The Insidious World of Devil Corp
Don’t drink the “JUICE”
**(Disclaimer): This story is my own personal experience and may not reflect everyone’s experience with said companies. These are only the thoughts and opinions of the author.**
The Pitch
It starts innocuously enough…
A young graduate or someone desperately looking for work stumbles across a job listing. It’ll usually say something like “Entry Level Marketing Role,” “Sports Minded Promotion,” or my personal favorite “Leadership Development Training Program.”
You might be thinking these job titles are a bit vague, and you’d be right. But for someone who desperately needs work and is spraying out applications without abandon, it seems like a good opportunity.
This someone happened to be me, when I came across a similar listing on LinkedIn one day. I applied, not thinking much of it and continued on my fruitless job search.
Less than an hour later, I got an email response…
Subject: This opportunity is for you.
Perhaps it should have been a red flag that a company would respond so quickly, but when you’re desperate for a job, any response feels like a win.
I set up a scheduled interview over Zoom for a few days out and that was it. My introduction to the world of Direct Sales Marketing had begun. At the time, I had no idea, of course. I was just excited I had landed an interview.
In hindsight, I was about to be lied to, manipulated, and indoctrinated into one of the best kept secrets of the modern business world…
The Opportunity of a Lifetime
During the interview process, I was told that this job was for go-getters, driven people who wanted to make a lot of money and eventually own their own business, be their own boss, live life on their own terms.
Sounds great, right?
They told us they weren’t looking for employees, they were looking for leaders who could eventually start their own businesses. It was presented to me as an “event marketing” job for charities that would last about 8–10 months until I learned enough about it to eventually take over my own charity account and become a director.
I know, I know… red flags abound. But hey, when you’re down on your luck and someone feeds you hope… you tend to bite.
My first day felt like a scene out of a David Lynch film.
I was escorted to a furniture-less room with whiteboards scattered along the walls. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, but apparently this is a classic Devil Corp tactic. If there are no chairs or tables, everyone is forced to stand, to remain alert and attentive, to keep their attention always focused on their coworkers, mentors, or “owner.”
This was about to be my first experience in “Atmosphere.”
Enter the Twilight Zone
“Hey, guys!”
“Hey, what?”
“Juice?”
“Juice!”
This is what it sounded like when I walked in on a Monday morning. There were about 25–30 bright-eyed youngsters dressed in blazers and pantsuits, all quipping back these rehearsed phrases at the manager like some kind of Pavlovian response.
“You newbies will get used to how crazy we are,” she promised.
The strange chants and hyper positivity were worn like badges of honor. They knew they were different—outlandish, even—but they were proud of it.
“We’re not like those 9–5 schmucks. We’re here to build something, to learn how to start our own businesses and make 6 figures in 8–10 months.”
This is what all new hires—including me—were promised before walking through the door. This was not a “job,” it was an opportunity. They didn’t want employees, they wanted entrepreneurs who would go on to manage their own charity marketing firms.
Of course, you can’t hire an entrepreneur, that goes against the whole idea of being one. But the psychology they use to instill hope is very effective as are the tactics they use to deflect questions.
In Atmosphere, we learned the “systems” of the “business.” We were taught the Law of Averages, how roughly 1 in every 30 people we spoke to would result in a sale.
We learned to SEE (Smile, Eye-contact, Enthusiasm).
We learned PPA (Pace, Pitch, Attitude), and CPR (Create a Personal Relationship).
We learned Juice! (Join Us In Creating Excitement!)
And I learned very quickly that this was in no way a “marketing” job…
…it was a sales job.
This was pretty evident on the first day when we set up a small table in the middle of a Walmart.
We were soliciting every person we saw for donations. Yet all the while, we were told, “This is only temporary. You can be out of the field in 6 months or less if you give it your all. Then comes the big money. Then comes 6 figures.”
Don’t Think, Just Do
The same psychology we were told to use on customers (namely: Impulse) was used on us. Sell someone a dream that sounds too good to be true, and before they can think about it, you close the sale.
For us, it was the promise of breaking out of the rat race and earning 6 figures in less than a year’s time. And, mind you, they were strategic in how they went about promising this to us.
They used something called the Five F’s to persuade new recruits.
What motivates you? Is it fame, fortune, family, freedom, or faith?
We were taught that everyone’s motivations could be distilled down to one of these.
This is also how the owner of this little business kept so many loyal recruits. A large percentage of the recruiters under her were immigrants she was sponsoring. So, they were bound to her by this strange quasi-professional, quasi-personal relationship.
Securing sponsorship to stay in the United States is notoriously difficult. As someone who is engaged to an immigrant, I can personally attest to this. It was sad to see the degree of manipulation this “business” was willing to resort to just to recruit and keep people.
For the customers, it was the promise of helping a child in need somewhere in the world. For as little as a dollar a day (ha!) they could bring a child out of poverty. Who could say no to that?
And it was at this point of greatest emotional fervor we were taught to close the sale. “Use their impulse, don’t allow the person to think—people don’t know what they want until you tell them anyway.”
Suffice it to say, I didn’t feel particularly great about what I was doing after the first day, but hey, at least it’s for charity, right? At least I was working toward owning my own business.
Every night after we finished, I was exhausted, ready to go home and see my fiancée and dog and prepare for the next day, but we weren’t done yet! We had after-work team-building activities.
So, my coworkers and I would drive to a sports bar where we sipped on drinks and ate wings and the whole time I couldn’t help but think: “We’re not getting paid for any of this… why are we even here?”
They would tell us it was to build team unity. But to me it felt like a tool of social isolation. If the business is your work and your social life, it becomes harder and harder to gain perspectives outside of it. Before you know it, everything and everyone you know is inside the business.
After about a week in the business, I couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right about this. So, before bed, I Googled the name of my office “CEO” and the rabbit hole went far deeper than I ever thought possible…
A Business with a Pyramid-like Structure
At first, my efforts were fruitless. There was surprisingly little information about her or the business I could find online.
Then I remembered the name of a magazine I had seen on her office wall: “Limitless.” But even searching for this led me nowhere. It was supposed to be a magazine that highlighted the most successful business owners in the industry, yet I couldn’t find so much as a website to back up its existence.
And then I went to Google Images. I found an older print from 2015 with a small name written in the top-left corner that was missing from modern issues:
Credico.
And here, the floodgates opened.
I’d never heard the name Credico at any meeting we’d ever had, yet I saw pictures of my coworkers and boss at Credico business summits. To save you the hours of research I underwent, here is the gist of it:
Credico, like other Devil Corp companies (Cydcor, Smart Circle, Appco, etc.) are an umbrella company that govern what they call ICLs: independent contracting (or corporate) licenses.
Basically, these so-called “businesses” that are offering marketing positions and the promise of one day owning your own business, are really just under the Credico sphere of influence.
They all attend the same conferences, they use the same language and systems, they are—for all intents and purposes—the same entity.
How to move up in the company, you might ask? Well, once you get promoted from sales agent in the field, you become a recruiter. Now, your job is to recruit others into the business that you will train (for no additional pay) and if you recruit enough people that end up recruiting their own people you can get promoted even further to an owner!
Past owner, you become a regional consultant where you have multiple owners and offices underneath you and get paid a “consultation fee” for every owner/office underneath you. Above that is national consultant which is the same as regional but on a larger scale.
You might be thinking, “Gee, this sounds oddly familiar to another business structure I’ve heard of. A shmyramid meme. A schyramid shleem.” I don’t know, something along those lines.
Protect Yourself and Others
I didn’t last long with Credico—about a week from start to finish. But the whole experience was so bizarre, it led me down a deep rabbit hole of other people describing their experiences with similar companies.
I just couldn’t believe that a company like this was operating in plain sight with seeming impunity.
For other resources, you can look at the Devil Corp website itself, which offers a great rundown of what to look out for when dealing with companies like this.
There is also the Slave Circle Documentary, which is fantastic.
Last, but not least, the r/DevilCorp subreddit is a great resource where people are constantly notifying others when these businesses pop up in their own cities.
It’s easy to think you wouldn’t fall for something like this, but they are masters at manipulation and psychology, that is their modus operandi. It’s important we ask questions and trust our intuition and try to protect ourselves and our loved ones from scams like this.
