Hundreds of thousands of Americans get sucked into Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies each year. From Mary Kay to Amway to Herbalife to PrePaid Legal, the list is seemingly endless. Each offers its own special spin on the products it sells, […]

Hundreds of thousands of Americans get sucked into Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies each year. From Mary Kay to Amway to Herbalife to Avon, the list is seemingly endless. Each offers its own special spin on the products it sells, but […]

Tracy Coenen explains what a Ponzi scheme is: a specific type of investment scheme in which the perpetrator recruits investors and then pays their “investment returns” with money from new investors.

Defenders of multi-level marketing (MLM) are often heard saying that it’s a legitimate business method! Even government regulators say MLM is legitimate. And it is true that state and federal governments in the United States generally allow multi-level marketing companies […]

One of the common defenses of multi-level marketing is that it is a legitimate business method that has been around for a long time. I’ve also been told that if it was illegal, it would have been shut down. Some […]

Do you think it’s only the “bad” people who do bad things in multi-level marketing? Those who frontload new recruits, dial for dollars at the end of the month (i.e. get people to order products they don’t need), talk only […]

In a past appearance on CNBC’s On the Money, Tracy Coenen talked about how consumers could protect themselves from business opportunity scams and multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes. MLMs parade themselves around as business opportunities, but they are nothing more than […]

The financial effects of divorce are far reaching. In a one-income household, it’s often even worse. It’s bad enough that one income now has to support two separate households, at least for a period of time. The non-moneyed spouse (the […]

No industry is immune to fraud schemes. Mortgage fraud and real estate fraud have been problems for a long time. Ups and downs in the real estate market can make developers desperate and may push them to engage in fraud […]

Despite all the warnings about tax scams, consumers are still falling victim to these types of fraud. Tracy Coenen talks on CNBC about the top five tax scams that consumers should be aware of. This episode is from 2008, but […]