MLM Bot Watch 48 - Don't miss the BBC Documentary investigating the truth about Multilevel Marketing / Network Marketing!

[BSintolerant]

Don't miss the BBC Documentary which is to be broadcast on BBC 3 & BBC iPlayer on the 27th April and BBC 1 on the 8th May!

Well that in itself shows they know what they are up to to dupe people in!

Almost as bad as Castle's mystery 9 day programme followed up by an equally mysterious 15 day programme that have completely transformed her life.

No mate, it's the same C9s and Fit15 bollocks you've been peddling for years.

I was always aghast that my OH couldn't grasp that a 'business' that involved constant deception, down to actually hiding the name of the business and it's products, could not possibly be a good thing.

She is a fundamentally honest person. Perhaps one of the most shocking things was hearing her trot out the various untruths they are taught to use when trying to reel people in ('only 2 spaces left', 'I'm really busy right now, but I've got an opening on Tuesday'...). It was so out of character. I honestly think she didn't see it as lies, as her uplines had groomed her to believe that this was simply 'business techniques'.

After I had pointed out a couple of times that what she had just told someone was a lie, she started doing her 'business' calls from the car or another room.

She resented me 'cramping her style' more than she questioned being made to lie.

*its products.

Spending too much time around bots isn't doing my spelling or grammar much good!

@Twenty I for one am glad you are here sharing your personal experiences. My bot is just a good friend, so obviously I'm never gonna have the same insight as you, as you lived it 24/7 and it affected your children and I can't imagine how hard that must have been.

In other news, Broke's idea of a 'week off social media' equaled 4 days.

And if Wig needs doing for filter abuse.

I don't see what yawn does/doesn't do to her house has any relevance here....this really has become a witch hunt which is a real pity as this used to be a balanced and useful thread. now it's sadly is becoming a bullying yawn thread which completely undoes all the work this was meant do. I'm one of a growing number leaving this now

I also agree, the entrapping of the nurse is fair game to discuss, if she wants to ruin her house then let her crack on and put it in a different thread. With this documentary coming up, there may be a lot more traffic to this forum. If it is seen to be a place where people are criticised for their looks and out of work activities, then it just gives more validation to the bots that the others are just 'jealous haters'

Fair point.

Yes, when the "my lifestyle is more enviable than yours" posts are based on demonstrable fallacies or half truths, I think they are fair game. They are weapons of mass deceit in the bots' arsenals, and should be exposed.

When they are simple matters of taste or looks, they are irrelevant to this thread and do not belong here.

I accept there may be grey areas (e.g. bots who fat shame in order to flog slimming products, but for whom those products clearly don't work, or ridiculously over-filtered pictures used to flog makeup or the miracle properties of some skincare product, or pass off purchases of cheap tat as signifiers of wealth, etc.), but I would very much err on the side of caution in those cases.

This site came to my attention after watching the BBC Stories piece on FLP & Valentus, I was already deep in the MLM rabbit hole after seeing some people I knew get involved in Nu Skin and Juice Plus and saw what can only be described as a radical change in personalities.
I was completely lost trying to figure out who all these people were who were being discussed here but I stuck with it and lurked, eventually working out who they were. Despite this site mainly focusing on FLP, I could quickly see the similarities in how the top bots behave regardless of the company, the use of mindset training, Law of Attraction, and outright lies, deceit and manipulation.
Whilst I do think this thread walks a fine line at times following these bots, unless you have witnessed first hand someone you care about being brainwashed by a Multi-Level Marketing company I think you need to understand why some people are extremely angry and hold nothing but contempt for those in the 1% bracket. They are profiting from peoples misery and lives are being ruined because they have been conditioned to chase a dream that is never going to happen.
It's not just the bots who suffer when they inevitably fail, it affect's spouses, family members and friends alike.
Ideally I'd love this thread to be the welcoming and supportive place for bots who might still be active but are starting to have doubts or even those who have already got out but are struggling to deal with the damage it may have caused them and others around them.

I was a bot, in the early 90s, 9dart, and until I read these threads I still believed that it was my fault it hadn't worked out. Now I know it wasn't and that has helped me a lot.

I absolutely agree that this thread needs to back away from Yawn. The trouble is that she posts so many times a day with who her next victims are, unlike any other bots.
She is pretty insignificant now in the grand scheme of MLM, however as her life if so transparent it is very difficult not to be sucked in.

Very good points.
Slight course correction needed

Welcome to any newcomers who happen across this thread looking for information about MLMs and support

@thetemptationofchocolate
That's what they do, they bleed you dry and use you for your own warm market and then give you the tried and tested excuses as to why you failed.

"You didn't want it enough"
"You don't have the right mindset"

.....of course it has nothing to do with the seriously flawed business model.

@thetemptationofchocolate - just curious, when you were sucked into botting in the pre-social media days, were the same techniques used as they do today- all the Law of Attraction stuff, the mindset books & CDs, the various gurus hanging around the fringes preying on failing bots promising to teach them the secrets of success?

I saw this on Facebook today and lol’d at a real Bot marketing fail!

Thanks FranceTeam, I just spat my sneaky late afternoon pint over my trousers!

I actually follow a top Juice Plus bot on Instagram. She is really slick, she's not like any of the low rent bots from forever living, Valentus etc that you see on Facebook. I suspect there is family money there, but she is basically just like a regular Instagram star - she instagrams her amazing lifestyle, fitness, food, travel, and then about once a week posts saying to drop her a message if you're interested in the opportunity. She has also gone viral a few times on Facebook when she posts non-MLM stuff, so I think she must gain a lot of followers as a result.

Obviously she's still making money from the losses of all her minions, so she's as much of a vulture as the rest of them, but you can totally see how she has made it a success, and how she would still be bucking the trend now that all the other bots' businesses are in decline. I bet every new recruit she has found approached her rather than the other way round. I started following her because I was interested in the MLM stuff, but now I actually just like following her 😂

If you're interested in seeing some scarily slick attraction marketing in action, her 'business' is called the princess movement, so have a look under #princessmovement on Instagram. Under that hashtag you can also see all her underlings copying her.

Blimey that hashtag produces a goldmine of MLM bingo catchphrases!!!

PS why is is good to have a ‘crazy’ life?

Haha sponge yes if you look at the most recent ones you get 'so lucky to stay at home with my baby', 'business is booming', 'I put the sign up fee on my overdraft and made it back in a few days' etc etc.

Their bot master doesn't really post anything like that though - she obviously just gets them all to do it and then she posts pictures of herself on the beach in Dubai drinking cocktails and surrounded by designer handbags and shoes...

I've recently got on to Twitter and #princessmovent is showing up some gems. Thanks 😁

FranceTeam I'd forgotten about that - it's enough to give you PTCD! 😂 (The letter 'C' isn't a typo.)

I'm amazed that a brazen bot didn't claim that aloe gelly reaches the parts that others don't.

twentytwenty yes indeed it was all the same. Maybe not the gurus, but everything else was exactly the same.
It was bollocks then and it still is now.

The juice plus Instagram movement knocks the socks off the FL
FL have older people at the top so that may be the reason.
#princessmovement does give out some gems

Hey @fitgirl26 , yes, sadly the fitness industry is rife with this MLM nonsense and it makes me so angry. I know at least two personal trainers who build Herbalife / Arbonne shakes and supplements into packages that they sell to their clients and I'm just appalled. It goes against the whole ethos of being a responsible personal trainer and if a PT has qualified with a reputable training provider it goes against everything they would have been taught about giving nutritional advice to clients. Personal trainers are actually operating outside their scope of practice by recommending supplements of any kind, if they are not also qualified dieticians (and of course absolutely no reputable dietician would recommend any of this MLM crap to anyone!).

One of my fellow fitness 'professionals' who tried to recruit me to their MLM used an underhand way of starting the recruitment pitch to me. She knew that I had a family member who was at that time very ill and started asking me what I thought were well-meaning questions about how my family member was doing. This led into how she was 'qualified in nutritional coaching', believed in the healing power of nutrition and how this could help my family member, and that then led into how I too could get into her nutritional coaching business and it would be a great fit for my personal training business. Alarm bells were majorly starting to go off in my head by now but out of sheer nosiness, and to confirm my suspicions that we were getting into MLM territory here, I asked her to send me some info. Sure enough it was one of the MLM companies I have mentioned above, and at this point I obviously said it absolutely wasn't for me. She asked me why not a couple of times but hasn't been particularly persistent in pestering me about it (phew). My family member is now fully recovered, which is wonderful.

Only at the point that my fellow 'professional' sent me the information was the name of the company confirmed....as I said in one of my previous posts, why oh why do they hide the name of the company until the very last minute? As @Twentytwentyhindsight says here: I was always aghast that my OH couldn't grasp that a 'business' that involved constant deception, down to actually hiding the name of the business and it's products, could not possibly be a good thing. Absolutely - why all this hiding the name of the business? Maddening!