Two More Operators of 'Blueprint to Wealth' Banned for Life From Selling Business Opportunities

Two defendants who helped operate a sprawling business-opportunity scheme known by several names, including Blueprint to Wealth, have agreed to settlements that include lifetime bans from pitching money-making and investment opportunities, the Federal Trade Commission announced.DOCUMENTED

The settlements were reached as a result of an FTC lawsuit and resolve claims against these two individuals separately from the case against Charles Garis and Business Revolution Group, which the FTC settled the following month, in September 2024.DOCUMENTED

A scheme with multiple names, multiple defendants

According to the FTC, the underlying operation has used several different brand names over time, of which Blueprint to Wealth is the best known.DOCUMENTED Business-opportunity schemes that rotate through multiple names are a recurring feature of this category of fraud, often making it harder for consumers doing basic research before signing up to connect a new pitch to the same operators' history of complaints under an earlier name.REVIEWED

The FTC's lawsuit named multiple individuals and entities as defendants, reflecting the multi-layered structure common to larger business-opportunity operations, in which a founder, additional principals, and affiliated marketing or telemarketing entities may all play distinct roles in recruiting and collecting payment from consumers.REVIEWED

Terms of the settlement

Under the settlement orders, the two defendants face lifetime bans from pitching or selling money-making and investment opportunities, along with monetary judgments tied to the scheme's alleged proceeds.DOCUMENTED As is common in these cases, a portion of any monetary judgment may be suspended based on a defendant's demonstrated inability to pay the full amount — meaning the ban on future business-opportunity sales, rather than the dollar figure of the judgment, often functions as the settlement's most durable practical consequence.REVIEWED

The settlement bars the defendants for life from selling money-making or investment opportunities of any kind — a broader prohibition than simply shutting down the specific scheme under investigation.

Building toward the founder's settlement

This August 2024 settlement with two defendants preceded the FTC's separate September 2024 settlement with Charles Garis and Business Revolution Group, the entity more directly tied to founding and operating the Blueprint to Wealth brand.REVIEWED Resolving cases against secondary defendants first is a common sequencing choice in FTC litigation, allowing the agency to secure enforceable bans and any available assets from defendants willing to settle early, while continuing to litigate or negotiate with remaining parties.REVIEWED

Why business-opportunity bans target the pitch, not just the product

The scope of the ban in this case — prohibiting the defendants from selling any money-making or investment opportunity, not merely the specific Blueprint to Wealth program — reflects the FTC's broader approach in this category of fraud enforcement.REVIEWED Because business-opportunity schemes can be rebuilt quickly under a new brand name using largely the same sales scripts, earnings claims, and recruitment structure, a narrow order limited to one specific program name would leave a defendant free to relaunch a materially identical scheme under a different label within months.REVIEWED A ban covering the entire category of money-making and investment opportunity sales closes that loophole.REVIEWED

The FTC's continued pursuit of individual defendants tied to the same underlying scheme — resolving cases against different operators in separate settlements spaced weeks apart — illustrates how a single sprawling business-opportunity operation can generate a series of enforcement actions rather than one consolidated case, as the agency works through each defendant's role and willingness to settle.REVIEWED

Untangling responsibility across a multi-defendant scheme

Larger business-opportunity operations often distribute functions across several nominally separate people or entities — one individual may handle marketing and lead generation, another may run the telemarketing calls that close the sale, and a separate corporate entity may exist mainly to receive and disburse the resulting payments.REVIEWED That distribution of roles can complicate FTC litigation, since establishing each individual defendant's knowledge of and participation in the underlying deception typically requires its own body of evidence, even when all the defendants are alleged to have worked toward the same overall scheme.REVIEWED

Settling with defendants individually, as the FTC did here ahead of the later Garis settlement, allows the agency to lock in enforceable bans against each defendant as soon as they are willing to agree to terms, rather than delaying every settlement until the entire case against every defendant is resolved — a practical approach that gets consumer-protection remedies in place faster, even if it means the full picture of the scheme emerges across several separate press releases rather than one.REVIEWED

What a lifetime ban actually forecloses

A ban on selling money-making or investment opportunities is broader than it might first appear: it covers not just running an identical scheme under a new name, but taking any role — as a marketer, telemarketer, closer, or consultant — in promoting any comparable opportunity to consumers going forward.REVIEWED That breadth is deliberate. Business-opportunity operators who have been shut down under one enforcement action have, in other cases the FTC has pursued over the years, resurfaced as consultants or marketing contractors for a different operator's scheme rather than launching a new company under their own name — a workaround a properly drafted ban is designed to prevent.REVIEWED

Whether the ban proves durable in practice depends significantly on the FTC's ongoing monitoring, since detecting a violation generally requires the agency or a state partner to identify that a banned individual is quietly involved in a new operation — work that can take months or years to surface, particularly when the individual's name does not appear on any public-facing marketing material.REVIEWED

For consumers who paid into Blueprint to Wealth or any of the operation's other brand names, the settlement itself does not automatically guarantee a refund; monetary judgments in business-opportunity cases are frequently far smaller than the total amount consumers lost, since operators typically have already spent most of what they collected by the time a case reaches settlement.REVIEWED Consumers affected by the scheme should monitor the FTC's refund program pages for any eventual claims process tied to this case, and can file a report describing their experience at ReportFraud.ftc.gov in the meantime.REVIEWED

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