A NATIONAL serviceman, who wanted to be known only as Mr Phua, was recently approached by this club.

Mr Phua, who had lost $1,200 after attending a sales pitch for a different scheme last year, immediately thought this one sounded too good to be true.

'I decided to go for the 'pep-talk' to find out if this was the same sort of scheme so that I can warn other people,' he said.

'But unlike the previous scheme which I joined, the members seem more secretive. You must be recommended by a friend in order to meet the seller.'

After he succeeded in making an appointment, his introducer arranged a meeting with one of the club's managers, who was in his 20s.

Describing the manager, he said: 'He was dressed in an expensive-looking polo T-shirt and when he sat down, he deliberately placed his BMW car key on the table.'

The manager then took out a laptop with a slideshow presentation and told Mr Phua that he could earn money and enjoy high-class entertainment despite the current recession.

Mr Phua was told he could earn rewards points for 30 months to get a five-fold return.

'But the real draw was that if I recruited four new members to buy the same packages and got each of them to recruit two new members in one year, I could earn 9,661,440 points,' he said.

That would be worth about $15 million, from what he was told.

The manager also told Mr Phua that the club had international affiliates in the US, Europe, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

Where's your office?

'When I asked them for the location of the Singapore office, they told me Singapore is too small and the market too insignificant for them to set up an office here,' said Mr Phua.

'All the sites they showed me on the laptop featured Caucasian models, and on a gambling site, they showed me a 'live feed' of a female banker online and told me that everything was live and that I was playing with a real person on the other side of the world, and not a computer.'

The club also promised members 'elite lifestyle activities'.

Recalled Mr Phua, who did not sign up: 'When I asked what kind of leisure activities I could redeem using the points, they told me that I could redeem a massage at some place on Beach Road.

'That doesn't sound very classy to me.'

This article was first published in The New Paper.