Posts about the multi-level marketing industry and its problems. Fully supportive of LGBTQ+ people - it's just the product-based pyramid scheme type of MLMs I dislike.
I humbly suggest that true crime freaks should get into learning about scammers instead of serial killers. I LOVE reading about fraud and grifts and pyramid schemes. true crime ppl have all this paranoid energy about murder, which is rare in the grand scheme of things.....maybe instead that could be channeled into some productive rage toward capitalism.
And u know a side effect of learning about scam artists is that you start to understand certain things about economics, and just how STUPID these systems are and how easily they are taken advantage of....and I'd much rather people gained a passing familiarity with economics than whatever armchair psychologist shit these true crimers get on. We need fewer people who think they're experts on "sociopaths" and more people who understand how people like Elizabeth Holmes and the WeWork guy were able to do what they did
Here are some of my favorite books about financial scams:
The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (about the 2008 stock market collapse).
The Caesar's Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap. (I admit I've never finished this one; the writing is hard to read.)
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonette. I bought this book because of the subtitle and I have never regretted it. You must read it.
Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale. They turned this one into a movie! The book was very different and is worth reading.
The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, by Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my tbr pile!
Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. I'm reading this one right now. The author is a financial journalist who stumbled onto this story by unraveling a bank failure in Spain.
And here's a list of more non-fiction books about fraud and financial scams. The first book on this list is about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, which I also haven't read yet.
If you are a podcast fan, I recommend Scam Goddess, which is run by Laci Moseley who is fucking hilarious and frequently approaches the trade from a pro-scam perspective. She is also having a Moment: she's published a memoir and recently got a television show of her own with a limited run on Max. The episode on Dixon, IL is my favorite: that small town was scammed out of $53 million by Rita Crundwell, who pissed the money away into her small empire of western pleasure quarter horses. Laci is very much an indoor cat and goes in for a fairly hyperfemme fashion style, complete with long fake nails, and she is hilariously visibly bewildered about why anyone would pay money to ride horses. And skeptical of the entire concept of horses, for that matter. As someone who quite likes horses, it was incredibly funny to watch--and the scam itself is one hell of a humdinger, too.
Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith is a slight change of pace: it's about the early acquisition of herps (reptile and amphibian species) by zoos and museums, which was cartoonishly corrupt and involved a lot of animal smuggling. It was truly fascinating.
I would also love it if more people got into medical scammers and grifters, because boy howdy, if you want to look at a death count, those folks often beat the serial killers all hollow. In that vein...
Charlatan by Pope Brock is all about the goat balls-themed radio empire of Charles R. Brinkley, who made himself cartoonishly wealthy by selling surgeries in which he would cure whatever ailed you by tucking freshly-removed goat testicles alongside your own testicles, nestled nicely in your sac. (If you did not come with your own ready-made testicles, he did not have a lot of thoughts unless your problem was infertility. In this case, he would tuck some goat balls or some goat ovaries--your choice depending on what sex of kid you wanted to have--right alongside your own ovaries instead.) Brinkley was so successful he inadvertently spurred the creation of the American Medical Association, which lead to getting knocked off the airwaves and spurred him to run for Kansas governor as a write-in candidate on the platform of "give me my medical license and also my radio show back", and he nearly won.
I’m currently reading The Woman Who Fooled The World (the basis for the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar), which is about an Australian influencer who pretended to have cancer, but also about the dangers of relying on the pseudoscience of the “wellness” industry.
I enjoy watching Hannah Alonso on YouTube. She does a really good series on Multilevel Marketing companies (MLM), both with MLM Fails about MLM huns and the weird and sketchy shit they post on social media; as well as MLM Horror Stories, wherein she shares stories people sent her about their experiences, which can be themselves, their family, people they know, whichever. Some of them are just, just infuriating.
Hannah has a masters in education and a background with teaching, but her husband is military and moves around, so she decided to do videos on the marketing companies. (Amway, DoTerra, Monet, It Works, Beach Body/Bodi, Mary Kay... just to name a few).
She does deep dives into the different companies, talks about the impact of these scams on people's lives, it's all really super cool.
Hannah also does Influencer Insanity videos, about how influencers just get crazy, like the Stanley cup thing, and the restocking vids, and rage baiting. She also did one talking about the Social Media Dads recently that was really insightful.
Hannah is also SUPER respectful, especially with the marketing vids. She doesn't name names and will blur faces because even if these people are just being weird as hell, they're also victims themselves. She even had a Horror Story recently that came from a woman who showed up in one of the Fail videos and she specifically thanked Hannah for being compassionate and blurring her face and stuff and then went on to tell how she fell down that rabbit hole.
trump accepting a bribe from qatar being like "but it's free..." -- this man should be a low level employee at herbalife. he should be selling insurance on the phone. he should be $10k in debt to mary kay trying to convince his wife that actually if just 12 people sign up under him he'll be rich. that is his destiny. we're just in some kind of fucked up alternate timeline
I've just watched a video on YouTube that's an interview with two people who were very high up in an MLM and who've since left. They don't give the name of the company but, from some of the details they gave, I'm pretty confident that it's Amway.
There were some interesting points, but the thing that stood out to me is that it feels like they were so close to understanding all the dangers and issues of MLMs but stopped short right before they got there.
They talked a bit about how there were people who were working hard but not succeeding or who failed through no fault of there own, but then a few minutes later, when asked why other people weren't as successful as they were, they started talking about the time and effort and sacrifices they put in. They talked about how they could overcome their fear and how they were consistent, implying that other people failed because they didn't do those things. Not a mention of timing or saturated markets that mean that the people in first have an easier time than the people who join later. They were still attributing their success to their own hard work.
They talked about how it's maybe possible for anyone to succeed - even though the model of the MLM makes it impossible. There's always someone at the bottom level of the pyramid, and if that person recruits others, then they've just created a new bottom level and by its nature those people at the bottom are not going to be earning money.
Right at the end, they were asked if they thought it was possible to be in an ethical MLM, and they said it was possible. Despite all their experiences and everything they figured out was toxic about the company they were in, they haven't put the pieces together that it's the whole business model that's a problem.
The video is here, if you're interested in watching:
It goes on a bit of a tangent about religion and Christianity in the middle, but it's an interesting interview.
I'm trying to watch the Total Forgiveness episode with the fake MLM but it's just too painful to watch. I keep skipping forward a bit to see if it feels less uncomfortable, but then I feel such second-hand embarrassment for everyone involved that I have to skip forward again.
Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.
In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):
That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:
http://thebezzle.org
Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.
A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.
MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.
It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."
The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:
This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.
One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.
Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.
But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.
The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:
After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."
This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.
The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.
But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.
The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:
There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.
They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:
This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.
Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.
These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?
The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:
The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:
That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:
The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":
No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:
https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/
The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:
Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.
And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.
Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:
I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I think people online treat driving too casually tbh, like there was a poll about people's bad habits while driving and they weren't bad habits or problematic or whatever, they were all things that literally kill people every single day. You are driving a massive vehicle that can very easily turn into a murder weapon with your carelessness, take this shit seriously.
Also people who speed up or suddenly stop or swerve a lot to freak out someone in the car for fun: it stops being funny when you get into a car accident because of it. Just so you know.
I see this a lot from MLM huns. There are so many social media videos posted about MLM huns about how great their life is and how wonderful this business opportunity is or how their products can cure everything under the sun, all posted from behind the wheel of a car.
It's infuriating because it is so dangerous, but these huns are encouraged to post to social media constantly and to fill whatever pockets of time they have with MLM grind. And when the companies prey on busy mothers, one of those "pockets of time" quickly turns into when they're driving their kids to school.
Watching a bunch of anti multi level marketing videos and I still firmly believe there's still a huge need for an anti mlm channel that actually analyses this shit from a proper anticapitalism lense
I cackled reading the book Ponzinomics because there were a couple of moments when the author pointed to bits of capitalism and drew parallels. He spent ages laying out in detail how the MLM model is unsustainable, and then takes a little moment to go, "You know, that growth-is-everything approach to capitalism looks a bit unsustainable too." He talked about about parts of the stock market look ponzi-like because people will buy shares in a company on the assumption that the price will keep going up and the growth model will continue forever.
That books not about tearing down capitalism in general, it's a history of the MLM industry, but it does point out how capitalism in general has a lot of the same flaws.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but the girl cold messaging you with a business opportunity is not your friend. The person you spoke to once in high school reconnecting out of the blue with a recruitment offer is not trying to help you. The #bossbabe crowd is a disease that intentionally seeks out people who are down on their luck and in need of money. The 'hey hun xx' and 'never miss a monday' girlies are lying to you. The mother of three who was able to quit her corporate job and sell protein powder full time had a lot of money as a safety net to fall back on and isn't a typical success story. You're not going to earn that free Mercedes or a trip to Las Vegas. You won't make lifelong friends in these people. Don't fall for the fake niceties. They don't care about you. You are just a figure on a chart and a dollar sign to them.
I highly recommend Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing by Robert L Fitzpatrick if you are at all interested in the history of MLM companies. This book goes into great detail about the history of the industry and the companies that started it all. Perhaps an excessive amount of detail in places. There was a chapter in which Fitzpatrick talks about all the previous business ventures of one of the founders of Nutralite, the first MLM company, and there were moments where I thought it was more information than was strictly needed. Still, you can't deny he was thorough.
Fitzpatrick talks about the founding of Nutralite and Amway, and the early lawsuits that shut down companies like Holiday Magic but left Amway untouched. He describes the earlier concepts that were built on to form the business model of MLMs, including ways direct sales were compensated in other companies the key players were involved in, and some fascinating stories about chain letters that I knew nothing about prior to reading this book.
Fitzpatrick also covers the short sale of Herbalife stock by Bill Ackman and the investigations into Herbalife and legal cases against them. He talks about the incident and its aftermath. There was also a lot of information about the ties between the MLM industry and the US government. I was aware of some of the connections, but I had no idea it was so pervasive.
Early on in the book, there is a great explanation of the pyramid structure, including mathematical proof that, no matter how big the pyramid grows, the majority of people will always lose money - because the way the pyramid grows means that the majority will always be on the bottom. It's laid out in a clear, easy to understand manner. He also points out something I hadn't considered but which makes sense, around the loss rates. Those that talk about MLMs often bring up the studies into how the majority of people lose money, but Fitzpatrick postulates that the loss rates are actually even worse than the terrible stats would suggest, because the income disclosure numbers are generally measured year-by-year. The people at the top who are making money tend to be stable, staying in the company because they've found success, but the people at the bottom are in a state of constant churn, with new ones being recruited and old ones leaving because they kept losing money. This means if you look at it over a longer period, the number of people who lose money may be actually greater than the numbers the annual income statements give. Which is horrifying.
The book does touch on the MLM industry today, but it's first and foremost a history of the industry. There is a lot of plainly laid out information covered in a fairly academic manner, but in a way that can be easily consumed by a reader. I
In a lot of ways, the book feels impersonal. It talks about the people involved in the history of the industry, but doesn't really talk about the people who get hurt. It's not a book of anecdotes or sob stories from the victims of MLM companies, but it sheds light on where these companies came from. Some of the information, I was already somewhat familiar with, but other parts were new to me and it was very interesting to see how the pyramid recruiting structure evolved from earlier concepts and to find out more about the people who invented it.
Fitzpatrick is definitely thorough. The book isn't the most fun I've read on the subject of MLMs but it's packed full of interesting information, and I would definitely recommend it if you want a thorough grounding in the history of the industry. Four stars.
I bought Empty at the Top by Athena Dean Holtz as an autobiographical account of someone who was in a high position in an MLM before deciding it was spiritually empty and quitting. I knew going into this that the book was written by a Christian woman who found that her position in an MLM ran counter to her faith. Even with that foreknowledge, I was not prepared for how much of this book would be given over to Bible verses and advice on how to pray.
If, like me, you're interested in stories and first hand accounts of her time in an MLM, they are there, but I found she would frequently skim past the things that I was interested in learning more about to then spend paragraphs or pages preaching about how important it is not to be obsessed with worldly success, or similar. I did find that there were some interesting points. There was a section where she talked about how she would go about pitching her business opportunity, laying out the manipulative way she would talk in the recruiting meetings. It was especially interesting that she made reference to talking in these meetings about having family vacations and financial freedom, when only a few pages earlier, she'd been talking about having missed or cancelled many family vacations due to her work, and how she was spending more money than she was earning due to the need to project an image of success.
I found it frustrating how she would talk about the harms of MLM companies, because she seemed laser focused on the fact that people wanted to make money instead of have a relationship with god, or that they were in MLM meetings instead of church. There was almost no mention of material harm done, aside from once quoting the statistic about how most people in MLM companies lose money. It was clear that monetary harm and exploitation were barely a consideration, with the people losing hundreds or thousands of dollars or ending up in massive debt getting barely a passing comment, but people skipping church got pages of recrimination and Bible quotes.
I did find it interesting to hear the perspective of a deeply religious person talk about the way that people in MLM companies often use relationships in churches to find new recruits. Some of her comments about the way that relationships and friendships can be twisted and exploited were insightful.
There were also parts of the book that were interesting in a horrifying way, because she would make casual remarks about her life or relationship with her husband as though they were perfectly normal, but which seem awful to me. There were multiple comments made about obeying her husband in a way that implies she thinks a deeply unbalanced relationship is not only expected but correct, and a mention about dying and going to heaven at one point that implies she thinks wanting to die is a good thing. As someone who isn't religious, these offhand remarks were alarming.
This was a fairly short book, padded with excessive Bible quotes, but it did contain some interesting moments. It wasn't what I'd hoped it would be, but I shouldn't judge it too harshly when it was clear that the author was intending to have the book be as much around her Christian faith as her time in an MLM. I do wish she'd spent more time on the specifics of her activities in an MLM, but it was fine for what it was. If you can put up with having the Bible quoted at you every other paragraph and are interested in first-hand accounts of MLM recruiters, you might consider giving it a go.
I'd give it maybe 3 out of 5 stars. It's okay. It's got some merit but I can't recommend it wholeheartedly because of the overwhelmingly preachy approach the author takes throughout.
I've been reading and listening to various books on the subject of MLM and the one I'm currently listening to is Empty at the Top: Exposing the Spiritual Dangers in Multilevel Marketing. It's an interesting experience.
The book is written by a deeply evangelical woman who keeps glossing over the MLM activities that I'm actually interested in hearing about so she has more time to preach to the reader/listener the wonders of her religion, but every now and then there are horrifying implications beneath things she states as though they're perfectly normal.
Not about the MLM practices, but about her relationship with her husband.
"I disobeyed my husband and he let me get away with it," is not a normal sentence to write. Unless you're into D/S kink, you shouldn't be talking about your partner in terms of disobedience. There are little moments like this scattered through the book so far, stated as though it's the most normal thing in the world. It's a fascinating insight into the sorts of relationships that are normalised in some religious communities.
Honey, I don't think it's just the MLM you needed to get away from. Dump that guy and get yourself a partner who treats you as an equal.
If you have ever been a member/distributor/reseller in an MLM company, please could you fill out this survey about the use of social media by MLM representatives.
PSA, as we enter a recession (or are already in one, depending on who you ask)...
now is NOT the time to join a multilevel marketing business.
it's never the time (because they're pyramid schemes) but now is ESPECIALLY not the time, and they're gonna be out in full force trying to recruit people, especially if we start seeing widespread lay offs
If someone wants to offer you a "job opportunity" but won't tell you the name of the company, RUN
if a company requires you to purchase a starter kit, FUCKING RUN
if someone invites you to an "opportunity call" or otherwise pitches this "opportunity" to you, and it's just a whole bunch of love-bombing and motivational speaking, RUN
if you cannot "rank up" in the company without recruiting more people to your team (aka downline), RUN
if you already joined one, cut your losses and quit now. seriously
if your friends/family join them, do not buy from them, even if it's just to support them... buying from people who join MLMs gives them false confidence that they will succeed, and it keeps them in longer, and ultimately they will lose more money, and probably damage a lot of their relationships along the way
99% of people either make no money, or worse, LOSE money, in multilevel marketing. They're scams and commercial cults and the "recession proof industry" marketing campaigns are already well underway, especially in MLMs that are currently on the brink of collapse (like Monat)
don't be fooled. there is no opportunity. it's not a job. it's a scam
(also, watch out for their alternate names... network marketing and social selling are just synonyms for multilevel marketing.)
Eta: if you're not sure if a company is an MLM, Google it. There's an entire database online for this. Search "is [X] an mlm" and if it is, you'll find a wealth of information about how their scams work.
This website has put together a MASSIVE collection of income disclosure statements from loads of different MLMs that show how little money the majority of people make in these companies - and most of them try to make it look better by not counting anyone who sold literally nothing, or by not taking into account the fees and product purchases and onboarding kits that they make people buy.
If someone is trying to recruit you to an MLM, look up the income disclosure statement and remember that the people in the tippety top 0.1% who are actually making money are there because they got in at the start and not because they just worked hard for it - and they're making that money by taking it from everyone below them in the pyramid scheme.
A collection of annual income disclosure statements published by multi-level marketing companies, continuously updated. Last updates done 9/
I’ve been doing some digging into the Multi-Level Marketing (aka Direct Selling, aka pyramid scheme) company The 1:1 Diet. Putting my findings under a cut because this is going to get loooooooong.
theartofmadeline
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