"Buy 1 for yourself and get the chance to sell your friends and family 5 and get your downline started!" We examine the multi-level marketing industry, where only the people who come up with the ideas make any money, and everybody else is left unhappy, broke, and tired of reading scripts and selling overpriced vitamins and similarly worthless products. Includes Global Prosperity, Pinnacle Quest International, IRS Codebusters, Stratia, and other new Global Prosperity scams.
If you subscribe to news alerts about MLM scams and pyramid schemes, one thing you may have noticed is that a huge proportion of the news on this topic relates to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, where MLM and pyramid schemes run rampant, and there are daily stories about their predations on the public while government does little to intervene.
I thought this one was a pretty good summary of some recent events in India:
Every other day, there is news about people getting cheated through “earn-double-money” in less than a year run under the multi-level marketing (MLM) model. While the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA) appears to have woken up by the financial mess and menace created by thousands of MLM companies, the watchdogs or regulators who have the powers to stop all this, on several occasions, are found to be merely watching things as mute spectators.
What would be necessary to put a stop to these crooks, new laws and severe penalties?
'There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect another from injury when they can.' (Roman. Cicero, De Off. I. vii)
'Choose loss rather than shameful gains.' (Chilon Fr. 10. Diels)
Another bit of news which has been circulating in India relates to the arrest of Sajeev Nair, a top MonaVie agent who was previously a top-level Amway distributor in India. MLM schemes have been operating in a "wild west" environment in these poorly-policed areas. I can't offer any solutions for how to fix weak governance, but more sunshine on these cockroaches can't hurt.
Sajeev N. Nair, senior agent of MonaVie, a multi-level marketing company, who was arrested from here on Friday was remanded to Kozhikode district jail on Saturday.
The Crime Branch (Economic Offences wing), Kozhikode, arrested Sajeev and searched the offices of MonaVie here on Friday.
The company’s activities have been under observation of the Crime Branch and cases were registered in Kozhikode and Palakkad for violation of the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act.
The Crime Branch team searched the company’s office at Palarivattom and sealed its godown, which is learnt to have had materials worth around Rs.3.5 crore. Details about the network would be learnt only after going through the computers seized from the office and tracking the banking details, police sources said.