Have we done MLMs / Pyramid Scams yet? Herbalife, Isagenix, Younique etc

I’ve never really seen much posted on here about them? Diet Shakes, Weight Loss Supplements, Essential Oils, Make up etc

Personally, I find it really frustrating to see people taken in by these – being promised financial freedom/independence by a family member, friend or associate, knowing fully well that they’ll never succeed, and end up in debt with a stockpile of overpriced merchandise. Essentially they take advantage of people’s insecurities, promise rewards that are unachievable, and often leave people alienated by their friends/family. If you watch Betting on Zero on Netflix, you’ll see how these schemes can devastate families and communities.

A Short Piece on MLMs by John Oliver

It seems to be a more frequent issue on social media nowadays.. am I alone in getting annoyed by this? I’ve never taken part in any, but you see good people being sucked in and spat out a few months later.. I know everyone has the right to “invest” in whatever business they wish to, but it seems a pretty unregulated industry, with housewives making false medical claims about Essential Oils etc, lying about potential income, friends/family taking advantage of others just to increase their downline, cult like organisations where critics are painted as toxic/negative personalities.. I’m just surprised there isn’t more social backlash to this, people just seem to tolerate them?

Or am I overreacting? What do you lot think?

It bothers me too… on two levels…

Firstly, the MLM guff that people fall for.
Secondly, the fact people refer to themselves as ‘nutritino consultants’ etc etc, when they’re as much an expert in nutrition, as I am an expert in aeroplane engineering just ‘cos i’ve been on a plane!!

I was on holiday in the Dom Rep recently, and the ‘American Herbalife contingency’ were in the resort ahving conferences etc.
The irony of rotund americans with “24 hour athlete” plasteres from head to foot on their clothes wasn’t lost on me!

However, I did nick a glass of the shake from the breakfast room, and TBH it WAS actually quite tasty!

DrP

Glad it’s not just me! At their worst, they’re dangerous and predatory..

It’s just really bizarre.. admittedly there will be a few at the top of the pyramid who do make money (at the expense all of those beneath them) but their cult like events remind me of Scientology conventions..

It seems to be a more frequent issue on social media nowadays.

I’m not sure if it is – I’ve known plenty of people get mixed up in schemes like these over the years – and not daft of gullible people either . I think anyone could be susceptible if the angle and the timing was right.

I’m not aware of seeing this more now that social media is a thing – more that social media is how I know that people are doing this as social media is the platform available to them. I also think social media is also useful in helping people see the error of their ways. People duped in this way in the past were much more easily more isolated and much more easily influence by malicious parties (or well meaning but deluded ones)

If someone in your social circle was drawn into scheme like this you, and all their friends would pretty much know about it instantaneously. In the past you might not have any idea until someone was properly in trouble

Never heard of them, nor seen anything on social media…

and having watched that Isogenix video above, I have no idea what they’re actually selling!

Someone I knew from school is on one of the make up ones – work from home mum hours, facebook says she is doing really well but part of it is the ability to self promote and sell via that. Not sure how it works when you hit saturation.

Another mate looked at the supplements side of things – with a detailed read it’s not a bad model if you remove your ethical standpoint and flog anything. these companies want the selling to be done but not paid for full time, commission based, so if it’s passive income then it’s great – if your investing and it’s your main income less good.

and having watched that Isogenix video above, I have no idea what they’re actually selling!

Diet Supplements I think, shakes etc

Another mate looked at the supplements side of things – with a detailed read it’s not a bad model if you remove your ethical standpoint and flog anything. these companies want the selling to be done but not paid for full time, commission based, so if it’s passive income then it’s great – if your investing and it’s your main income less good.

I think the issue (other than the moral side of things of recruiting people) is the fact that in order to earn a decent commission from your downline, you have to buy X amount of products yourself every month.. as the market gets saturated, it’s harder to sell and recruit, and you end up with a garage full of products.

By the way, there’s a good (but lengthy) piece on Younique here

oh the herbalife ones are great to bait, especially as a cyclist/health nut they naturally seem to gravitate to getting me in on it.

what annoys me is that its seemingly rational inteligent human beings that get suckered in by it.

You try and explain its a pyramid and they swear blind its not.

but then i guess people bought into Idave.

flipside – when my wife was a stay at home mum with our kids she worked for a couple of these Pampered Chef and then My Secret Kitchen.

PC was in general a quality product but pricing was high and market was already saturated, but as all she really wanted to do was use it as a means to get out of the house, meet people, host some nice cooking parties and not particularly play the MLM side of things, she found it quite rewarding and gave a bit of extra money at a time when we were struggling a bit.

MSK was a start up selling food ingredients, spices, etc., at a vastly different scale to the biggies. She worked directly for the founders and recruited a few people below her, a couple of which went on to be quite successful at the MLM bit but that was never my wife’s target so when appropriate she stepped aside so they became same level ‘managers’ as her. Instead working for the founders she learned a heck of a load and organised conferences, booked guest speakers, used to run their social media, wrote marketing copy and so on.

Both gave different skills that she now uses in her back-in-employment life, and she doesn’t / I don’t regret her doing them at all, even if she doesn’t have the combined income of 4^n people rolling in!!

Someone tried to rope us into Amway when we were much younger. Trying to get the bugger out of the door took forever, as I was a nicer person then. 🙂

Whilst your wife might have gained some benefit from it, the whole ethos is very questionable as it promises much to both its evangelical product marketeers and the naive consumers, and only really delivers to those much further up the food chain. And to gain the promised success requires you to manipulate your close networks, who are in most cases your friends and family.

I’ve known plenty of people get mixed up in schemes like these over the years – and not daft of gullible people either . I think anyone could be susceptible if the angle and the timing was right.

I’ve had a couple of mates taken in, and as you say, they weren’t the type of people who I’d have thought were particularly lacking in the brains department.

What you’re missing though is that the people who run these schemes are experts at it.  It’s a finely honed craft and exceptionally well organised.  Those at the top are at the top for a reason. It’s easy to think “how gullible do you have to be?” but they are very persuasive.  Ever seen those market-stall owners giving out a load of patter to a huge crowd in order to sell them magic knives or dishcloths they don’t want?  Rank amateurs.

I went to one of their induction briefings once.  The friend who asked me along had been instructed not to discuss how the scheme worked beforehand – obviously, they don’t want a layman to explain it or the mark will go “well, that’s daft.”  They get you all in a big room and then it’s like a cult.  They have the head honchos in sharp suits talking about their Ferrari and their yacht and planting “this could be you” seeds.  Loads of appeals to the heart, even if you’re sure it’s a scam it’s still a very appealing one and well it might just not be a scam after all and…  It’s an incredibly slick operation.

The one I went to was for a company called Amway, selling eco-friendly cleaning products (it might’ve been Ecover before anyone had really heard of them, can’t remember exactly now).  It was a good product, but very overpriced, and as the man-on-the ground salesman you had to buy a couple of hundred quid’s worth of products from them up front before you started selling.  But really this was a secondary business, a front almost, the big push was “tell your friends, bring them along, they’ll all be rich too, recruit recruit recruit!”  The flaw of course being that your friends and your friends’ friends are often the same people and in any case how many sales are you going to make when you’re all selling the same product and you’ve just recruited most of your prospective customer base.

A while after that I went for a job interview, with the managing director of a company.  I got to the address to find, somewhat to my surprise, a suburban semi-detached house.  Rang the bell and was met by a young woman who was supposedly the MD.  She started the sales patter, when it was all suddenly sounding terribly familiar I asked “hang on, is this Amway?”  And yeah, the “job” was as another foot-soldier.  She’d really drunk the Kool-Aid though, I remember her showing me her motivational pictures, she had photographs on her fridge of a sports car, big house, some idyllic beach somewhere, all the things she was going to buy when she’d made her fortune.  I wonder whether she ever got her Porsche.

Enjoyable Herbalife (Erbalife) video

I remember her showing me her motivational pictures, she had photographs on her fridge of a sports car, big house, some idyllic beach somewhere, all the things she was going to buy when she’d made her fortune. I wonder whether she ever got her Porsche.

That is quite sad really….

If you want to make a pyramid scheme really work, you need the services of Bernie Madoff.

I suspect there wasn’t enough money in the schemes of selling shakes or chocolate flavoured tofu to a few million gullible types.

Go Big, AIM High, You are the enabler.

Yo!

Dudes!

Lets… Go!

That is quite sad really….

Yeah.  I very nearly typed exactly that just now.

So is the issue here, the dodgy product or the MLM structure itself?

Some very successful businessess do okay out of MLM whilst being quite sincere about the way they do things. Slimming World for instance. (Although they really wouldn’t justifiably see themselves that way).

Setting up in business is risky, irrespective. I know my sister did the Younique thing. She did okay but was hardly knee deep. Likewise I wouldn’t say it ruined her life in the experience.

The flip side is I remember years ago getting invited to a business opportunity at someone’s house and I sniffed trouble at the start when they start by showing you pictures of Porsche’s and swimming pools. And they take ages to get to the product.

Yeah it’s a bit conniving.

Same with telecom plus…

Some people do okay out of these things though, but not for the most. Same as any opportunity.

Yeah, back in the nighties I let a mate persuade me to take up a precious Sunday to go to an Amway conference. I remember being peeved as he wanted me suited and booted to meet his next level up, which pissed me off no end. It was what I imagine the front of a cult looks like. Much whooping and hollering and standing up to tell your story. If I remember rightly there were levels you could climb up the greasy pole like Emerald and Diamond and so on? I spent a few minutes during one of the comfort breaks to work out how many idiots you’d need to recruit and how much you’d need to bung in of your own money, and quietly made my excuses and left.

They chased me for weeks afterwards to come round to my house and were pretty relentless until I agreed. The bloke that came around was some mid level true believer who’d really swallowed the marketing book. Eventually he asked me what I really wanted from life, and I think I was supposed to tell him my dream, when I said “For you to leave and never contact me again” it went a little frosty….

Enjoyable Herbalife (Erbalife) video

That was quite good, Short sellers paying whistle blowers to blow whistles hoping to crash the stock…..

Wonna buy some chocolate covered senokot?

*sniff

I had a fb friend into herbal life, soon got blocked. The local BNI chapter meet up at work, I looked into that to find out what it was all about, seems like a scheme too

So is the issue here, the dodgy product or the MLM structure itself

The structure – often the products are OK (although the price is usually too high for what it is)

The issue is that the business is the business of selling franchises and stock to franchisees, not those franchisees selling stuff to punters. You quickly reach a point where the only way you will recoup your money is by recruiting new people in a wildly oversaturated market.

McDonalds works by setting up franchises and selling their products through them. Imagine if the only way that each branch of McDonalds could make money is by persuading folk to open another five restaurants in the same town. And those new people could only make money the same way.

You’d end up with a couple of hundred fast food restaurants in a town, each of them with a massive stack of unsold hamburgers. That’s MLM, except the restaurants are individuals, many of whom have invested thousands of pounds, with a garage full of unsold herbal supplements.

what annoys me is that its seemingly rational inteligent human beings that get suckered in by it.

It like when everyone says ” If we all get a P the forum will be fixed”

I remember her showing me her motivational pictures, she had photographs on her fridge of a sports car, big house, some idyllic beach somewhere, all the things she was going to buy when she’d made her fortune. I wonder whether she ever got her Porsche.

I think that is meant to be a “technique” for success from “the secret” self help book, apparently all you have to do is imagine you are successful, and build a picture board of what you want and it will happen, certainly worked for the author.

I expect the sales pitch selling the dream of success and being rich is largely just a rehash of that book.

World Ventures is one that I’ve had to contend with. Couple of people trying to sell it to the more junior reserve soldiers I manage. Total crock of shit.

One of the women in Mrs Batfink’s mothers group is deeply involved in Isagenix APAC – so have looked into it.

It’s the heady combination of selling the twin ideas of being rich and thin, plus social media “influencing” that seems to be feeding their resurgence.

Isagenix are very careful with their marketing – they talk about their products just enough to avoid being legally categorized as a pyramid scheme (which they clearly are).  You only have to look a little bit further down the pyramid to see that facade dropped entirely though – a couple of layers down its just all about selling a get rich quick scheme.

I have some sympathy with people taken in by it – but they’re getting big enough to be on the radar now, it’s only a mater of time before a new ruling sets a new precedent.

I have a friend at work who does Younique so I had a read of the link mentioned above.

She wasn’t really active on Social Media before but now she REALLY is,

Cross checking vs her Facebook account her posts fit the template mentioned on the link.

Product Promotional Post – [tick]

Isn’t my life great post – [tick]

Trite Motivational pos – [Tick]

She’s not daft but she only took this up a few, months ago – you’d imagine a few rudimentary google searches would have put her off.  Apparently not.

My aunt and uncle got suckered into “Echos” which was a perfum and aftershave pyramid. Knock off copies of the big brands.

They had the pictures of the cars and holiday homes, we’ll be millionaires by next year, all of the bs. They ended up buying a tatty old 924 to fill the Porsche in the next 6 months criteria they set themselves. It went wrong in the end, not sure how much they lost.

edit. He was a Police Sergeant / trainer so not exactly stupid. Still fell for the bs.