LilyAlpha This is the absurdly-obvious money-laundering trick that lies at the heart of all 'MLM' rackets, which you have fully-understood, but which generations of regulators (and law enforcement agents) have apparently never fully-understood, or wanted to understand.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time (with the notable exception of the many dunces with law diplomas who have temporarily held-down low-paid jobs at government regulatory agencies like the US FTC).
No matter what 'MLM' racketeers, and their well-paid-sophists (often former government regulators) might pretend, the quantifiable evidence (and common-sense) demonstrates that for 60+ years countless millions of transient 'MLM' adherents have been deceived into handing over their cash each month, and attempting to recruit others to do the same, in the false expectation of future reward. The effectively-unsaleable 'MLM' wampum products and services they have received in return, have been just a means of laundering billions and billions of dollars of unlawful losing-investment payments into hundreds of copy-cat closed-market swindles or pyramid scams, all based on the crackpot pseudo-economic theory that endless recruitment + endless payments by the recruits = endless profits for the recruits.
If criminogenic cultic groups like 'Amway' and 'FLP' gave their adherents counterfeit bonds (offering future profits based on the same crackpot pseudo-economic theory), instead of over-priced, but cheaply-procured, pots, pans, pills, potions, etc., in exchange for their monthly (losing) investment payments, then what has been occurring, would be even more obvious.