MLM Genre Analysis: CBD products have HUGE risks not understood by participants

Some of the more recent MLMs have latched onto CBD, or cannabidiol as their next big thing, and several companies have started selling products based on CBD oil for topical and other uses. However, what those people failed to consider is CBD is NOT legal in all 50 states. That's right, holding CBD oil in certain states can get you arrested for drug possession, which can RUIN YOUR LIFE!

Fact: DEA considers CBD oil as a schedule I controlled substance, with ONE exception

DEA considers CBD oil "marijuana extract" and remains on schedule I (same as cocaine and heroin). DEA has allowed a specific formulation, containing less than 0.1% THC, and approved by the FDA, to be reclassified Schedule V. This happened in October 2018.

This is often misquoted by CBD advocates as "DEA legalized CBD" when nothing of the sort took place.

With that said, DEA has bigger fish to fry, like the opioid epidemic. But it's illegal. And if your state law enforcement wants to bust you, it can, as a man in Indiana found out. He was arrested for possessing CBD oil and prosecutors chose not to charge him because the state legislature made CBD legal AFTER his arrest.

Scam Psychology: Engaging Antivaxxers: What I learned from them vs. Scheme Denialists

Recently, I engaged a couple antivaxxers on Twitter. It was a learning experience. One just wants to talk about his conspiracy theory (There is no reason for the government to care about your health!)   (Uh, what about taxes?)  while the other ONLY want to talk about the harm done by vaccines and ignore all the good it did (Let's talk about how many children the original Salk vaccine harmed...)

Let's be absolutely clear here: Yes, the original Salk vaccine did sicken 200 children and killed 10, but it also saved about 15000 (or even 20000) children from paralysis THAT YEAR ALONE!  Go ahead, Google that yourself. A vaccine that saved 98.6+% of the children (210/15000) from a crippling disease such as polio was a success, NOT a failure!

But the anti-vaxxers only want to talk about the children that were harmed, not the 14000+ children saved that year from paralysis. They are NOT interested in seeing the whole picture.

I am not going to provide a blow-by-blow of my encounter. I'll just say that as predicted, they engaged in multiple goal-post shifting (trying to shift the topic), citing bogus experts (Mercola), claiming conspiracy theory and Galileo gambit (Wakefield and Sears), outright refuting facts ("measles is not dangerous"), name-calling ("Where are the honest provaxers?") then concluded with pigeon chess mixed with conspiracy theory ("You are stifling dissent, but you can't suppress the truth forever! ")

And this is the virtually identical pattern to the financial denialists I've engaged before. Except they want to somehow prove their pyramid or Ponzi schemes are legitimate money-making enterprises. Which pretty much proves that more than a few scammers are "financial denialists".

How to Combat Falsehoods: It's NOT a matter of opinion or being neutral!

As a skeptic, it is often troubling to see the amount of bogosity available in public, much less the Internet, where anyone with some free time can offer advice, and many people just eat them up, with absolutely zero due diligence about the veracity of the information received. It doesn't help when social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on help (inadvertently) spread the misinformation.

Recently, a post on Slate documented how the subreddit /r/askHistorians struggle to control the deliberate misinformation campaign by Holocaust deniers, and how social media, afraid of lawsuits, basically left them to say ANYTHING they wanted. Fortunately, that subreddit has a crew of volunteer moderators that use the banhammer when it was called for.

And what they found about Holocaust deniers applies to ALL sorts of deniers, such as antivaxxers, pyramid scheme and ponzi scheme proponents, and so on. You should go read the article yourself, as I will only be discussing their findings.  Deniers generally use these tactics:

1) Cite bogus experts who are proven to have ignored facts that did not fit their narrative, or experts who had nothing to do with their field, but merely sympathetic to their field.

Holocaust deniers cite David Irving and Fred Leuchter

Antivaxxers cite Andrew Wakefield, Bob Sears, and Mercola.

Scam proponents cite their own leader(s) or uplines

2) Cite minor mistakes in citings and frame it as "Just Asking Questions"

Otherwise known as "JAQing off", this technique requires a lot of effort to dispell since there are an infinite amount of details they can focus on while sounding earnest, usually by leaving out the context of the question.

Holocaust deniers deny fundamental facts about the Holocaust, such as the number of deaths, whether Nazis have a campaign of extermination, and so on.

Antivaxxers are well known to deny that vaccines work at all, whether vaccines have eradicated most infectious diseases, and even deny that some infectious diseases are deadly.

Scam proponents are well known to deny their scheme is a scam, often even AFTER the scam had been shut down by authorities. They will often deny pyramid scheme by obfuscating-conflating it with "pyramid organization".

Attempting to engage them by doing the research does not appease them, but instead, waste a TON of time. They are NOT interested in the facts. Their questions, seemingly innocent, casts doubt on the facts: "if they didn't get this 100% right, what else did they get wrong?"

Scam Tactic: Moving the Goalpost (aka Special Pleading)

Moving the goalpost is very simple to explain with a single image:

Moving the goalpost, courtesy of zapiro @ zapiro.com

If someone moves the goal post, you'll never to be able to score a goal.

So what does that have to do with scams? Two ways:

1) when scammers promised one thing, then moved the goalpost with some excuses, or

2) when scam deniers tried to deny the evidence of the scam by moving the goalpost.

Scammer Moving the Goalpost

Scam companies that promise an IPO (initial public offering) while offering stocks or options to affiliates are known to move the goalpost because the IPO either will never take place, or takes place but were completely useless.  One such example was Wantong Miracle 萬通奇跡 scam in China, where a known scammer who launched multiple scams in China AND in the US seem to have finally been arrested by Chinese authorities.

Some suspect that recent attempts by Visalus to roll back the promised "founders equity incentive plan" may also be "moving the goalpost" after one side had already satisfied the requirements, only to be met with even MORE requirements from the other side or lose the supposed equity incentive they have gained, that a judge had to issue a restraining order.

OneCoin, which has been accused by multiple regulatory bodies on multiple continents of being a scam or a suspect scam, has repeated changed or delayed its IPO or ICO (depending on when you asked).  In January and February 2017, OneCoin announced they will go IPO in "early 2018", then the date was moved to July 2018 according to a Chinese website on OneCoin. However, in September 2017, the news completely changed. Instead of IPO, affiliates of OneCoin claimed that OneCoin will conduct an ICO (initial coin offering) instead, and it will not be until October 2018. That's at least THREE delays in less than a year, and it's ALWAYS a year away.

"Always delay the day of reckoning" is a standard bull****er tactic.

Let's go onto our next topic, scam denier moving the goalpost

Scam Tactic: Deny everything, make up some other reasonable sounding reasons

When confronted with truth that contradicts their world view, MLMers often resort to denial, i.e. "that can't possibly be true". It's motivated reasoning, i.e. thinking with your heart, not with your head, and that means impulsive rather than logical decisions.

After the denial, then some alternate explanations was supplied with no proof in order to justify the view.

Recently on BehindMLM I encountered a perfect example of such.

On Feb 6th, 2016, commenter B.F. wrote on BehindMLM that MLM "Kyani" was "kicked out of the Norwegian direct selling organization (Direktesalgsforbundet) for using illegal health claims in the official marketing."

Less than 24 hour later, commenter "MLMexec" replied "Kyäni was not kicked out of the Norwegian DSA because of illegal marketing. They were trial members for a year and weren’t accepted as full members because Eqology and Zinzino joined forces to vote against it."

But is that true?