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This article from a 1997 issue of The Baffler really gets in to how MLMs work, and I can't recommend it enough: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/dreams-incorporated My favorite part is how comprehensive the scamming of the participants is. If you buy into an MLM but aren't making any money at it, they'll happily sell you expensive training seminars and individual coaching and weekend retreats to improve your selling skills.
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Jan 5, 2021 17:34
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In the golden age of Amway the products were actually their secondary profit stream. The
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Jan 5, 2021 17:44
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Eric the Mauve posted:In the golden age of Amway the products were actually their secondary profit stream. The Coupled with "we love you and believe in you. Not like all those negative people who want to destroy your dreams". They're also really good at making YOU feel like poo poo if you're not making money. Sure, 97% of the "business owners" make little to no money at all and a huge amount lose money but that's not the fault of the business model. This is bolstered by the endorsements of actual successful business people too who espouse the virtues of Amway and MLM's and lend them an air of credibility they don't deserve. I don't know if they get paid for it, merely own stock in them or actually believe this bullshit but I suspect it's some combination of A and B. I read Merchants of Deception and am always on the lookout for good documentaries and hidden camera poo poo on the subject of MLM's so if anyone has some of those, please link them for me. I've listened to a few podcasts on it but for some reason really enjoy watching the sleazy tactics of these people.
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Jan 5, 2021 17:54
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The BBC did a great radio series on OneCoin, which was a MLM riding the crypto wave. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-50435014 What was amazing to me was that they got people like Igor Alberts and Andreea Cimbala into it - these are people that already sell MLMs, and simply pivot their GIGANTIC crowd of followers onto a new one.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:00
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There was a recent article focusing on moms advertising brands on Instagram etc. The most startling part was many of them were paying for the privilege. Like, there wasn't any funny maths involved, they were actually company spokespeople who were paying for the products they hawked. A number of them admitted how preposterous it was, but said they did it for the community. I wonder if MLMs are working off a similar idea, just slightly disguised.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:20
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Reading that article linked earlier and this jumped out at me:quote:These products aren’t available in stores, though. The key to Amway’s success is its curious distribution system: Instead of using retail outlets and mass-media advertising, Amway licenses individual “distributors” to sell its goods from their homes. The distributors are independent franchisees; they buy products from Amway at wholesale and resell them at the “suggested retail” price, pocketing the difference as profit. Distributors are also paid a percentage of their sales (from 3 percent to 25 percent) by Amway itself. Which is what I was trying to articulate. It's not $100/month for one thing. You don't sell anything nor get it wholesale and the suggested retail price is like how stores will mark out a higher price and write in a lower one. The percentage of your sales is not a commission or a payment. It's a rebate. quote:To see how this worked, we were told to imagine recruiting six distributors, each of whom would bring in four more, who in turn would each net an additional two. Our downlines, according to this “6-4-2” formula, would then have seventy-eight members. If each of our underlings did $100 a month in sales, we’d be making an extra $2,000 a month in bonuses. So even if these numbers are true (they're not) Amway is making $7800 and sending you $2000 (they're not). Also, with that 6-4-2 model, You run out of people somewhere around the 15th level if I remember right.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:24
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what really bothers me is how quickly the brainwashing seems to take hold. when i was in high school, a friend who graduated recently got sucked into one of the insurance scams, and he went from being a cool and funny guy to talking about nothing but the mlm, in the span of a week. we’d tell him to stop talking about it, but it would always come out anyway. every conversation we had, he managed to steer back into that drat pyramid scheme
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Jan 5, 2021 19:07
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nishi koichi posted:what really bothers me is how quickly the brainwashing seems to take hold. when i was in high school, a friend who graduated recently got sucked into one of the insurance scams, and he went from being a cool and funny guy to talking about nothing but the mlm, in the span of a week. we’d tell him to stop talking about it, but it would always come out anyway. every conversation we had, he managed to steer back into that drat pyramid scheme
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Jan 5, 2021 19:29
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FMguru posted:It's a key part of the training - if you want to be a success, you need to be selling all the time. They explicitly train you to work your MLM into every single conversation and every personal interaction. So MLMs not only wreck your finances, they wreck all your friendships and social relationships! And if you lose all your friends over it, well, it's probably for the best - why, they were holding you back with their negativity and their unwillingness to see what a great opportunity you were offering them, so good riddance to 'em. And now you have even more spare time to work harder on building your MLM downline and making a success of yourself! I briefly sold Cutco knives during a summer in college. This matches my experience. At the start of the three-day training period they told us that we'd see fewer people come back in the room every day, or even after breaks. That was because their family members were holding them back and telling them it wasn't right. But you folks who stay are rockstars and you're going to make it big. I barely lasted a week at that "job" but it was excruciatingly miserable. The prime directive was to hit up as many family members and friends as you could, as fast as you could, so that you could press them for money before you burned out.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:43
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e. ^ lol beaten I did my last two years of HS at a sort of hybrid campus with the local community college, and on every single billboard were flyers to work for Vector. $15 an hour! They'll hire anybody! Great way to start building a resume! None of the flyers actually said what the job was, just that it paid well and they'd give work to people without job experience. It actually wasn't too big a draw on our campus because we were five minutes away from a major theme park that voraciously hired teenagers to staff the place, but I'm sure in places lacking in easy first time job opportunities it's an incredible honey trap. You can skim the wikipedia article I linked but in brief, they're an MLM marketing wing of a cutlery company, and the "job" is to push their poo poo. I did have a friend who tried it highlights I heard from her include: 1. Their "Regional HQ" was a tiny office rented out of building in the local Industrial Park, and had functionally zero signage or visible presence. 2. They did hire you no questions asked, but they then made you travel to and sit through hours and hours of training that you were naturally not reimbursed for. 3. You had to buy your own demo kit, which was fairly pricy (apparently this has changed per the article). 4. While you could get $15/hour, you could also choose to be fully commission-based instead, and this was heavily pushed on applicants. If you adamantly refused to accept switching to commission, they'd quickly turn around and fire you. 5. You had a fairly rigorous sales quota, and what passed for management pretty aggressively advocated for selling to friends and family to meet it. If you failed to meet quota for a couple weeks you would be fired. Unsurprisingly, this lead to my friend selling knives to her parents and a couple extended family members, then quickly failing to meet quota and being shown the door. The money she mad on commission didn't even cover the cost of the demo kit they made her buy (technically it was a "security deposit" but her manager decided she had ruined the set somehow while demoing and so they refused to refund her) and left her a depressed wreck for quite a while.  And yeah for the brief time period she was doing it all she could talk about in conversation was how good Cutco knives are and asking all of us if we could set up time with our parents for her to give pitches to them. The sad part is if anything, it's a more merciful MLM because they just quickly milk you for some easy cash and then cut and run, as opposed to stringing you along indefinitely like Amway.
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Jan 5, 2021 19:50
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Yeah the Cutco et. al. business model is to scam people indirectly via their vulnerable relatives.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:08
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e: ^^ yeah, the tactic we were explicitly told to use was to ask Grandma if she could sit through your pitch "just for practice" and then go in for the hard sell at the end.Sydin posted:2. They did hire you no questions asked, but they then made you travel to and sit through hours and hours of training that you were naturally not reimbursed for. This was what did it for me. Shortly after I was hired and trained, my manager (who I eventually realized was just the guy one step above me on the pyramid, making a cut of all my sales) told us there was a big regional conference a few hours away. We were supposed to snappily dress in all black with "a hint of lime" and take turns calling a list of prospects from our cell phones as we carpooled. Once we got to the Great Wolf Lodge where they were holding seminars I couldn't take it any more. The big hyped guest speaker showed us how to carve a watermelon with the exact same cadence and flourishes that my manager had showed us and it all rang hollow. There was an audience participation thing with a show of hands for seniority, and looking around I realized that like 90% of the people there had been hired in the last week. I made sure my carpool buddies had alternate rides home and then I bailed. The next day I made zero sales calls and felt completely, blessedly free. I returned my demo kit soon after. My mom was a little bummed about that, she said that she liked the knives I'd sold to her under duress and that she'd have bought the whole demo set from me for the price of the deposit.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:19
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wizzardstaff posted:e: ^^ yeah, the tactic we were explicitly told to use was to ask Grandma if she could sit through your pitch "just for practice" and then go in for the hard sell at the end. This reminds me that my sister just about went down this exact same path, complete with "it's just for practice". I think there was also Avon or something? All I remember about that was helping out someone in the family sticking order forms to hundreds of doors. I was too young to know what an MLM was but even back then something felt really shady about having all those boxes at home.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:44
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nishi koichi posted:what really bothers me is how quickly the brainwashing seems to take hold. when i was in high school, a friend who graduated recently got sucked into one of the insurance scams, and he went from being a cool and funny guy to talking about nothing but the mlm, in the span of a week. we’d tell him to stop talking about it, but it would always come out anyway. every conversation we had, he managed to steer back into that drat pyramid scheme Let me guess. Did he stop cursing and start wearing a necktie everywhere he went too? Maybe a suit? Cut his hair? The next step after that is him talking a lot about Jesus. And yeah, it is creepy. I think fundamentally this stuff works on people with a void or who are searching for something, which of course is most of us, but the ones who really buy in all the way seem to be missing something. Acceptance, security, love, affirmation...I don't know. It's not that dissimilar from the recruiting tactics of faith healing churches and even gangs. wizzardstaff posted:This was what did it for me. Shortly after I was hired and trained, my manager (who I eventually realized was just the guy one step above me on the pyramid, making a cut of all my sales) told us there was a big regional conference a few hours away. We were supposed to snappily dress in all black with "a hint of lime" and take turns calling a list of prospects from our cell phones as we carpooled. At least from what I hear Cutco knives are fairly decent. My brief experience in Amway was similar and lasted maybe 2 weeks. I was waiting tables at a diner and one of the regulars (the manager's brother in fact) started chipping away at me and giving me the pitch. Figuring I could use some extra money and being stupid and naive, I did the the same thing, joined up and sold some poo poo to my family. My sponsor asked me for a list of names of everyone I knew and then we set up meetings where I listened to this guy repeat the same bullshit he said to me to people I hadn't seen in a year that I supposedly wanted to contact because they were "sharp". One was a girl I used to date who said "I don't believe that for a minute" It was SOOOO loving embarrassing, phony and skeevy. The real kicker was when he said "you have to start giving me some reputable names!" and I was like gently caress you, dude. I was 17 and barely out of high school and so were my friends. My dad said the car wax he bought hosed up his paint. The dude's brother (my manager) said "man, he got you roped into that bullshit?" gently caress Amway and gently caress MLM's. BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 22:07
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BiggerBoat posted:Let me guess. Did he stop cursing and start wearing a necktie everywhere he went too? Maybe a suit? Cut his hair? The next step after that is him talking a lot about Jesus.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:18
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FMguru posted:MLMs seem to target people who are dissatisfied with their place in the economy. They know there are people out there making fortunes, and that they're grinding 9-5 (or longer!) just to barely keep their heads above water. Amway (et al) push hard on the notion that the standard job is just a trap that most people fall into that is designed to keep them Just Over Broke (J.O.B. - get it?), and that if you actually want to get ahead in life, to afford a nice retirement or regular vacations or your kids' college tuition, you need to get off that treadmill to nowhere and dedicate yourself to a new way of making a living. All it requires is a lot of a hard work and the toughness to follow through, and you can be living a life of comfort and ease like these Amway founders [cue profiles of the DeVos family, focusing on the number of country houses and yachts they own]. Well, they're not entirely wrong in many respects. Its just that signing up for loving Amway or any MLM is not the loving solution.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:22
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Zamujasa posted:This reminds me that my sister just about went down this exact same path, complete with "it's just for practice". That triggered a memory of a one-time friend who got a job at a financial planners and who tried to recruit our whole circle for practice interviews. I went along because I genuinely wanted to help him after a period of unemployment. Got emails for weeks urging me to not delay and hand my money across.
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Jan 5, 2021 22:58
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The podcast The Dream is a pretty good look at MLM scams (season 1) and “alternative medicine” scams (season 2).
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Jan 5, 2021 23:48
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BiggerBoat posted:Well, they're not entirely wrong in many respects. Its just that signing up for loving Amway or any MLM is not the loving solution. Exactly, and that's what makes MLM's so insidious. There is absolutely a growing group of people who are trapped in a situation where they work multiple jobs for menial pay just to keep food on the table and a roof over their head, usually with a family to support. Between multiple jobs and no savings they're left with no time, energy, or money to invest in education or training that could help elevate them out of that situation, and at a point it must feel like an inescapable, suffocating trap. Particularly if there are kids involved, stopping you from even entertaining the notion of just walking away from it all and living out of your car or something while you try to pivot to a better life. In such a situation successful people swooping in and telling you that yes, you are in fact getting a bum deal, and they have the solution that can break this horrible, endless cycle and give you and your family a better life must be very difficult to turn down. As others have mentioned MLM's also pretty much always immediately bring you into seminars and meetings with other people who are like you, which gives a feeling of inclusiveness and purpose. It is all the terrible psychological tactics used by religious cults, just replace "cleansing the soul" or "moving on to paradise" or whatever with "not being one minor financial crunch away from homelessness."
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Jan 5, 2021 23:50
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MLM's are also extremely popular in Utah and Idaho (Utah has more MLM "independent consultants" per capita than any other state), to the point where the joke is that it stands for "Mormons losing money", and you see a ton of ads for them on cars in those states. The MLM companies have figured that the Mormon traditions of women staying at home, doing missions where you spend a lot of time being rejected, emphasizing community and family, and tending to trust "natural medicine" mean that it's a community that's generally more open to MLM marketing than the general population, especially if they're hawking vitamins or some kind of supplement.
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Jan 5, 2021 23:57
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azflyboy posted:MLM's are also extremely popular in Utah and Idaho (Utah has more MLM "independent consultants" per capita than any other state), to the point where the joke is that it stands for "Mormons losing money", and you see a ton of ads for them on cars in those states. What do the ads tend to say? Is it "Work From Home! Make Money" or "Join the GlobalDream Team Today!" type of poo poo? Because I;ve seen both. Some take the cheap "work from home" poster nailed to a telephone pole angle while others (that I find more funny) pretend to be be big giant mega corporations and try to get their ads to look slick with some bad rear end PIP/Kinkos poo poo. A lot of them put the Jesus Fish on it. I've been looking for work and every time I get on Zip Recruiter or Indeed it's pretty annoying to get these emails telling me how I "have the talent to do what it takes" and how my resume "lists many good skills that would benefit our fast growing company" without listing any of the ones I wrote. Honestly, now that I think about it, I hate HATE the way job hunting is set up anymore and it's real close to being a scam all by itself. For one thing, it's real interesting how I started applying for work using my main email address and all of I sudden I'm receiving spam on it. I think online applying is about 50% bullshit. BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 00:13
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I may have picked a poor chose of word with "ads", since it's usually a giant sticker on the rear window that says something like "SCENTSY: independent consultant Karen McBossBabe" with a phone number and email address. I think most of the actual recruiting and sales is done via social media spamming, since that's essentially free and easier to target.
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Jan 6, 2021 01:32
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Sk8ers4Christ fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 03:54
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I got a phone call from "disaster insurance company." They said that they were starting to check houses in my city for damage from the typhoon in summer 2018. If I was ready to set up an inspection date, the local rep would call me back in 10 minutes. Sad to say, I was a flake and said they'd need to ask my husband instead so call again tomorrow. When they called again the next day, my husband was out of the house. I lost my cool and got flustered and told them it sounded suspicious and I was gonna hang up so please send paper mail or leave me alone. That's all :/
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Jan 6, 2021 08:38
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BiggerBoat posted:Let me guess. Did he stop cursing and start wearing a necktie everywhere he went too? Maybe a suit? Cut his hair? The next step after that is him talking a lot about Jesus. yeah, all of the above. i’m convinced mlm is for people who are dissatisfied with their lives and lack the class consciousness to understand exactly what’s going on nishi koichi fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 08:56
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That's not your phone number in that URL, is it? 
Zamujasa fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 09:36
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Zamujasa posted:That's not your phone number in that URL, is it? don't quote the image man, call and find out
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Jan 6, 2021 10:05
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Nah, that's the number the scammer spoofed when sending the spam.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:52
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wizzardstaff posted:I briefly sold Cutco knives during a summer in college. This matches my experience. At the start of the three-day training period they told us that we'd see fewer people come back in the room every day, or even after breaks. That was because their family members were holding them back and telling them it wasn't right. But you folks who stay are rockstars and you're going to make it big. That was me. I got suckered into the initial meetings, and found it especially hilarious because we actually owned a set of Cutco knives (they had been an anniversary gift to my partner's parents at one time), and they are....well, they're not entirely lovely, but are absolutely not worth the price. You can get far, far better knives for similar or less. They also seemed personally offended when I told them I knew basically no one who fit their criteria for good sales targets (married, own their own home, and over 30. If they didn't fit all three, they were basically garbage!). I went outside for "a smoke" during one of the breaks, called my partner's mom for a ride home, and walked down the road to buy a milkshake at McDonald's while I waited. ETA: Zamujasa posted:This reminds me that my sister just about went down this exact same path, complete with "it's just for practice". Avon is one of the OG MLMs. I'm not going to defend them, really, but in my experience with a ton of "Avon ladies" they are waaaaay more laid back than the really, really predatory MLMs. It's still shady, and it's still not great, but the vast majority of people selling Avon that I came across were mostly doing it for...fun and to get out and have make up parties. Mary Kay is the seriously predatory make up MLM. AngryRobotsInc fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Jan 6, 2021 |
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Jan 6, 2021 12:41
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Zamujasa posted:That's not your phone number in that URL, is it? It's not my number, but I'll black it out anyway. I think sometimes active phone numbers can be spoofed.
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Jan 6, 2021 13:03
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Sk8ers4Christ posted:It's not my number, but I'll black it out anyway. I think sometimes active phone numbers can be spoofed. They can! Not only have I received annoyed calls and texts from people who got my number spoofed at them, I’ve also received spam calls from my own number.
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Jan 7, 2021 01:21
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Captain Monkey posted:They can! Not only have I received annoyed calls and texts from people who got my number spoofed at them, I’ve also received spam calls from my own number.  So much freedom.
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Jan 7, 2021 10:01
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I think there was a thread here a loong time ago by someone who was involved in that cult/scam org that drives teenagers around in vans and make them go door-to-door selling books. Sounds familiar to anyone?
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Jan 7, 2021 10:29
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axolotl farmer posted:I think there was a thread here a loong time ago by someone who was involved in that cult/scam org that drives teenagers around in vans and make them go door-to-door selling books. It sounds familiar, I think it was a front page article at some point
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Jan 7, 2021 10:48
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Captain Monkey posted:They can! Not only have I received annoyed calls and texts from people who got my number spoofed at them, I’ve also received spam calls from my own number. That's a common tactic - apparently people are likely to pick up if it shows their own number. Makes sense, if only to find out 'what is this here?'
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Jan 7, 2021 14:43
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I thought the common tactic was to spoof the first six digits of the target’s number to make the call look super local, and 1/10000 times it will end up spoofing the target’s entire number.
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Jan 7, 2021 14:52
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Eric the Mauve posted:I thought the common tactic was to spoof the first six digits of the target’s number to make the call look super local, and 1/10000 times it will end up spoofing the target’s entire number. That has to be it, I used to get a bunch that were my local exchange. Which in the age of cell phones and number porting, makes no sense in a metropolitan area. Lately I'm getting fake business names. Or real business names but spoofed. As a contractor I get a lot of random numbers calling so I always have to test it, during business hours.
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Jan 7, 2021 16:03
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Red Oktober posted:That's a common tactic - apparently people are likely to pick up if it shows their own number. Makes sense, if only to find out 'what is this here?' I don't live near the area code where I got first cellphone over a decade ago, so any number that starts with the same first six digits as mine is easy to automatically mark as spam. Cannot wait for authentication to finally happen.
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Jan 7, 2021 18:56
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Volmarias posted:I don't live near the area code where I got first cellphone over a decade ago, so any number that starts with the same first six digits as mine is easy to automatically mark as spam. You know it'll be used exclusively to gently caress with the have-nots and never ever to gently caress with wrongdoers, right?
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Jan 7, 2021 22:32
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Tubgoat posted:You know it'll be used exclusively to gently caress with the have-nots and never ever to gently caress with wrongdoers, right? Like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC? I'm very cynical in general but not that cynical.
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Jan 8, 2021 01:24
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