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.

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.