MLM Bot Watch 16 - Chat about the Scamalasmical cultic racket of MLMs Forever Living, Juiceplus , Ariix, Younique, (insert name of Utah MLM here) now including hunpreneurs, cheese, posts from eyes

[stopfaffing]

Botwatch
botwatchblog.wordpress.com
www.facebook.com/liestopper/?fref=ts

Timeless Vie
timelessvie.wordpress.com
www.facebook.com/timelessvie

Eyes Blog:
mlmtheamericandreammadenightmare.blogspot.nl

Hommetepreneur:
www.facebook.com/hommetrepreneur/

I still think it is worth investigating how MLMs have been banned or at least curtailed in China. Although eyes might be right about fraud - this has so far not been a successful way of inhibiting their spread.

Stop press! Natasha Shingles has said something truthful!! She said that she is unable to back up her beliefs in her products and tell you about the research she has read on the subject. She said she would end up on Bot Watch if she did. This is correct.

In Europe the only medicinal or traditional herbal use for aloe vera is as a treatment for constipation. A seller of aloe vera products is not allowed to tell you it has any health benefits at all. This extends to personal testimonies, repeating other people's testimonies, describing research on the ingredients or referring to their beliefs.

There are many laws for this and some very good reasons why these are in place.

I would be interested to hear if Forever Living have a stance on their products' suitability for pregnant women and children. I see these markets targeted often and I am concerned. Some research has shown aloe vera has a detrimental effect on offspring in animal studies. And it has not been tested on children, with reputable companies advising against use in under 18s. I am going to be looking into the legalities of these but I would be interested to hear of FL'a official line.

Ok....here goes.
1- I keep flitting in and out because I am a busy single mum with 3 children & a life... Not to mention the temperamental Internet!

2- We have a head office in China & operate there.... Legally! As we do in the UK!

3- I am obviously aware of my accounts, and they are absolutely marvellous. If they were not I wouldn't be able to feed my children! I don't have a rich husband funding my business!!

4- I am still NOT reporting any posts that imply I am a liar. I want everyone to see the discussion in its entirety therefore I see no need to do that. My quite reasonable questions to posters last night however have been deleted as were reported even though they break no more rules than the ones I'm seeing again tonight from MN users!!

5- I am in no way needing to be saved! Please understand something really quite important.... Every single person in my family that has raised me, watched me grow up, understands me, knows my background, understands the business, knows how I coach, knows how I'm paid... Absolutely supports me and are all proud of my achievements. Those in my team that have joined me, worked with me, achieved their goals, are working towards their goals, are also proud of me, themselves and the team they are in.

6- All of the bots you have mentioned in here work extremely hard & have success ONLY due to the success of the people in their team... They deserve their income, and unfortunately just because people don't believe they earn that money doesn't mean it doesn't go in the bank every month!

7- On July 9th 2015 at midnight , I sat with my best friend as our emails came in with our earnings for June. We both joined with no money, no husbands to find a fake lifestyle, no savings.... And between us we had earned almost £8,000 in a month! We just cried! Cried because we NEVER believed that would happen for us! Cried because 3 years ago we would've been agreeing with you on here! Cried because it was at that point we knew our lives would change and we could give our children more choices than we ever thought possible. Cried because we had achieved something people had told us was impossible!

8- The reason you won't see the top earners on here is probably because they have no desire to humour this thread. They don't waste their time on things they know are a waste of time!

9- Marketing in any sales/retail industry isn't very different. Attraction marketing is used every day on the tele, on the side of buses, in magazines etc.

I'm only still on here because I felt there should be a different opinion being voiced! And whether you agree or not that's generally how a FAIR discussion tends to develop! Unless of course this isn't intended to be a FAIR discussion in which case I will happily leave the thread & let you continue without any more objection.

Whether you like FL or not, the company have given myself, friends, family & many team members MANY things that we never thought we'd have. Not just income, but confidence, belief in what we are capable of, I would've paid £200 for that alone!! Worth every penny!

Give your "bot" a break! They are probably new, inexperienced and over excited! They more than likely genuinely want to help! If you don't want products or a business that's fine .... Be polite! Wish them well and ask nicely that they don't ask you again rather than ridiculing, bullying & attacking them! So stating how I am the one ruining people's lives maybe a tad hypocritical when in actual fact this thread has probably destroyed more self belief & confidence than I ever could have!

So please..... Don't save me!! I don't want saving!
I respect your opinions, I do understand what you see & why you see it!! .... I just choose to base my view now on what have I seen for myself.
You know how the saying goes....
"Those who think it can't be done shouldn't interrupt those who are doing it"

You don't have to believe me, it won't affect me. All I have really ever wanted from this thread was for people to stop assuming!
You can attack MLM in general all you want.... But calling out the individual to be a liar, a fake, a fraud etc..... THAT is where YOU need to address your behaviour before you judge anyone else for theirs!

Natasha, I'll ask again, because I'm really struggling to understand this. If all the in depth, clearly written analysis of mlms that Eyes has posted publicly on his blog and on here is untrue, why aren't flp and others suing him.

These threads and eyes blog, whether you want to admit it or not, are making an impact. People's attention is being drawn to them and, over time, that is going to affect the number of people mlms are able to recruit. If what eyes and others has written about mlms was untrue why wouldn't fl sue to stop the blog and other public posts damaging the business and its reputation?

Think about it. The only reason 'cash rich' fl isn't assembling a team of lawyers is because there is not grounds to sue - eyes' analysis is correct; effectively 99% of people that sign up to an mlm quit without making any net profit, with some losing significant amounts.

And people don't just lose hard cash - they lose time. If everyone was compelled to keep a record of the time they spent on these schemes - including all the "Success Days" etc it really wouldn't amount to much of an hourly rate. Even if you can get a refund on your inventory where can you get a refund on all the "training" fees abd hours you have put in?

There is no other side to the argument Natasha - you currently make money. Well done. In this game a small percentage (0.4%) do. In fact you all seem to know eachother - small world innit?

Attraction marketing. Well yes companies on the whole do market their products through various means. You are NOT marketing a product - you want to sign up people to your pyramid scheme. What was it? 20% product and 80% lifestyle. As a (now deleted) bot video actually stated - you can't make money from the product and stay sane. Schemes that rely on recruitment to make money ARE PYRAMID SCHEMES. You are in one. Accept it.

In addition to Shadow and Twunk's post above...

Natasha, you say "And between us we had earned almost £8,000 in a month! "
You see, this is smoke and mirrors as well. It gives the impression that you are on £4k x 12, perhaps - maybe £48k. Maybe you are, but maybe you aren't. We have no indication from that post. Logically, you could be earning £0 a year, and that post could still be true.

Looking at what you say in more detail:
First, it isn't clear how much you earned and how much your friend earned. Perhaps your friend earned almost £8k, and you earned nothing, or perhaps it was the other way round.
Second, I work freelance, and might cry with joy one month and with pain the next. How much you earn in one month isn't necessarily representative of the whole year.
Third, you need to deduct expenses.

I would like a bit more logic in your posts, please.

In a way, I can understand where Natasha is coming from. She is making money and sees what she is doing as helping people, especially if she sees that her best friend is also making money too (you will have that feel good factor). It will be easy to overlook the people who are not making money by thinking that they only want to earn a couple of hundred a month by retailing etc and aren't interested in the big bucks. Or the old nugget of it just wasn't for them

But in reality, they don't make money because the majority don't, it's hard to build a steady customer base, when there are also 10 other reps in your area, looking for the business too, who then undercut to get a sale. Friends feel torn about who they should buy from as they don't want to offend.

When you recruit your friends, how many times can you (and them) then approach other friends to join? Plus, you understand the marketing plan now, but how much of it was disclosed to you when you joined? We're told you just need to do your 4cc per month to be paid on your team, but that then changes when you hit manager and have a manager leg.

I was told not to worry about the plan until I got to manager (but like you, I wanted to understand everything inside out, before I could approach others about it)

I didn't recruit straight away as I wanted to know everything about Aloe, but I was actually told not to worry about knowing it all first, that the business was such that you could learn on the job and to just start showing the business and that everyone makes mistakes at the start. It's part of the journey. But that didn't work for me. I wanted to know about all the products. Imagine if I'd recommended the Freedom to someone who was allergic to shellfish, or I'd recommended the c9 to a diabetic or someone who epilepsy or a new kidney? I didn't want people to badmouth me because I'd recommended something they couldn't actually have.

And now it's all the much harder when you can't show testimonials or how it's helped you.

I see a lot of people with Juice Plus recommending their products to pregnant ladies and diabetics. They tout their products as life changing. There's a free child study JP are doing on their products. My friend was asked if she wanted to do it for her child. She was interested until she found out that to get it free, she had to sign up to JP. So how are those results going to be unbiased, if you're now having to financially commit to the products yourself outside the trial?

The amount of pressure put on people to hit 4cc is how people get in debt. If they have a bad month and don't recruit, they then have to find 4cc of sales (or personal use) just so they are still paid on their team.

The ones that come on this thread, the ones that say they're making money and have at least 2 people joining their team each month, well then the personal pressure isn't as bad to just get that 1cc through their account. But if you're that person who is contacting loads but not seeing the results yet, where do you find 4cc from? You end up finding some or most of it from your own pocket.

Last year one of the very top ones recommends as soon as you've joined (so you've just spend £200 on your box) that you should buy a c9 as soon as possible and do it and get your results out on social media. It will cause intrigue to your potential customers and it's increasing your cc's in your first month, but as you're at the bottom (assistant supervisor) you're paying a far higher price for the c9 than say a manager. (and don't forget those extra cc's are also going into your sponsors pot too)

That's not a trial at all! I've never heard of such blatantly biased research!

No double blinding
No random choice of subjects
No objectives
No baseline

It couldn't be less a trial/study if you tried.

Yes there's personal use
There's training days
Success days
Travel expenses
Hours worked unpaid

Pairs of pyjamas and glasses of wine
Your soul

twunk don't forget mindset training to pay for too, then there's books, audio files, more expensive trainings by people in the business etc etc

Oh yes my bad. Brainwashing mindset training etc too....

I'm actually quite prepared to believe that there are a few people who are doing .....OK.......from MLMs. There are clearly a great many $$$ swishing around and a (very) few people - the 'favoured sons', usually - seem to have a pretty good time on it.

Could someone remind me what the 'churn' rate in MLMs is though?

I have to say this thread had become a little too much about one person and not mlm as a whole.
I think from a flp point of view Natasha has put her point across very well. I am sure her team will be watching these threads and will be proud of her.
Whatever Natasha says will be picked apart word for word to try and catch her out.
If 1 % of people in mlm make money then Natasha will be in that group.
I think there needs to be more focus on the majority of people in mlm. The ones that don't make an income.
Their stories are the small print that never gets read.

She doth protest too much.

I wonder if Donald Trump is engaging with those haterz of his campaign so very much

'On July 9th 2015 at midnight , I sat with my best friend as our emails came in with our earnings for June. We both joined with no money, no husbands to find a fake lifestyle, no savings.... And between us we had earned almost £8,000 in a month! We just cried! Cried because we NEVER believed that would happen for us! Cried because 3 years ago we would've been agreeing with you on here! Cried because it was at that point we knew our lives would change and we could give our children more choices than we ever thought possible. Cried because we had achieved something people had told us was impossible! '

Again I'm calling BS on all of this. This is a classic description written by a person who has been exposed to co-ordinated devious techniques of social, pychological and physical persuasion (without her fully-informed consent), and who had undergone a radical personality transformation. The anecdotal statement that £8000 had been earned in a month by these two persons, is totally meaningless, unless it is qualified with quantifiable evidence as to how much time and money was invested to recoup these alleged profitable payments. It strikes me that that two ecstacic, weeping converts of an exploitative non-rational ritual belief system dissimulated as a business, were in no fit state to use their critical and evaluative faculties, and calmly calculate whether they had generated an overall net profit.

Last year 997 people worldwide hit the forever incentives and picked up a chairmans bonus cheque at the global rally. (that was for the year 2014, global rally was held in april 15)

This year Forever boasts over 10 million business owners worldwide. So for the sake of argument, we'll say there was 10 million exactly in 2014.

That means that 0.0000997% achieved the incentives Forever set within the company.

Even if back in 2014 there were only 9.5 million distributors, that's still only 0.00010% hitting the incentives of free travel, holidays, cars and bonus cheques.

We're shown business presentations that this is all possible, but in reality look at the odds of you actually achieving them.

Can I remind everyone that it's not been 99% who lose money in 'MLM/Prosperity Gospel' cultic rackets and eventually give up, it has been effectively 100%.

The 'FLP' racket has been in existence for decades, no one seriously disputes that tens of millions of individuals have been churned through it. The annual retention rate for adherents, is known to be about the same as that of 'Herbalife,' i.e. only about 10%. The retention rate over a 5 year period is negligible. The overall insolvency/ churn-rate for so-called 'FLP' distributorships/businesses' since the racket was first instigated, is effectively 100%.

In effect, the lie which has been hung over the entrance to 'MLM/Prosperity Gospel' cultic rackets has been:

'Work will set your free.'

In reality, there is only one accurate sign which should be hung over the entrance to 'MLM/Prosperity Gospel' cultic rackets:

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.'

Well you surely wouldn't want 'No entry without mathematics'. That mindset wouldn't suit at all.

diamondgirlie Thanks, I received a pm yesterday, to which I replied. If you sent another one today, I have not received it.

crumpetsfortea37 In respect of the UK Fraud Act not being a successful means of tackling the spread of 'MLM' rackets.

'If you pass any law, but then fail to enforce it, you effectively authorise the very crime which you were apparently seeking to prohibit.'

'MLM/Prosperity Gospel' cultic racketeering has never been a question of legislation, it has always been a question of whether there has been political will to enforce existing laws. That said, existing laws defining and prohibiting fraud, could be expanded and written in more accurate terms; again, only if there is political will to do so.

It lies in the hands of ordinary well-informed people, like the members of this thread, to create the political will to tackle this phenomenon.

I've found all these posts very enlightening. Logical people might look at their income and expenses over the whole year, consider the number of hours worked, and arrive at their true income in £/hr. They would then consider whether it was worth continuing. I'm still not sure that Natasha has done this.

We have heard on these threads that one of her friends was also in FL. This friend has a successful (genuine) business, so I would think she has done just this. Not only has this friend dropped out of FL, but she has also been at pains to distance herself from the company. Why? (Thanks to Lurky, the friend was unsuccessful at this.)

I would suggest to Natasha that she gets someone to go over her books and do the figures for her, just in case they are not as rosy as she thinks. And then look at her downlines' stats. But I guess once emotion enters the equation, it makes it impossible to do.

whether there has been political will to enforce existing laws
I did think of writing to my MP, but his name is Grant Shapps, aks Michael Green .

of the two FBOs that earned £8 between them in a month:

the amount came to a massive shock to them. But why? they would have had some idea of their figure, them being the ones who had sold x amount of products. Each FBO knows their profit margin, surely.

why was the amount so shocking to them? because the remuneration rules are so bloody complex, that no FBO knows if they are coming or going at any one moment.

and how many expenses were incurred on training days, mindset training, pupp boxes, table tops, coffees sat in a coffee shop waiting for a victim to walk by etc etc

Botted to the fucking eyeballs, thy can't see the wood for the trees