An interesting PR strategy
As you know, I am very suspicious of complicated investment products with complex rules that pay large commissions to ‘advisors’ who recommend them to unsuspecting people.
A reader (who also has a personal finance blog) was recently contacted by lawyers representing a company called RL360 who target expats. They demanded he take down a post describing his bad experience with the company.
Apparently this is the aggressive side of ‘reputation management‘, an alternative strategy to actually serving your customers.
This Telegraph article explains how RL360 operates.
RL360 are also mad at Mr Money Mustache for a forum post on his site and are attempting to intimidate him into taking it down.
I think they chose the wrong guy to mess with, personally.
My take on this? The best way to avoid unfavorable customer reviews is to provide your customers with good service and value.
​I guess that’s hard to do when you’re trying to take as much of their money as you can get away with though 😉
Be careful out there!
I’m grateful that I signed-up for your updates via e-mail. If I hadn’t read about this, I would’ve been completely in the dark with RL360 for who knows how long.
I started investing with them almost 2 years ago, and I’m about 2 weeks away from the initial premium allocation deadline. If I was to stick with RL360 past that point, that would mean that my “financial adviser” would keep the commissions he/she made off of enrolling me into the RL360 Quantum account.
I’ve since started the process of cancelling my account, in hopes that the premiums for April won’t hit. I’m looking at $17k that I won’t be getting back. Talk about an expensive lesson learned.
I’m pretty sure this was fate, and I just want to say thank you for posting this and opening my eyes. I’ve been doing extensive research on personal finance over the past few months, and compared to 2 years ago, my knowledge in the field has greatly increased, along with my confidence in investing on my own. I too, live in Japan (Okinawa), but work as a civilian in one of the U.S. military bases here. This allows me to still have access to my U.S. bank accounts, and investment opportunities, but I did want to have a Plan B for when I eventually get out of this field and live/work in the local economy since my wife is Japanese and I’ll be able to stay due to that.
Looking forward to more of the information you have to share in the near future, and I wish you the best of luck!
Cheers,
Ino
Hi Ino
Thanks for the kind words! I’m really sorry you had to take the hit, but very glad this post ended up helping someone.
RL360 is doing a pretty good job of sanitizing the internet, so the more people post and link to things like this the better.
I wish you happier investing in the future!
You couldn’t be more wrong about this company and others. The problem is when you are mis-sold these products by cowboys without having a grasp on how they work and the purpose of them. You’d struggle to find anything better in Japan. Ask the right questions and you won’t need to write damaging posts on the internet.
I approved this comment, not because I think it contributes to the debate, but because it illustrates what we are dealing with here.
Notice how the comment doesn’t address the actual topic of the post (RL360’s aggressive legal/marketing tactics) but instead makes a generic case for them not being a terrible financial product.
It’s almost like the comment was copy and pasted 😉
I wonder if the poster has some kind of vested interest in RL360 and its products.
Yup, I saw the same crowd of people pretending it is a good product, when I discussed my experience about their products on another site. Have to suspect they have financial connections with RL360.
“You’d struggle to find anything better in Japan.”
–> Of course, it all boils down to how you define “better”, but statistically an indexed ETF with, say, rakuten, has much better chances of success (better returns for the customer) than a product like RL360, simply because of much, much lower fees.
I left RL360 4 years ago, lost a lot of money in the process, and that was one of the best financial decisions in my life. My experience with them was described in a page that got taken down through bogus legal threats… it should tell you something when a company has to go through legal intimidation to remove bad reviews about their products.
@retirejapan: if they ever hit you with legal intimidation, get in touch with MMM. He has pledged to protect those who get bullied by this company.
Thanks! It would be ironic for them to threaten me with legal action over a post describing… their threats of legal action 🙂
So far not much (I guess RetireJapan is not influential enough to merit attention!)