The Real Reasons Why Network Marketing Needs Reputation Management

It's interesting how the topics in this blog suggest themselves: why network marketing needs reputation management. It's not because there's a bunch of "meanies" out there... though there are. It's usually because they have some actions that looks shady, and people will point that out.

Recently, a company called BidForMyMeds was reviewed on BehindMLM. The company employed a whole slew of questionable conduct, including listing some other company's management as if it's their own, and implying a far tighter integration between the two companies than there actually is.  The truth is BidForMyMeds is a marketing company that markets BidRx through MLM. However, BidForMyMeds at many times implied that they are BidRX, and borrowed various BidRX media as if that is them.

So Oz / BehindMLM published the review with the questions, wondering if BidForMyMeds is really authorized to by BidRX as it is not behaving ethically. Within hours, Oz was sent a "cease and desist" email by BidForMyMeds' lawyer who demanded the review be taken down. Oz, who knows his rights, put the threat online instead, with even MORE questions and other information received, revealing that BidRX has multiple marketing partners, none of them pretended to be BidRX. And the MONTHLY fees ($7) that BidForMyMeds charged is almost 300% the cost charged elsewhere for BidRX ($2.50), and so on and so forth. AND if you pay even more ($17), you can benefit from recruiting other people who also pay the monthly fee.

That alone takes it into the potential pyramid scheme territory.

Then Kevin "The MLM Attorney" Thompson posted an entry on his blog about Cease and Desist.. cited Oz's reaction, then discussed when C&D should be used, and when it's an empty threat.

In the comments is a Mr. Jonathan Gilliam of Momentum Factor, touting their reputation defense can deal with "online Meanies".

...Our reputation defense team similarly serves
at the front end of a company's need to "do something" to combat online
Meanies. Lawsuits as you know are often just too distracting, involved and
expensive for some CEOs.
The good news is, companies CAN
defend themselves, often without the Meanie even knowing, via online
suppression strategies...

In other words, he just spam-commented a lawyer's blog with an ad for his firm. :)

And he basically claimed that he can "bury" negative comments through "suppression", which may or may not involve shill reviews. :)

But what's *really* surprising is what sort of people would employ Mr. Gilliam's firm...

BREAKING NEWS: NuSkin suspends recruitment meetings in China (until further notice)

Amidst charges by Chinese government that its agents are running a pyramid scheme, NuSkin today announced that it is suspending all recruitment meetings in China (until further notice).

NuSkin is an American MLM but operates as direct sales in China... officially. However, many local newspapers have reported, since June 2013, that many NuSkin sales teams actually operate as Multi-level Marketing, which is ILLEGAL in China, complete with pyramid organization. Many were alleged to also make fradulent health claims, and employ cult brainwashing tactics on participants.

NuSkin announced only hours ago, on 21-JAN-2014 that it will suspend all recruitment meetings in China pending further review of training, and blames a few overzealous reps of using unethical tactics to drive sales. It maintains that the reports in Chinese newspapers are exaggerated and are not typical of its presence in China.

Critics noted that it does not preclude person-to-person recruitment.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-21/nu-skin-to-review-china-practices-after-pyramid-scheme-claims

Related articles

• MLM Dictionary: Pyramid scheme
• MLM Dictionary: Amway Safeguard Rules
• Bad Arguments: Misrepresenting Pyramid Schemes, esp. by people who should know better
• MLM Mythbusting: Does Having a real product prove business is not a pyramid scheme?

MLM Dictionary: Pyramid scheme

A pyramid scheme is a type of financial fraud that usually disguises itself as a business, but the participants earn compensation by first paying into the system some sort of fee, in exchange of right to recruit additional participants and sell the product / service, and will be compensated primarily by the number of additional participants they recruit (who also pay the fee). Little if any of the compensation will be based on actual sale of the product or service.

The earliest pyramid schemes, and modern HYIP matrix schemes, are investment frauds, in that you pay in (buy a position), recruit others, then when enough people joined, you are "cycled out" and get the big payout. This has lead to much confusion in modern times where scammers insist on using the original definition of pyramid scheme and insist their business cannot possibly be a pyramid scheme (by the old definition).

In the US, pyramid scheme is defined by the Koscot Test.

Pyramid scheme is related to Ponzi scheme, but pyramid scheme requires participants to recruit in order to be compensated, whereas the Ponzi scheme do not require recruiting.  There are many other differences between pyramid scheme and Ponzi scheme.

Pyramid schemes are known by several names to law enforcement, including franchise fraud, chain referral / endless chain, matrix scheme, and pyramid selling.

Franchise Fraud 

Franchise fraud is mainly used by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), it stated:

pyramid schemes — also referred to as franchise fraud or chain referral schemes — are marketing and investment frauds in which an individual is offered a distributorship or franchise to market a particular product. The real profit is earned, not by the sale of the product, but by the sale of new distributorships. Emphasis on selling franchises rather than the product eventually leads to a point where the supply of potential investors is exhausted and the pyramid collapses

Basically, this sort of pyramid scheme sells the opportunity itself, rather than the products. Thus, it is a disguised pyramid scheme.

Note that franchises are governed by franchise laws, under the purview of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which also prosecutes pyramid schemes on the Federal level as consumer fraud.


Chain Referral / Endless Chain

In many US states, including California, "endless chain" is the same as pyramid scheme. The California Office of the Attorney General (OAG) writes:

Millions of Americans have lost money participating in pyramid schemes which are also known as "endless chains" - - because they cannot work unless the chain is endless and, of course, it cannot really be endless because at some point there are no more people willing to join the scheme.... An "endless chain" or an unlawful pyramid is a plan in which a person pays money or buys merchandise for the chance to receive money when additional participants are introduced into the scheme.

Chain referral scheme can also describe a fraudulent sales plan, where you order an item at the given price, but if you can make friends and family to also buy the same item, your price of the item will be reduced (possibly all the way up to free).  However, in reality, the item is vastly overpriced, and the demand for the item is vastly exaggerated. This was prosecuted many times by Postal Inspectors as mail fraud in the 1970's.

Please note that referral sales is ILLEGAL in the US, and if a company offers such a plan... It may be in legal trouble.

BREAKING NEWS: SpeakAsia head Manoj Kumar Sharma found dying in Singapore Hospital

IDG relayed an article from Singapore... Apparently Manoj Kumar Sharma, head of Speak Asia, and fugitive from India, is dying in a Singapore hospital, and contacted a writer, and want his story to be told in another book by the author. 

The author instead published the article, where he tried to balance MKS's view (I did nothing wrong, they just don't understand my business) and what did the Indian authorities do (it's a Ponzi scheme). 

For those of you who are already convinced that you're on the right side, this is not going to change any minds, but rather, simply add fuel to your side of the story. Neither side (MKS, or EOW) had revealed all their cards. 

So read it, for what it's worth. And read all the footnotes too.  

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=5224F51D-B363-09BA-8F8E24AC3B9DF5B0

Scam Psychology: Why Scammers Use Testimonials, and Why You Should NOT Trust Positive Reviews

Why do advertisements almost seem to have testimonials? Because they do influence us.

Human beings are social creatures, and we do learn from each other, so when we hear testimonials, we pay attention. This is sometimes called 'social proof'. Some benefits from testimonials include:

• It builds trust
• It sound less sales-y
• It demonstrates the benefits of products/service

The problem happens when we do not apply "crap filter" to testimonials, and scammers start to seed the testimonials with fake entries. In fact, you can find people who will do fake testimonials for you for a mere $5.00 USD on Fiverr.com  Furthermore, in the modern world of information overload, people are less and less likely to fact-check or do "due diligence" on common stories.

Image via CrunchBase

It's estimated that in a few years, 20% of all reviews online (including testimonials) will be fake. The crowd-review websites such as Yelp, AngiesList, and so on who rely on testimonials and reviews are starting to combat this problem, and even government have started to notice such problems.

So you should NOT trust positive reviews, but seek to verify the claims.

And if you do find a sincere positive testimonial, it may STILL be "wrong"... in that the testimonial may be influenced by the five factors that result in a sincere but fake review.

MLM Dictionary: Amway Safeguard Rules

English: Honda- Amway（AVCL）Hồ Chí Minh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Amway Safeguard Rules represents a set of "rules" (actually concessions) implemented by Amway when it was sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1975. With the reform of the compensation plan where the IBOs (independent business owners, i.e. sales affiliates) are only paid for what they sell and what their downlines well, and the provisions in these rules, FTC reluctantly agreed that Amway does NOT fit the Koscot test for pyramid scheme. This was finalized in 1979, and became the basis for the entire "multi-level marketing" industry.

In the successful 1975 FTC prosecution of "Koscot Interplanetary" and earlier prosecution of "Dare to be Great", FTC specified the four specific problems they have with the pyramid scheme:

• a) Large membership fees (Dare to be Great can cost up to $2000 or more in 1970's!)
• b) Front-end loading (buying a huge "starter kit") and inventory loading (buying so much inventory just so your upline can get the commission)
• c) Programs in which distributors were misled as to the amount of commission they might reasonably earn (misleading income claims), and
• d) Programs in which commissions were not based on the sale of product to the ultimate consumers. (no true retail customer means it's a money circulation game)

SEC had also previously joined in the prosecution of "Dare to be Great" in 1973, as it considered a pyramid scheme similar to a ponzi scheme...  you put in money, and you expect to get more out of it with rather minimal effort, via the rule known as the "Howey Test".

In fact, many states as well as the US Postal Service have also joined in the prosecution of misleading direct sales, esp. those sent through the mail. Some argued that this patchwork of regulations, different from state to state, created such a hostile atmosphere for direct sales that it would have perished...

An infamous player of this era is called Cambridge Plan International, founded by Jack and Eileen Feather. Some of their most infamous products are "Mark Eden Bust Developer" (diet supplement to make women's boobs bigger), "Astro-Trimmer" (diet supplement that shrinks your tummy fat), and their namesake, the "Cambridge Diet", powdered drinks, soup, and such, only 350 calories, developed by Cambridge professor!  Cambridge eventually went bust when it tried to shift from mail order model (prosecuted multiple times for mail fraud) to direct sales, then the direct sales went bubble and burst. It started with 25 reps in 1981, to 150000 reps in 1982...  and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1983.

Direct sales basically would not have survived had Amway not survived the FTC lawsuit, and it did not survive unscaped. The ruling, 1979 FTC vs. Amway, resulting in a consent decree where the company agreed to several fundamental changes, that became known as the "Amway Safeguard Rules". (Incidentally, Amway also agreed to tone down income claims, and agree not to restrict the power of affiliates to set prices, i.e. price-fixing).

So what are the Amway safeguard rules? It's quite simple... 3 simple steps.

BREAKING NEWS: NuSkin in Serious Legal Trouble in China

NUSKIN logo (Photo credit: Ellery Chen)

China usually don't advertise internal troubles, except when they are about to make an example of somebody. So when NuSkin was mentioned on People's Daily, the official newspaper of the government, people really noticed. And it's NOT in a good way. 

Just reading this paragraph from Xinhua (Chinese official press agency) is enough to send NuSkin stock price in the US plummet 30%. 

BEIJING, Jan. 16 (Xinhua) -- Local authorities have been told to investigate media reports that allege Nu Skin distributes false information and conducts illegal business in China, the country's State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) said Thursday.

The "media reports" in China had been posted in June or July 2013, as had continued research from Citron Research, since 2012! [Link 1]  [Link 2]

if you wish to do your own research, what you need to know is reports are in Chinese, so you will need to search with the Chinese name: 如新

When China represents 30% of the company's revenue, and sales had SHRUNK in the rest of the world vs. China, this is going to be a MAJOR blow to NuSkin, whether the reports are 100% true or not. And there's no doubt there is *some* truth to the media reports, esp. when it came from widely different sources, in different parts of the country, and even Citron's own investigative report.

But what's REALLY disturbing is the cult-brainwashing.