30 People Share How They Escaped Multi-Level Marketing Schemes That Sucked Them In

My SIL talked me into selling It Works! I was hesitant, didn’t quite need the money, but figured extra income couldn’t hurt. Was a “seller” for 6 months. They kept telling me to add all of these women I have in common with people I’m already friends with. And to post about it 3 to 4 times a day on Facebook and Instagram. I literally made an Instagram for it. They said to message at least 30 people a day about. And twice a week there was a group video chat they kept insisting I join. I couldn’t join due to me being at my normal job.

All in all. I hated it. I’m awkward and a terrible salesperson. And I made nothing from it. Never made a sale. They kept saying “try and get your mom or aunts to support you”. It was a waste of money and all. But, made out with 1 new friend.

The people were horribly mean under the veil of being “good Christians”. They used the f word to describe gay people, made fun of a deaf person at a conference and the whole crowd roared with laughter. Made you feel like an idiot for wanting anything other than “the business”.

I had to completely cut them all out of my life at once, stopped responding completely to all calls/texts/e-mails.

I lost so much money but thankfully I have the most patient friends and family so I didn’t lose any of them.

Do NOT waste your time or energy on MLM’s. If you’re looking for a sense of community, join a co-ed sports league, book club, small church group, volunteer, ANYTHING but a MLM.

My first office job out of University was working at the head office of an MLM company. It was shady as all hell. I was in-charge of "licensing and communications". They would charge people between $40-120 per month to maintain their "travel agent license" which was meant to provide discounts and booking benefits to airlines, hotels etc. In reality they had a single actual licensed number and were setting up thousands of people as "agents" using the same accreditation number - which in itself was illegal, and meant most people were laughed at when they actually tried to ask for discounts.

Furthermore people were constantly calling and emailing asking us to stop charging their debit/credit card every month. Most of them were poor, uneducated, or older on a fixed income. The stories were heartbraking. People were evicted, had power shut off etc because we were basically stealing from them monthly. All of them had been duped at some point into signing up by a friend or family member at a big "travel agent event".

A handful of about 30-50 top "network leaders" with massive downlines were cut checks every month...like double digit thousands, out of the hundreds of thousands bilked out of the poor shmucks they signed up through lies and false advertising.

The owner was treating company accounts like a piggy bank and using funds to pay for holidays, private jet travel and his new humvee. They couldn't even keep the books straight enough to make sure us office employees regularly got paid on time. Eventually it got so bad they couldn't even keep paying the leaders regularly, who would constantly call with threats to "move their whole f**king downlines if Ron doesn't get on the f**king phone this god damn second".

It was such a collosal scam, and I only realised after about a year that this was just one of hundreds and hundreds of other MLM companies that operated in largely the same way by preying on rubes and shmucks.

On my last day I emailed about 20,000 contacts in the company records a short few paragraphs describing what a piece of s**t the founder was, the various investigations and lawsuits he was involved in, and pasted extracts from emails of him telling us to "keep charging the idiots" that had requested multiple times to cancel. Apparently I heard through the grapevine he was livid and wanted me dead. They had to change offices and business names.

I was eventually contacted by someone from the state business board, the FBI, and several from competing MLM schemes inviting me to come across and share secrets of the operation.

So long story short - people running MLMs are pure garbage scumbags, and anyone involved at a lower level is a gullible idiot. Not a lot of room there for legitimate entrepreneurs and business people.

I joined WUN in 2013. My upline didn't even help me and just told me to keep paying money and "be persistent". It wasn't until 8 months later I snapped out of it and realized "Hey, I'm shelling out $100 a month for f**king nothing!" I was so brainwashed by the success hype that I couldn't see that I was wasting money while my upline went on to become the top earner in the company. My upline was making $100,000 a month and I was going broke because I bought into the hype.

The company started falling apart in early 2014 because of shady business practices from the founders. By that time I had already quit and my upline was like "Hey dude, are you going to renew your subscription?" I said "F**k no. The only time you hit me up is when it's time to pay? FOH." Years later I still feel so bad about trying to peddle that BS to my friends and others. Every time I see a post I wrote on my feed I delete it out of cringe. When you're a young teenager and want money you're prone to sip some cool-aid because you want the "rich young CEO" lifestyle.

Man I joined a wrap company. I'm sure you can guess which one. This was 5 years ago.The first thing they said was to start making posts. Take pictures at the gas pump or of your grocery receipts and say "look what (insert company name) has paid for!" Even if you haven't made any money yet, it's okay because eventually they will be paying for it. Write sappy stories, or steal them from the big consultants and just change the names to fit your own. Oh and be sure to say you only have 3 spots left" or whatever to make people think their isnt much time to get in. Even though it's not a limited thing. It was all crazy.

I was approached at one of my jobs by someone I used to work with at my first job. This was when I was 19. He said he was a part of a really good “business opportunity” and he had a “mentor” who was teaching him all this [stuff]. I agreed to meet with him and the mentor and luckily for him I had no knowledge of what mlms were at the time. I found out it was Amway and went to a few meetings. At first they were able to be flashy and confusing enough that I thought hey this sounds like it could work. Plus before you actually register and join someone’s downline you don’t see their aggressive recruitment tactics.

Pretty quickly though I realized things were not right. There was a big Amway event not long after i joined so I got a ticket quickly because they tell you that the events are insanely important blah blah blah. The mentor of the guy who recruited me lied about the ticket, saying that it would include the hotel and 2 meals both days. Obviously neither of those things were true. Plus while we were at the event the “mentor” tried to get me and the 3 other guys I split one room with to pay for part of his brother and his brothers girlfriends hotel room. Total scumbag.

After that was when I knew I was out of that s**t. But before that I started noticing how weird the recruitment aspect felt and how much they pushed it. They lie about the products and say you will save money because you get a discount but every single product is like at least 50% more expensive than most name brand stuff and when I saw that I was like how am I supposed to sell any of this?

The funny thing about that is they don’t want you to sell. They want you to buy a certain amount of product for yourself every month to prop up your upline. They say it will save you money but you’ll lose money not only because of the cost of the product but because you’ll have no idea what to do with the amount they expect you to buy. One of the guys there said he just gives the extra product away… and the up lines will encourage that as long as you’re hitting your number.

I realized quickly that the only way to make any money would be to use shady tactics to recruit people under me so I can profit off of their losses. I also did some research and found out that all of their events and weekly meetings are bulls**t as well as their educational app services because they felt like bs. They’re all cashgrabs, once you hit a certain level in Amway you start to earn a cut of the profits from the meetings, events, and app sales and the more people you bring to meetings and events the more you make. Luckily I only spent a few hundred dollars on Scamway and leaving was as easy as saying that I didn’t want to do Amway amymore.

I was a call agent for Tahitian noni for the USA and Germany (now called Morinda). It was horrible fielding calls near when people’s $120 monthly auto payment was due for 4 one liter bottles of juice. I couldn’t cancel their subscription on late notice without a fax with their signature at least a week in advance, unless they claimed “financial hardship.”

Eventually I learned that I would just need to feed them what to say and then gladly cancel for them on the phone. Total scam. Only people who made money were the early people to sign up and the founders, who are multi millionaires.

My wife wanted to do nuskin for about half a year. The thing is, we already have an online sales business with a few thousand regular clients so doing nuskin just added one more product onto our product list which was already pretty extensive. The problem, as I knew it would be, was that you don’t make any real commission money unless you get people ‘below’ you. No biggie, my wife just fake signed up family members and did all her sales in their names so her name could collect the higher commission. But even after going to all that hassle (multiple emails, credit cards, shipping addresses/po boxes, etc) the commission was still only something like 15-17% and our typical profit margin on cosmetic products is more like 40%. Some stuff, like The Body Shop shampoo, we can sell for over 100% markup. She figured that the free vacations and other perks for winning sales competitions would make up for it, and she ended up in position to win a 5 day trip to South Africa. But when we researched what all the trip entailed, it actually seemed like it was going to suck balls, especially when we had a 1 year old at the time, so she just cancelled all her accounts, sold off the remaining product, and that was that.

Bottom line is that if you had the ability to make real money doing online sales for an MLM, you’d most likely make twice as much money for half as much work actually just working for yourself.

I did Lularoe for almost a year. Buy in was insanely high. How I Actually got in when the Halloween leggings were highly sought after with very limited supply and I bought 200 of them. Sold every pair. So that basically paid for my initial investment. I did okay at first, hustled my butt off online. But then I kept being told by my sponsor to buy more to sell more. Later found out sponsors were paid commissions based off what their lackies were buying rather than selling. Another few red flags were no online sales. I did it anyways, so I did well compared to those who followed the rules. I also started receiving leggings and tops from other LLR reps that went out of business and sent their inventory backs… so I was getting leftovers. Another red flag was the holes. The freaking holes. They never reached out to us to just have us toss a batch that were prone to holes. They would just send us a bunch of ugly ass solids that were paper thin so every few weeks I would try on a few pairs I knew would have holes and wore them until minutes later, “pop!” Then and only then could I take photos for corporate and be reimbursed. It was total s**t. I started putting in more and more time for less money. I was starting to lose money, thankfully at the same time LLR was under fire that their business was failing and consultants were losing money so they said anyone can get out and get 100% of their money back from their inventory. I sent it all back. Got my check. A few months later it changed to 75% back so I lucked out. I’ve helped two other consultants get out since. I made $16,000 in profits for hours upon hours. I lost time with my son while I was supposed to be a full time mom. He had my iPad while I would constantly post my inventory everywhere.

As terrible as it was in the end, I really did love it. I learned about fabrics. Now I’m self taught at sewing and sew up some hoodies for friends here and there and clothing for my own family as well. I love it so much more but would’ve never found that joy without lularoe so.

Was on bumble and this hot chick who tbh, I though it was a bot or a Catfish. Anyway, she asked me out for coffee to talk “business”, I was suprised cuz you know women and first moves.

It wasn’t even a date, It was ACN, and they pay almost 600$ to get in! I told her to pay for it, y’know since she was bragging how easy she makes money, told her I could pay with the first money I’d make in the company. She kinda got me hooked and I attended their repetitive speech events twice (their people are fake af)

After many awkward attempts to get in almost every one I knew (ruining relationships in doing so) I spent a month and two without a “sale” I was pissed. After doing some research and realising how impossible the marketing tactics are (no advertising, just tell a friend, relative or anyone) I unfriended everyone, left their group and told them to delete every identification of me.

I kept my 600$ too, just time wasting man, f**k those guys man!