PYRAMID SCAM?

Why are these businesses always having to defend themselves, right? They’re not illegal.

Pyramid scheme is a dirty word – over the years and with the power of sharing information through the Internet, people became more aware that they were a scam and the law also started clamping down; a lot of them were prosecuted. Like vermin, these businesses hid in the shadows and waited. They tweaked the business model to circumvent new laws and regulations and re-emerged as multi-level marketing, network marketing or social marketing companies….but underneath all the pseudo-marketing semantics, they are still those same old dirty schemes.

Here’s an extreme hypothetical example, but see if it fits:

Say there’s a company that mass produces cheap ‘health’ drinks and sells them for a whopping £30 each. Who’s gonna pay £30 for a ONE LITRE bottle of plant juice that has no scientifically proven health benefits and contains SEVEN artificial e-numbered chemicals, right?!

But then I tell you that YOU can sell these drinks for £30 each, and you’ll get PAID £10 for every bottle you sell…plus YOU can recruit people to sell drinks as well. You’ll get £3 for every drink THEY sell, plus £1 for every drink their recruits sell and so on. Three levels of commission, hypothetically £14 total commission on a £30 sale. Everyone, including yourself, does have to buy a product ‘kit’ for £200 (for personal use only) to allow anyone to start selling, but all you need to do is find three people who find three people who find another three people…. In the end, yeah, you’ve paid out £200, but you’ll be making around £980 in commission from your team of three plus any extra from individual customers purely interested in buying a ‘health drink’.

Boom. Why wouldn’t you want to join, right?

Product is shifting. The ‘health’ drinks are flowing. No recruitment revenue so it fools the law, only ‘product commission’ rolling in…and the actual health benefits of the drink don’t really seem to matter because you realise signing people up is where the money is. And if there is no manager or anyone around to regulate what you say or claim the drink can do or what the business really is, it’s inevitable what will and does happen.

The focus of these distributors shifts to recruiting. The official line is to deny this and say that they’re here to sell the drink but the fact is that the recruiting incentives far outweigh the sales incentives…and that tells you everything. Any new confused member who even tries to solely focus on selling the product, will soon find if they don’t recruit their customers as new team members/distributors it won’t be worth their while, and another distributor will just sign them up instead.

These companies count on and exploit that desire for wealth and financial freedom by using emotionally manipulative tactics – I called one distributor, pretending to be interested in joining and within twenty minutes she was trying to pull at my emotions by telling me that I should join her team so that I may leave a pot of money for my children after I die?! I know exploitation and manipulation is an inherent part of marketing, but the manipulation here is ridiculously outsized because these independent distributors who refer to themselves as ‘managers’ or ‘supervisors’ are completely uncontrolled and make whatever wild claims they want, to convince you to sign up – and the lax regulations in this country allows them to do so without question.

Most of the people involved are truly good uninformed people looking for a change of career but others – I’m sorry to say – fully aware and looking for easy money without the hard work. The idea of just recruiting people and getting percentages from all of them and all of the people that join under them and so on and so on, is obviously attractive to say the least.

If all this sits right with your personal morals, religion or ethics, fair enough….but absolutely 100% they’re pyramid schemes – dirty, unethical and swindling people to buy cheap bogus ‘health’ products. To be fair, the real reason most people are buying the £200 product kits is for the opportunity to join the scheme and make money. It’s completely unsustainable as eventually someone in the chain will run out of people to sell to, and those at the bottom get fucked gambling away £200 but aren’t able to make any money back. And you never know if YOU are going to be in that bottom level of the pyramid; statistics prove that 90% of people who join these schemes have failed to make their money back.

What is clear is that these companies are charging insane prices for sub-standard artificial bogus health products specifically designed to prey on the ill, weak or insecure; and the overpricing isn’t for superior quality of product (far from it).  I mean, it’s cost next to nothing to mass produce.

So when a company like FOREVER LIVING sells one litre of an unproven ‘miracle’ plant juice for £21 or another company wants to sell you an artificial soy protein ‘miracle’ drink for £35 and at the same time offers you an ‘amazing money making business opportunity’, you can be quite sure that they are pretty much a shady pyramid scheme in disguise and you’ll want to stay well away from it.

IS IT HARAAM?

Pyramid schemes like Forever Living and Reliv have been here for decades, as alluring and easily accessible ‘work from home’ money making schemes. Given the current economic downturn, it should be no surprise these shady business practices are on the rise yet again but what is truly disturbing is that these schemes have become acceptable and seem to sit right within the values and conscience of the practising Muslim community, reaching a whole new level of hypocrisy.

I spoke to a number of individuals involved in these schemes locally (unbelievably most of them practising beard-toting brothers and hijab-wearing sisters) to understand what was going on, but trying to engage a healthy intelligent discussion with anyone invested or working for these schemes has thus far proved impossible. These ‘business owners’ all tried to maintain a sort of feigned ignorance or plausible deniability, all using the same defensive scripted dialogue full of baseless excuses that is obviously part of their ‘training’. Each time this scripted marketing spiel failed, predictably they all fell back onto the ‘you’re a hater hating on my success‘ card – some of these practising Muslims even became quite belligerent and aggressive to protect their profits.

Forget about the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him). 2015 is all about the profit, it seems. 

With all pyramid or multi-level network marketing schemes, the actuality is that it’s not going to work out for somebody in your downline or lower levels (read about pyramid schemes here). In a pyramid scheme, there is a massive risk you could be in the bottom levels and you’re unable (or there’s no one left) to recruit and thus lose all the money that you’ve gambled to join the scheme.

Alternatively, you could potentially be in the level above the bottom level and be directly responsible for convincing and recruiting someone, only for them to make a loss because there’s no one left to recruit in your area. PLUS THEY’RE DUPING PEOPLE INTO BUYING INFERIOR QUESTIONABLE HEALTH PRODUCTS AT DOUBLE THE TRUE MARKET VALUE. If they were selling cheap cosmetics or flimsy kitchen utensils at double the value, it would still be despicable but less sickening than these shameless unprincipled distributors who are preying on the ill, weak and insecure with their ‘miracle’ health products and claims (read more on the scientific truth about Forever Living Products here and here). It’s a shameless hustle, it’s a corrupt scam – but if that sits right with your values, fair enough.

As much as it may be denied, argued or ignored, these schemes are WRONG. As well as being documented in shari’ah and Hadith, there are Islamically forbidden elements of business transactions such as riba (trans: profit by exploitation), gharar (trans: ambiguous transaction) and also gambling in these schemes – to the point that these multi-level marketing companies and this business model have now been deemed officially HARAAM in fatwa number 22935 issued by The Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta’ in Saudi Arabia.

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid=20120309119277

http://islamqa.info/en/42579

The Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) also prohibited two sales (business contracts) in one. Combined ambiguous contracts, like with Forever Living, are defined as this:

First off, the purpose of the initial membership payment is unclear and disguised – is it for the purpose of becoming the member of the company or is it for the purpose of buying some product? Secondly, after becoming the member of the company he or she is automatically appointed as an agent/distributor of the company to recruit more members. This ambiguity can lead to many uncertainties.

Nevertheless ambiguity and doubt is present throughout these schemes and the fact of the matter is that most of the members of the pyramid lose out, except for the few at the top.

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) clearly forbade these ambiguous transactions, as narrated in shari’ah and Hadith.

There’s no excuse to be morally compromised in this context – especially those few who, by choosing to have the responsibility of a hijab or beard, are visual public representatives of Islam and are directly compromising our religion. The hypocrisy is mind blowing.

My account here may not be perfect (your input is more than welcome), my words may even be deemed embittered or subjective – the further I research into this, the more I admit the hypocrisy of all this infuriates me. There are many people out there who have been duped but don’t want to come forward out of embarrassment. It is a difficult subject to research when these companies use a lot of manipulation and marketing tricks to hide their true nature; it is especially difficult when a lot of the practising muslim distributors, who have reached the higher levels and are making a bit of money, have happily compromised themselves and willingly cover up the shadiness in exchange for profits.

So IS IT HARAAM? The FACTS are undeniably clear. Forever Living and Reliv – amongst many more of these companies – are immoral, unprincipled and ruthless; exploiting people with sub-standard cheap bogus ‘health’ products before getting them to join their shady scheme. To me, that’s haraam…. but, more importantly, it’s just damn wrong.

Allah knows best. Though our consciences, may He guide us to the right choices in life. Ameen.

Aren’t All Companies Pyramid Schemes?

Most pyramid scheme distributors don’t deny their company is a pyramid scheme and then try to defend legitimacy of their business by suggesting that every company out there is a pyramid scheme. Quite often they’ll use an analogy of company directors, managing store managers, managing employees at the bottom level of a ‘pyramid’ to prove that their business is just as legal as any other company, and then they suggest that you could be your own company director and be at the top.

At face value, it sounds great…but it could not be more baseless, stupid and incorrect.

When you look at a store employee, civil servant, or engineer….Do any of those make their salary recruiting other people to perform the same job as they do? You could argue that a HR advisor recruits, but they don’t recruit a chain of HR people who recruit more HR people, etc. They recruit people for other vacant positions in a corporate hierarchy, and those people perform their individual duties, which don’t typically include recruiting any others.

The employee or manager in a normal company isn’t required to buy product to join the company or to start earning salary.

In a pyramid scheme, there is a massive risk YOU could be in the bottom levels and there’s no-one left to recruit and thus losing all the money that you’ve already ‘invested’ to join. Alternatively, you could potentially be in the level above the bottom level and be directly responsible for convincing and recruiting someone only for them to make a loss.

Most companies simply have a hierarchical organisation of people fulfilling their duties. It is NOT a dirty shady pyramid scheme with endless manipulating and recruiting of two or three people to make an investment, risking money and exploiting the people around you.

Reliv International: The Facts

Reliv International is another one of these questionable pyramid schemes in disguise that simultaneously tries to sell a miracle health product and an amazing money-making business opportunity. Reliv seem to take it a step further when it comes to swindling the ill and afflicted. Some of the claims made by Reliv distributors I met were nothing short of miracle cures.

Reliv have flooded the Internet with misleading information. They’ve set up crude websites that appear to enthusiastically promote a completely new yet-to-be researched branch of science called epigenetics and a miracle new biological protein found in soya called lunacin. It’s purely theoretical and unsubstantiated but Reliv claim to have the key to manipulating DNA!

Careful research of their products reveals that they are essentially selling nothing but soya protein powdered shakes, similar but inferior to products like Ensure or Complan. They’re genetically modified soya powders synthetically infused with cheap artificial ingredients, sweetened and flavoured with arguably dubious artificial chemical sweeteners and flavourings. 

Soya (or soy as it’s known in the US) is a cheap mass produced grain – note than more than 90% of soya beans grown in the United States are genetically modified and that’s where the problem is.

For a time, there were a number of health claims about soya protein. Some of these claims stated that soya protein consumption helped lower bad cholesterol, prevented heart disease and even fought off some cancers. The marketing bandwagon touted soya as the perfect health food for decades but recent studies have proven that many of these health claims are not only false but that there are very serious concerns about high soya protein consumption; if you look at the actual science of genetically modified unfermented soya is in fact very different and potentially dangerous compared to naturally cultivated soya.

Genetically modified unfermented soya (found in most western products, including Reliv) interferes with protein digestion, and the soya estrogens are endocrine disruptors, (by binding with estrogen receptors) potentially creating fertility problems and breast or uterine cancer in women, and reducing testosterone in men. These soya phytoestrogens also are anti-thyroid agents, causing sluggish thyroids, possibly thyroid cancer, and weight gain.

Modified soya increases the body’s requirement for B12 and Vitamin D. Soya food processing results in the formation of MSG, which is a well known neurotoxin (nerve poison), and soya contains high levels of aluminium which is known to be toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys.

Also, here a comparison of the unbelievable amount of sugar in one of their products, Reliv Innergize:

330ml of Orange Fanta – 23g of sugar
2 scoops of Reliv Innergize – 28g of sugar
330ml of Coca-Cola – 35g of sugar

Reliv products do have a mixture of added vitamins but because of the high soya and sugar content, you are just simply peeing them down the toilet. Your body can only handle so many vitamins, and can only handle them in certain ratios – anything extra is just passed through your system and down the toilet.

All these facts aside, these cretins are selling a cheap artificial soya protein powder with some added synthetic vitamins at ridiculous prices making wild uncontrolled claims that it can relieve almost everything including psoriasis, migraines, hayfever or even schizophrenia within DAYS!!

The recommendations and claims of Reliv distributors are entirely inaccurate and deceptive. I guarantee you that almost every single review, recommendation and social media post you will see is from a Reliv distributor or affiliate.

If you insisted or were compelled to take a soya protein based product (possibly because of an intolerance to the safer whey protein), you could probably get something similar and safer for around ten pounds from any health store.

Some further reading:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/soy-health_b_1822466.html

http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-975-soy.aspx?activeingredientid=975&activeingredientname=soy

http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/soys-negative-effects