cheeky that link is fascinating. I have copied one of the comments below:-
I lost my ex-boyfriend’s mother, a single parent, to Amway. She went from being a nurse with a steady income and two young children (in addition to my ex, who as 19 by then) who still found the time to paint and sell floral greeting cards; to no longer spending time with her children, losing her job, and spending all her time going to thrice-weekly meetings. Thousands of dollars of merchandise stacked around the house that never got sold as she simultaneously splurged on expensive jewelry and clothes (all sold by Amway) to give other people an impression of success…even as her children were eating half a can of baked beans each for dinner. I tried to get her to quit, but she resisted and eventually forbid me to come near the house; after being close to her family for three years.
The worst part was that I was there when she was recruited. She had called me over to the house for a ‘business opportunity’ but I had heard of Amway before and dug my heels in, because I had lost high school friends to them in the past. I had come to treat this new family as my own and was pretty hostile to the two creeps that dared try to take advantage of her ignorance. In fact, I believe their actual words were that she would be able to earn enough to quit working, spend all day teaching her children, send them to a private school, and indulge in art.. None of that has come to pass. That was about 8 years ago and I broke up with my ex over unrelated issues during that time, though we remain friendly.
A further comment by same writer:-
We are in Australia. She was stuck because she was sold on Amway first by trusted friends through her church. I think that since her original job as a nurse had her working at difficult hours, and caring for her children took up so much of her other time, she spent years with a limited social circle that revolved around church attendance on Sunday morning and the other parents at her kids' tennis classes. Even her painted artwork was sold at church fundraisers.
Most churches in the western world have an aging congregation, to be blunt, with the exception of some evangelical ones, and she went to a fairly traditional Lutheran one. Being isolated from more tech- or business-savvy younger adults meant that she did not have anyone to criticise her. She had only just begun being computer literate at the time too, and lived on a prehistoric Australian dialup connection that took ten minutes to open her Gmail. It's safe to say she could not have researched Amway enough.