a waste of time and money. The company makes you buy overpriced and bogus investments.
Penney Ooi and WFG Focus On Taking All of your Warm Leads (Your Friends and Family)
Here, the reviewer explains that Penney Ooi relies on pulling in new associates and taking the warm market of their family.
He highlights that the company taught a lot about business and 401k. However, the company only relied on the associates bringing their own customer base and then the repetition of the cycle.
According to the reviewer, it’s demeaning work.
Detailed Review on How Penney Ooi is Running a Scam:
This reviewer points out that Penney Ooi is running a multi-level marketing business. As a new recruit, you will be doing all the grunt work of getting more recruits from your friends and family.
This way, your trainer will profit.
He points out that he only received a few financial presentations to give to his friends and family from his trainer as his ‘training’.
His upline was earning commissions from his warm market and from the new people he brought in. He points out this is the only way Penney Ooi’s company stays in business.
Also, he found out that the company didn’t disclose all the necessary information.
For example, he had to pay for his licensing exam, online courses and all the study materials. The company didn’t help with any of this.
Additionally, he had to buy meals for his upline, volunteer many times to business presentations for free and pay for team t-shirts. He also had to spend money on business tickets, monthly administrative fees, monthly omits and emissions insurance fees and more.
Because he was a new recruit, his upline was making money from all of his warm leads.
Also, he had to give away his warm market referrals freely. Certainly, Penney Ooi’s business model puts its associates at an extremely unfavorable position.
When he was ready to sell and met all the requirements, his superior said he wasn’t ready. Then, his agent asked for 50 more warm referrals.
Furthermore, even if he was doing all the work for these sales, his upline made commissions.
When he became an agent, he had no warm leads left and had to enter the cold market. It was very difficult.
“Penney Koi’s entire business model is flawed”
He highlights that the people at the World Financial Group won’t even let you enter the field if you haven’t done the various things he shared above.
Also, your superiors will keep earning commissions from all of your sales and your team sales.
They call it ‘overrides’ and get 10-15% commissions.
Furthermore, the industry is highly competitive and if you don’t meet the monthly or quarterly criteria, they demote you.
Also, if you sell life insurance and a client changes their mind in less than 13 months of signing up, Penney Ooi’s company charges back all the commissions you earned. They call it ‘chargeback’.
Hence, the company tells you to manipulate people to keep paying premiums for the 13-month period.
Afterwards, they don’t care.
Lastly, he highlights that Penney Ooi and the firm pressure you to sell problematic products that don’t help your clients but generate the highest commissions.
More Penney Ooi Reviews:
Conclusion
After going through these reviews, it’s obvious that Penney Ooi is a MLM scammer. She is promoting a pyramid scheme while disguising it as a legitimate insurance firm.
Apart from the terrible business model of her company, Penney Ooi has also received a ton of complaints from her victims.
Due to these reasons, you should not trust Penney or WFG.
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The best life insurance program would be not to purchase any of them from WFG because the company has less experienced associates who have been told to sell expensive life insurance to the users.
World Financial Group is a scam. As a recruit the problems we face were they never paid our commission instead based on our contracts they used to earn profit for themselves, which was cruel.
The name of the firm doesn’t match their work pattern at all, as the name depicts the world but they aren’t able to pay their associates, though as an investor I will request you not to invest here.
In other MLM schemes there are chances you will earn a handsome amount of money but here World Financial Group is misusing the energy and faith of the new associates, which comes into the category of a scam.
As a final year graduate student I joined the World Financial Group for earning good with the help of a commission-based program but the problem I faced was the company never paid us on time and also the pay was less as compared to other companies.
The biggest problem with this company is that they will pressurize you to add new members with the speed of a rocket. I used to work as a recruit with World Financial Group where they forced us to add 3 members in the first month as a beginner.
They even complete the payment which they promised to associates before joining, the author has explained it very well, where you aren’t paid based on your contract levels. This company just wasted my time and all my dreams of earning through commissions went in vain.
WFG Does not have its products, they market products from different Financial Institutions like IMO, and IA financial WFG is a financial distributor which gives customers more options to select from products from many different Financial Institutions based on their needs.
I found various reviews of former workers of WFG complaining about the false promises the company made to them on their paid structure and every single thing about commission-based earning is false, they suffered a lot, especially the new and young associates.
What I didn’t like about WFG is that they tell you that you don’t have anything going for you.
I have heard Penney Ooi say something along the lines of if you have nothing going for yourself you should quit your 9 to 5. She claims that if you have any different opinion then a worker from WFG will get richer no doubt. It’s for one customer service and all of the above will not be as can but they don’t spend a lot of time training their workers. The recruiters overall aggressive.
This is spot on please listen to the whole thing peeps… MLMs are probably going to cost me a lifelong friend… the person shows I am just potential recruits and money for him and up lining his new team is very flattering but then I had to talk about us leads like cattle.
My friend invited me to a WFG zoom call. She is pretty excited but I told her I needed to do a little digging. I am glad I did. It makes a lot of sense and although, my friend, is very excited about joining but I will share your article with her anyway.
Haha, I have come across Penney Ooi’s posts and her company, World Financial Group.
The girl that tried to recruit me just asked me very basic questions that everyone would say yes to. Like you have to agree with her repeatedly. She was a good pitcher indeed but I saw through it nothing in life is all that good for free lol.
Once I interrogated an associate of Penney’s firm, he was a new member and wasn’t prepared by the company how to explain the details of the products and even was hesitating to complete the chat. This made me worried and also looked unprofitable to invest with World Financial Group.
Penney Ooi says the System in WFG is nothing but a process you follow to build a brokerage firm.
“Think of McDonald’s if you buy a McDonald’s franchise they have a system or process you need to follow to make burgers, drinks, etc.”
But I don’t think that’s how things work in the real world.
She thinks she is smart but she isn’t.
How do I contact Penney Ooi? I have been working at World financial group for over 3 years and I feel scammed. My upline took all of my leads and I haven’t seen any profit. Maybe Penney can help?
Thank you very much for posting this very information.
I have a strong belief that more people should become financially educated.
From my experience, WFG looks to use this to the company’s advantage. I hope more people view this and do their research.
Penney Ooi has been marketing this scam so heavily, it’s depressing. I feel bad for all those people who get scammed by her and wfg.
WFG or WTF, this company isn’t able to pay their associates who are making the company earn profit then as an investor how can trust WFG for investing? The author has correctly judged, WFG is only a pyramid scam.
Wfg is a ripoff. I haven’t earned any thing after working for months.
World Financial Group is DEFINITELY A SCAM. I have spent countless hours promoting them but the result is the same: 0. I fell for the marketing gimmicks of Penney Ooi and thought it would be a great business opportunity. It was a huge mistake. I don’t suggest anyone join this company. They don’t treat you like employees but more like slaves.
In other MLM scams you are forced to buy various products and here at WFG, you are asked to buy expensive life insurance by less experienced associates. And the biggest issue with this firm is that they are not paying their staff accurately as they promised before recruiting them.
WFG scammed me for $1000. I am not rich. I need the money but now they tell me there is nothing they can do.
MLMs have been repackaged numerous times over the decades the same type of people fall for it. We attended our college friend’s wedding anniversary party and quickly started chanting. It was weird and sad.
They don’t pay you. I have wasted thousands of dollars here and never earned any returns. My upline kept harassing me. Penney Ooi doesn’t care about the people working for world financial group.
I wasted 8 months working for World Financial Group. I was drawn in by Penney’s social media posts and thought it would be a good opportunity. They make so many claims about how you can get rich you start to believe their lies. In all my time working with this company, I never earned a profit. Don’t trust Penney Ooi.
Never buy any type of insurance from WFG as the company sells this insurance following the patterns of MLM schemes and even if it is claimed to be a Pyramid scheme, which is completely illegal.
A friend of mine tried to recruit me. I told him I will just give a reference that selling is not my cup of tea.
I have lost over $2000 because of these people. They sound good on paper but you never make any real money. All of it goes into the pockets of your superiors.
My mother-in-law is going through a divorce and one of her relatives got her into it. ‘
I feel really sad because she thinks her life is gonna change. She is a teacher at a high school.
I don’t see how this happened but I feel like they are being predatorial about her delicate situation.
Your ignorance is on blast with this post that sounds absolutely ridiculous to anyone who knows ANYTHING about WFG or building a business or who is committed to building one for themselves! The people in the business of WFG are NOT employees so you’re incorrect all over your rant. But I’ll keep going just ‘cuz.
* First things first, it is NOT a scam, pyramid or MLM. It is a legitimate business model that I guarantee has been thoroughly vetted by each and every one of the financial services providers who request to put their products on the WFG platform (like Nationwide, Pacific Life, MetLife, Franklin Templeton, Athene, etc…). But nonetheless, I’m sure that intelligent people will take your word (*sarcasm*)
* Second, you say ‘recruiting’ like it’s a bad word. Show me a business that doesn’t recruit and I’ll show you a sole proprietorship.
* Next let’s look at selling to friends and family.
Wait – wait wait, I’ve got a joke for you:
What do you call an insurance agent who doesn’t do whatever it takes to make sure that every single one of his (or her) friends and family is fully educated and protected by every financial product to meets their needs and achieve their goals?
wait for it……
A JERK! hahahahhaa
How ridiculous you sound by making it a complaint to sell
* Commission structure – do the math genius. Sure, a sole proprietor is able to keep their whole commission, however, when you’re building a team and working as a team, you’re not the only person who has worked to earn the commission so it would make sense to share it, no? AND there is nothing stopping someone from earning more than the person who brought them into the business. If they do the work, they get the rewards. The commission structure is designed to build a passive income business – yah, passive income, that’s kind of the draw for one to build a business in the first place, no?
I urge you to stop talking because every word reveals a little bit more of your ignorance. WFG is an amazing opportunity for anyone looking to protect families through education and financial services (including your own!), build a business that will allow for passive income, and it’s going to take more than just you doing the work, so you’ll have to recruit. If you’ve got a problem with that, you can just ask any successful business how they dealt with the ‘scam, scandal and sin’ of recruiting, maybe you’ll learn something. I asked Amazon, Nike, Century 21, Morgan Stanley, Revlon, The Gap, my local grocery store and every other store and business I could think of and they laughed at me, it was kind of embarrassing. It is not possible to build a business without recruiting so get over it.
I agree with everything you said. WFG is a scam. I never made a penny when I worked there. They kept asking me to get warm leads and by the time, I entered the market as an agent, I had no warm leads left for myself.
When it comes to MLM I believe that at the end of the day it’s all about the quality of the product. My advice to people wanting to join is to focus on the product.
Don’t ever trust the World Financial Group. They make false promises to get you to join their mlm scheme. When you do, you get trapped in a vicious cycle where you don’t make any money.
WFG doesn’t pay any salaries. At least, I never recieved one.
For Legal reasons, it is not this disingenuous or an illegal scheme but for other intents, it’s a scam.