Half a million more 'MLM' victims to add to all the countless millions

 Shyam

 One of your free-thinking readers, Gorzi, has effectively asked the obvious questions about yet another absurd, but nonetheless pernicious, 'MLM business opportunity fraud' - 

- Why do the Indian authorities continue to turn a blind eye to what lurks behind the corporate structure known as 'Speak Asia Online?'

- Why have so many Indian citizens (half a million) joined, and continue to join, 'Speak Asia Online?' 

Until the 1970s, this type of self-perpetuating fraud was an exclusively-American problem. Unfortunately, the absolute failure of US federal regulatory agencies to stamp out, 'MLM business opportunity' fraud (when agents of the US Federal Trade Commission identified the problem during the 1970s), allowed it to spread around the globe like a virus during the final quarter of the 20th century. By passing laws, but not enforcing them, the US government has authorized the very crime which it ostensibly sought to prohibit. The fact that the racketeers behind  'MLM business opportunity' fraud have not been prosecuted in the criminal courts, has given their criminal enterprise commercial credibility. Fortunately, Shyam, as you have pointed out, some senior Indian Judges are already fully-aware of these alarming facts. 

Had the original instigators of 'MLM business opportunity' fraud been thrown in jail in the USA the 1940s as charlatans, then we wouldn't be where we are now. Today, in dozens of countries around the globe, idle-minded regulators continue to do nothing whilst millions of people continue to be cheated, on the assumption that 'MLM' might be controversial, but it can't be technically illegal, because the US Federal Trade Commission has allowed it . However, so-called 'MLM' (as it has been operated) has never been a business in the traditional sense of the word. 

More than half a cenury of evidence, proves that the overwhelming majority of all the countless millions of ill-informed persons who have invested their time and money in countless so-called 'MLM business opportunities,' have not received even the slightest overall profit. A significant minority of 'MLM' victims have wound up not only destitute, but also dissociated from their friends and families and suffering from chronic psychological deterioration symptoms (particularly, overwhelming feelings of guilt). This is because all these ill-informed persons have found the obligatory products, and/or services, offered within these schemes (at a fixed quality and price) to be effectively-impossible to sell for a profit to the public. However, they have been told that no matter what is says in the 'MLM' book of  'rules', there is no need to sell anything to make money, on the contrary, simply by duplicating a proven system and regularly buying the 'MLM' products, and/or services, and recruiting others to duplicate the same system, etc. ad infinitum, anyone can achieve 'total financial freedom.' In reality, all these so-called 'MLM business opportunities' have been centrally-engineered closed-market swindles, in which victims have been peddled an infinite shareof their own finite money. Generally, 'MLM' victims have been falsely defined in their contracts as 'Independent Business Owners' in order to fool them into believing that failure was all their own fault. This is why some of the very worst 'MLM'victims have been driven to suicide. 

The regulators can have no excuse. The universal test to determine the true nature of any commercial enterprise, is simply to establish whether it has consistently generated significant, lawful, external profits.  No matter what their instigators steadfastly pretend to be reality, the evidence proves that so-called 'MLM business opportunities' have all been based on the crack-pot, pseudo-economic theory of endless-chain recruitment and regular self-consumption = infinite profits. 

David Brear (copyright 2011)