The wider guru-course economy

Andrew Tate did not invent the online money-making course, and the vast majority of people selling courses have nothing to do with the manosphere. What Tate demonstrated is how far the model can scale when it is welded to an identity movement. This page documents the surrounding economy — agency courses, dropshipping mentors, trading gurus — and the marketing pattern that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly ruled against. Selling a course is not itself wrongdoing; presenting outlier income as a typical outcome is where the documented trouble begins.

The pattern

The Tate version is the clearest illustration of the two-tier structure. At the bottom, a cheap mass product: Newsweek reported in 2022 that Hustlers University cost $49.99 a month and claimed more than 110,000 active members, marketed as access to stock analysis, crypto, e-commerce, copywriting, freelancing and more. ^[1] At the top, a far more expensive premium tier — the War Room. ^[1] Forbes reported that the brothers reportedly made around 5 million dollars a month from the two products combined. ^[2]

The same architecture — free content to build an audience, a paid course as the first conversion, high-ticket coaching or a mastermind as the real profit centre — recurs across niches that have no ideological content at all.

The agency-course wave

The most successful adjacent niche of the early 2020s was the social media marketing agency course: pay to learn how to start an agency that sells advertising services to local businesses. Its best-known figure is Iman Gadzhi, a British entrepreneur profiled by a Forbes contributor in 2022: he started at 15, ran the agency IAG Media, launched Grow Your Agency in 2019 to sell courses on starting and scaling online agencies, and told Forbes he had made about 25 million dollars to date. ^[3] The same profile records that he had personally financed the building of five schools in Nepal. ^[3]

Gadzhi is cited here as an example of the business model, not of misconduct: no regulatory finding against him is cited or implied on this page. He matters to this reference because his format — young founder, documented lifestyle, agency income as proof, course as the product — became the template thousands of smaller sellers imitated, and it is at the imitation layer that regulators found the recurring problems documented below.

Dropshipping mentors and trading gurus

The dropshipping and e-commerce mentor niche produced one of the FTC's cleaner recent case studies. The FTC's complaint against Ecommerce Empire Builders alleged that consumers paid nearly 2,000 dollars for training, or as much as 35,000 dollars for a "done for you" online storefront, on the promise of profits of 10,000 dollars a month — profits the FTC alleged never materialised. ^[6] In May 2025 the company and its owner agreed to a court order banning them from selling business opportunities, with a monetary judgment of 9,786,124 dollars, partially suspended for inability to pay. ^[6]

In trading, the FTC alleged in 2020 that customers of RagingBull.com lost at least 137 million dollars in three years to marketing that promised subscribers could learn to "DOUBLE or TRIPLE" their trading accounts in a week; the FTC's release records that consumers targeted were often retirees, older adults and immigrants. ^[4] These were allegations at filing; the FTC later reported sending nearly 2.4 million dollars in refunds to Raging Bull customers after the company agreed to settle the charges. ^[10]

The funnel mechanics

The funnel documented in the cases on this page has a consistent shape.

First, reach: short-form video and paid social ads built around visible wealth and a promise of escape from ordinary work. The ASA's October 2025 rulings all concerned exactly this layer — paid social posts making earnings claims such as "£33,000 in 30 days" or growing a business "overnight" by up to 180 percent. ^{[9] [8]}

Second, conversion: a comparatively cheap product whose job is to establish the buying relationship. Tate's $49.99 monthly subscription is the canonical example, marketed as a bundle of every money-making skill at once. ^[1]

Third, ascension: the high-ticket layer where the real revenue sits — coaching, masterminds, "done for you" packages. The FTC's Ecommerce Empire Builders complaint documents the jump from a course costing under 2,000 dollars to storefront packages costing as much as 35,000 dollars. ^[6]

Fourth, the income claim as engine. Every stage runs on the implication that the seller's results, or a featured student's results, are what a typical buyer should expect. This is the specific element regulators keep striking down: the ASA ruled in October 2025 that ads by five separate course sellers misleadingly implied outlier results were typical, and that footnote disclaimers saying results are not typical contradicted, rather than qualified, the headline claims. ^{[9] [7]}

Red flags that generalize

These signs are calibrated deliberately: any one of them can appear in legitimate marketing, and none proves misconduct. The cases in the next section were decided on evidence — substantiation the sellers could not produce — not on aesthetics.

What regulators have found

The United States regulator has treated deceptive income claims as an enforcement priority across a decade of cases that long predate the current guru wave. The FTC's February 2022 announcement of a rulemaking on earnings claims catalogued the record: Herbalife agreed to pay 200 million dollars and AdvoCare 150 million dollars in consumer refunds over income-opportunity claims; Amazon agreed to hand back over 60 million dollars in tips the FTC alleged it withheld from Flex drivers it had lured with earnings claims; and DeVry University students received 49.4 million dollars in partial refunds plus 50.6 million dollars in debt relief after the FTC alleged the school's income statistics were false. ^[5]

Consumers, workers, and prospective entrepreneurs are being bombarded with so-called money-making opportunities that promise the world but leave them deeply in debt.

That rulemaking — an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on the use of earnings claims — was opened precisely because a Supreme Court decision had hindered the FTC's ability to claw money back under its general statute, and a dedicated rule would restore redress and add civil penalties. ^[5] The December 2020 Operation Income Illusion sweep shows the enforcement baseline: over 50 actions in one announcement, spanning work-from-home schemes, bogus coaching courses, investment education and pyramid-shaped opportunity sellers, with the FTC noting the schemes it pursued had collectively taken over a billion dollars from consumers. ^[4]

In the United Kingdom, the Advertising Standards Authority applied the same logic to the influencer-guru layer in a single day of rulings on 15 October 2025, upholding complaints against five sellers of business and money-making courses. ^[9] They included Robbins Research International, over a Tony Robbins Business Mastery ad claiming viewers could grow a business "overnight 30 to 130 percent, 180 percent with 2 or 3 changes", and Grant Cardone Training Technologies, over a claim of building a 5.5 million dollar business in 90 days with no money — in each case because implying such results were typical could not be substantiated. ^{[8] [9]}

Two boundaries keep this section honest. An ASA ruling is a finding that a specific advertisement breached the advertising code and must not run again in that form — it is not a finding of fraud, and it says nothing about the underlying business beyond the ad. ^[8] An FTC complaint is an allegation until settled or judged; where this page reports settlements, the defendants agreed to orders and judgments, which is itself a matter of public record rather than an admission on every allegation. ^[6] The pattern, though, is now documented on both sides of the Atlantic: the product being policed is rarely the course itself — it is the promise.