MLM for the gullible

[SpringIsComingAlways]

MLM everywhere on social media...living my own life selling tat @bossgirl

Apart from people at the very top is MLM just aimed at gullible people recruiting more gullible people?

YABU all type of people join MLM and make shedloads of money

YANBU it's just for gullible or vulnerable people

In case anyone doesn't know MLM is multi level marketing.... getting others to sell products you sell, like a pyramid with commission to those above you in the scheme...think YouNique, bodysuit, fake perfumes, smelly candles, make up that is ridiculously overpriced due to commission, etc etc..... they come and come and spread as much as covid

It's great, I just need to buy some over-priced crap, hassle my friends until they buy something out of pity for me and stick a picture of a yacht to my fridge and keep on dreaming. I'll get there in the end I'm sure, I just need to dream big and ignore the haters (which happen to be all of my family and friends that care about me)

@LApprentiSorcier

She claimed she got a four figure paycheck

A four figure paycheque isn't really anything unusual - if you worked full time on the minimum wage you'd get a four figure paycheque.

Yeah she was claiming this was for working a few hours a week, in her pj’s, on her laptop. In fact she claimed it was so easy, this stuff sells itself so it wasn’t even “work”.

I have a friend who tried to convince me to host a usborne book party

This one bothers me a lot. Especially as they run book fairs in schools and prey on kids. There's a teacher near me who keeps trying to recruit people and has done sales things from her garden which happens to be near our biggest park. On FB she gets loads of messages about how wonderful it is she is doing this for the kids. I think people aren't aware it is an MLM.

10 figure salary?

Yes, they've earned £10.54

I can see why some people do it though - you can't earn a decent living working for other people (or the cost of living is too high) and they feel exploited. I can see why people would think starting a business is the way forward, except they don't realise that they are someone else's business.

I could understand people getting caught up in it years ago, but there’s so much info there now. I think people who get sucked in now are genuinely desperate rather than gullible.

What really shocks me is that they are told explicitly to “fake it til you make it”. Lie about how much you’re making, pack out your orders with empty boxes from previous orders and post photos to look like you’re ordering more etc, so you know you’re faking it... yet you still believe those up line from you really are making more, ordering more etc.

Everyone I know who’s ever done it has eventually just stopped posting about it and never mentioned it again. I do worry about how much they’ve lost before they realise it.

Would really recommend the documentary Betting On Zero about Herbalife, and the Elle Beau blog if anyone you know is about to get sucked in.

Life Coaches seems to be the latest thing
Life coaches have been around long before now. The one I'm seeing a lot are the ones about running an online business.

I could easily see someone who is in a vulnerable situation getting sucked in to the promises of a better life

You have to be really careful about pushing the "desperate and vulnerable" narrative. I've seen some really smart, not vulnerable or desperate people buy in to various MLMs. The marketing is way more sophisticated than it used to be, using social engineering tricks to get people on board. If we keep insisting only vulnerable and desperate women fall for it, far more are likely to sign up as "I'm not one of those people, I'd be able to see through the scam". Fewer will come forward if they have been scammed as they don't want to be seen as desperate.

I've had to mute my cousin in the states on Facebook. I love her dearly but i was getting infuriated by the constant posts of "I've become a wellness coach, let me tell you how I can change your life! I just need four more apprentices". She leaps from MLM to MLM.

Actually all the people who do MLM on my Facebook leap from one to another. Body shop to scentsy to Herbalife. Are those perfume replicas an MLM as well? Because they seem pretty rampant at the moment.

@BloodyDarrener

I'm getting annoyed with my MLM friends who are 'kindly' selling their wares and donating them to NHS workers on your behalf. Guilting people into levelling them up giving them large sales results by using the NHS and charity as their sales pitch.

No Betty, I don't want to buy your bodyshop shit to donate to nurses so you can get paid. I'd rather buy from a shop which is at least not bullshitting me about their reasons for selling it.

(Plus I wouldn't buy Bodyshop again after TRAs got the words woman, women and girls from their websites but still sell multiple products for men.)

Ohhhhhhh that's what that's about. It is all over our local FB and I was trying to get my head around it because it didn't look right to me. The seller was bragging about how much she has donated to local nurses, but.... so then the real motivation is getting people to buy stuff from her. Makes sense now.

I think some are gullible. A lot are desperate. Then you have the ones that are manipulative and self-absorbed.

Hmmm. YANBU with the way things are now, but in the past it was much easier to make money from them. I, for example, became a Body Shop consultant when I was at uni (which I still believe is one of the lesser evils when it comes to MLM) and it was fantastic. I had free reign of several hall buildings of students, plus all my friends, family, contacts on social media etc.

Now, everyone and their pet rabbit is a consultant. Honestly, I'm a member of 6 groups - and I've muted them all since realising it's better and cheaper to buy things yourself directly from the website anyway!!!! You get rewards too, which you don't get from consultants.

It can be good if you have a large network of people who are happy to buy from you, like when I was at uni. But these days it's so diluted that people just get pissed off at it instead of excited to see the catalogues and treat themselves to some nice things.

In my village:
Body shop at home (now I refuse to buy anything from there)
Ann summers (I won’t shop there)
Usbourne books (I refuse to buy usbourne books now, I actively avoid them at school fairs and I am NOT nice if they are the only option)
Travel Agency thing (I book my own holidays anyway, will not touch a travel agents)
Younique (do not buy)
Activ-labs (do not buy)
Crappy knock off perfumes (I wind them up and ask for stuff I know they won’t have and when they ignore me I post about them ignoring me until they delete the post)
Avon (never have and never will buy from them!)
Juice plus, weightloss coffee ones & Herbalife “huns” (I point out how their “recommended dosages could actually kill me with my medical history and mention the lawsuits against them. Then go on to point out that they actually are saying I’m overweight, which is rude, hurtful and can cause major depression, which is another side effect of the shite they pedal)
There are at least 8 of each of these in our village of 500 houses. That’s criminally insane. The math is batshit.
Basically I avoid them at all costs, report their posts as spam and try my dammed hardest not to give any of them any cash whatsoever.

I know someone who has pumped a lot of money into a certain MLM and can't understand why she can't recruit anyone. She still believes she will eventually get a white Merc.

@MintyMabel

Oh apparently only around 25% of people that join make any money....that's sad

That is a massively inaccurate figure. Most MLMs will see around 98% of people make no money whatsoever. A large proportion of those will lose money.

Thank you. I took the 25% make money from Google searching....sad that it us even lower!

Elizabeth Dos Santos was one of the top Younique sellers & now youtubes all of these companies nasty money taking leave you poor MLM tricks, she left last august. She also has a facebook group called Hey Hun ban the scam, I found her youtube after googling a company my friend is now selling on facebook, I now know shes being sucked dry of cash & sanity.

It’s true that most people don’t make any money (a lot lose money) and it’s all about recruiting. I have worked at a head office for an MLM and they are horrible places that are like cults

I remember thinking the same, then I had a friend on Facebook who seemed to be doing amazingly well - foreign all expenses trips paid, new posh house in the country, brand new BMW etc etc. She was attractive and a people person and did seem to “have it all”... I almost started to believe that maybe it could be possible to do well on these schemes... until one day she disappeared off Facebook without any warning. Very strange as she’d been a daily poster with motivational quotes, videos etc.

A few months later I remembered her and googled her name- she’d gone into bankruptcy and I’m guessing has basically withdrawn from society as she’d brought a lot of her friends in the cult with her. And was I’m assuming selling a lie and lying to friends in the process many of whom were buying multiple (overpriced) products from her. Very sad

It must have been highly embarrassing as she was all about showing off and spinning the #bossbabe, I’m doing this for my girls blah blah and had made an emotive video about her rise from a single mother living in poverty with her parents in bunk beds and sofa surfing, working three minimum wage jobs to her success with home, trips abroad and four bedroom House in the countryside. I felt genuinely happy for her success. I can’t imagine what happened, how much debt she got into and worse how many friends she lost as she had lied about her entire lifestyle. It was my warning to never believe social media and never join a MLM

When I say lied about her lifestyle. She had somehow got the home and car but without the means to pay for it. So the desperation came. And ultimately the downfall. Very dramatic.

I've worked on the corporate side of -direct sales- MLM.

In a pool of about 1,500 active "sales" people in any given month, approximately 7 made what I could consider a LOT of money. One of those was on seven figures.

Below that, about 20-30 made what I would have considered a "liveable" salary. Probably a further hundred or so made a decent part time living out of it (however I do not know if these people were actually working part time - they may have been working every hour they could to get to that point.)

About 30 people qualified for the free incentive holiday every year. In the case of the company I worked with (it is subsidised by a major global multinational) the trip was truly free and everything including airfare was paid. In other companies which I had to research and join as a part of my job, that wasn't the case.

The people at the top who were making good money out of it all were cookie cutter copies of each other. They all have exactly the same characteristics. They are all incredibly driven people, and whether or not they see what they do as "work" they really are working all day, every day. They are very good at managing people, because at that level of an MLM you're more HR and recruitment than sales. And they are very, very personable and persuasive, all very good speakers.

There were some in the 20-30 "decent salary" set that didn't fit this description and they managed to sell using some form of social media "gaming" that as corporate, we didn't like but as they're all independent contractors we could do nothing about. We could prevent people from making certain claims about being a rep, or mis-selling a product (very, very hard to mis-sell as it wasn't one of the dodgy health industry ones!) but how they sold is up to them.

Either way the answer isn't really in the dichotomy of your AIBU question. People can and do make real money at it, selling overpriced BS and "recruiting" people to do the same, it does tend to attract the gullible, and there is some nominal oversight that is supposed to prevent that (but the companies are largely expected to self-enforce and doing that on social media is pretty difficult.)

I have a friend who was sucked into arbonne at the start of lockdown 1.

It kicked off her bipolar massively. As a consequence, in late spring, she spent a month in the local psychiatric hospital.

Arbonne didn't give a shit.

I don't think it's black and white, as pp said they prey on desperate and vulnerable people.
Not all MLMs are created equal, they range from questionable to abominable. The worst ones use cult like techniques to get people to flog their products to all their friends and relatives and pressure on them to recruit more and more people. They encourage ppl to be aggresive when selling and recruiting in order to meet their "goals" and continually order stuff they can't afford and they could never sell on. This leads to the person being dropped by all around them and even more dependent on the cult they joined, they feel they made good friends and they find it really hard to break away from them.
If you have friends or family members taken over by MLMs, try to leave the door cracked opened so they can return to you and get support when they inevitably leave the cult.
And if not sure something is an MLM or not, a good tell tell sign is when the company makes the most of money from recruiting new sellers and not from selling the actual products. Then it's an MLM.

So from what I gather the 'life coaching' mlms dont actually do any coaching. I think the product they sell is training courses to become a coach. All the sales pitches tend do be like "join this course to learn how you can make the most of your life coaching business". I have never seen anyone advertise an actual 1-1 coaching session.

The biggest one I'm seeing is the travelpreneur one. Surely they must be suspicious about how a travel business currently can be booming?...again the product they are selling is the training course to be a travel agent, not travel itself.

I took the 25% make money from Google searching....sad that it us even lower

Perhaps if you'd looked past that one line, you'd have seen the actual numbers.

I think I have 2 'huns' on my FB right now and I would say they are both people who struggle with their mental health and cannot hold down a "real" job.