john oliver

More on John Oliver’s Takedown of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)

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john-oliver-multilevel-marketingRobert FitzPatrick, one of the foremost experts on multi-level marketing, published a piece entitled “What John Oliver Didn’t Have Time To Say In His Hilarious Exposé Of Herbalife And MLM” on Seeking Alpha. (register for free to read the whole article) As always, he did a masterful job o flaying out the case against MLMs, which are nothing more than elaborate pyramid schemes set up to look like legitimate businesses.

As of the writing of this post, the YouTube video of the complete episode Multilevel Marketing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) had over 5 million views. The program made the point (in a very articulate, yet humorous way) that MLMs are nothing but pyramid schemes.

FitzPatrick expands on the episode: Continue reading

John Oliver Exposes the Scam of Multi-Level Marketing

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Last Week Tonight With John Oliver devoted this week’s episode to multi-level marketing. Although he uses quite a bit of humor in his presentation, his analysis of MLM is spot on. Multi-level marketing companies are pyramid schemes, plain and simple. MLM is not a business. It doesn’t matter what product you’re trying to sell, the whole set-up is a fraud in which 99% of participants lose money.

The full episode is shown below, and is well worth the time spent watching. John Oliver mentions companies like Mary Kay, Herbalife, Market America (Shop.com), Jeunesse, and Youngevi. The producers did an excellent job of honing in on the important facts about an industry that is made intentionally confusing (in order to conceal their fraud, of course).