Multi-Level Marketing has a very specific definition — it's a tree of people reselling ("marketing") stuff, on the expectation that the person at the next level

Multi-Level Marketing has a very specific definition — it's a tree of people reselling ("marketing") stuff, on the expectation that the person at the next level will be able to resell ("market") it in turn to an even-bigger sucker. Or an end-user, maybe, eventually. Something being an MLM, implies that the original producer of the product — either literally the factory, or the business that ordered the product from the factory as a work-for-hire to then begin marketing it — is the root node in that tree of reselling, and so is the one getting the most rich, since everyone else in the tree has part of their profits flowing back to them. If a middle-man between the producer and consumer is getting richer than the producer is, then you're not looking at an MLM. You might be looking at some other kind of immoral market manipulation, but it's not specifically an MLM per se.