{"id":5162,"date":"2010-08-10T07:41:45","date_gmt":"2010-08-10T13:41:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/?p=5162"},"modified":"2012-09-29T17:09:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-29T22:09:33","slug":"penn-teller-on-multi-level-marketing-and-pyramid-schemes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/penn-teller-on-multi-level-marketing-and-pyramid-schemes\/","title":{"rendered":"Penn & Teller on Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, Penn & Teller’s Showtime show Bullshit! featured multi-level marketing. They did an excellent job of hitting the high points on why MLMs almost guarantee failure for all the participants. Sure, there will be a couple of people at the top of the pyramid that make money, but that’s only because hundreds or thousands below them have lost money.<\/p>\n

Lost money? Yes, MLM is all about losing money. They use a product as a “front” to hide this money transfer and make the scheme appear to comply with the law. But the products are of dubious quality, and significantly overpriced. MLMs aren’t really selling a product, they’re selling an “opportunity,” one in which almost everyone loses.<\/p>\n

Here are some highlights from the episode:<\/p>\n

They talked about Pure Romance, a sex toy company.<\/p>\n

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Then there was ManCave, a company selling meat and grilling products, with inflated prices and little profit to be had by the guys selling it.<\/p>\n

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Zrii is another magic juice company, with a pathetic representative who has been working more than full-time for it and has only financial losses and no real future to show for it.<\/p>\n

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My colleague, Robert FitzPatrick, provided the expert commentary for this show, and did a marvelous job!<\/p>\n

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The MLM game is all about recruitment, and here’ a look into a recruiting attempt.<\/p>\n

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So whose fault is it when someone fails at MLM? Is it the fault of the person, or the system?<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, Penn & Teller’s Showtime show Bullshit! featured multi-level marketing. They did an excellent job of hitting the high points on why MLMs almost guarantee failure for all the participants. Sure, there will be a couple of people at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[184],"tags":[2028,937,2027,890],"class_list":["post-5162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pyramid-schemes-mlm","tag-bullshit","tag-mlm","tag-penn-teller","tag-pyramid-scheme"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Z0e-1lg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sequenceinc.com\/fraudfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}