4 ms·

I followed a few of those in a previous life and they are always MLM schemes.

• haswell 3y ago
  I have family members who are always getting themselves involved in MLMs, and for the longest time, it was always some health supplement, or training course, or deregulated energy savings thing. In more recent years, I’ve become convinced that some of the current MLMs (especially the crypto variety) are fronts for something shadier, and/or are pure scams using the MLM format to court the crowd that’s already into that stuff. Increasingly they can’t really explain what the actual product is, and it’s clear that they’re just greed/desperation traps.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    The aha moment for me was realizing there's a set of scammers who scam other scammers by selling them the ability to scam marks. It's why so many spam campaigns are completely broken (no link, nothing to even possibly send anyone any money) because the money was made when the spam gun was sold to someone, and they have no idea how to use it.
    • loeg 3y ago
      The 'Octopus: Sam Israel' book really highlights this -- conmen seem to be more susceptible to being conned than the general public.
      • denton-scratch 3y ago
        Not just conmen. There's an old saying that there's no sucker for a salesman than a salesman.
    • kaiken1987 3y ago
      Sounds like the Dread Pirate Roberts except you were never the Dread Pirate in the first place.