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  Geebo 8:00 am on July 22, 2021 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Georgia ( 5 ), Instagram ( 17 ), MLM, multilevel marketing, pyramid scheme ( 12 ), Scams ( 1,386 )   

  Potential pyramid scheme targets young people on Instagram 

  

  By Greg Collier

  There’s a fine line between pyramid schemes and multilevel marketing. In pyramid schemes, the top level of the pyramid asks you for money with a promise of getting multiples of your money back. All you have to do is recruit more people who are willing to pay you, so you can in turn pay the top of the pyramid. With MLMs, not only do you have to pay to get in, you have to sell a product, and recruit more people to join.

  Pyramid schemes are illegal in the US, but MLMs are not. If an MLM makes more money from recruiting new people rather than selling a product, it’s then considered a pyramid scheme and is violating US law. This hasn’t stopped some MLM’s from continuing to operate.

  One thing that pyramid schemes and MLMs have in common is that the lower someone is on the hierarchy, the less money they make. Both also tend to target people in lower-income areas who may not have had the best educations. They both also tend to target younger people who may not have the life experience to recognize a potential scam.

  Recently, The Office of the Attorney General in Georgia, has issued a warning to young people about a potential pyramid scheme/MLM that has been trying to recruit them on Instagram. The ‘company’ clams to give money to college students so they can establish credit. They say they’re looking for recruiters and that someone can earn $350 for each person the recruit. However, to become a recruiter, you need to pay $100 to join.

  If you have to pay money to join some network marketing plan, you’re not running your own business, as they may claim. What you really are is a paying customer who has quotas on how much you have to buy and how many people you need to recruit each month. Social media, with Facebook and Instagram being the most egregious, is where most MLMs will try to recruit you. Think about that person from high school you haven’t seen in years all of a sudden has a ‘business opportunity’ for you. They’re just looking for suckers of their own so their ‘business’ isn’t suffering. Before you know it, everyone involved except the top of the food chain are further in debt. This isn’t a business, it’s a predatory practice.

   

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  Geebo 8:00 am on July 12, 2019 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: MLM, multi-level marketing ( 2 ), pyramid scheme ( 12 ), Scams ( 1,386 )   

  Are MLMs the biggest scam? 

  

  Let’s say that you’re between jobs and looking for work. You come across an ad for an amazing position that promises flexible hours and an amazing salary, however, it’s a sales position. Sales isn’t the worst thing that you could do and you need a paycheck soon. You may then be asked to join a group of people in a meeting room where you realize that this isn’t just any sales position, it’s an ‘opportunity’ to join the exciting world of multi-level marketing.

  If you’re not familiar with multi-level marketing, or MLMs as they’re commonly known, are those ‘businesses’ that one of your Facebook friends may be trying to recruit you to join. The reason they’re trying to recruit you is that they only really make any kind of money if they get more people to join. The MLMs impress this upon their members to try to recruit their friends and family. Outside of just being annoying when someone tries to recruit you to one of these schemes, there’s a darker side to MLMs. Often, you have to buy stock from the person who recruited you before you can sell your own stock. Many MLMs are accused of having many cult-like tendencies such as pressure to stay and isolation from those critical of MLMs. Sometimes friend or family relationships are severed due to someone’s devotion to an MLM.

  [youtube https://youtu.be/o5xhNXVfPYQ%5D

  The truth is that MLM salespeople tend to not make very much money and in numerous cases wind up in crippling debt. The math just isn’t in their favor. MLMs generally tell their salespeople that they need to recruit a certain number of other people to join the MLM. Then those people also need to recruit the same number of people. What they don’t tell you is that this cycle can only be repeated a handful of times before the number of people needed becomes astronomical and unobtainable. But that’s not the MLM’s problem since they already sold you, and anyone else who’s joined, their product. If this sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme that’s because it essentially is. The only reason there hasn’t been mass prosecution of these MLMs is that the fact that they’re ‘selling’ a product makes their businesses legal.

  In most MLMs, the only people making any real money are the ones at the top of the pyramid and unfortunately, that’s probably not you.

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