'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'

Shyam 

The title of your Blog is Corporate Frauds Watch. For many months you and I have been trying to warn vulnerable and ill-informed individuals (particularly in India) of the dangers of blame-the-victim 'business opportunity' fraud, no matter how convincing this criminogenic phenomenon's corporate camouflage might be.

From his courageous resistance to the 'TVI Express' racket, Kasey Chang seems to be a very decent and sharp guy. However, despite his recent statement that he was not wanting to debate 'Amway' on this Blog, that is exactly what he was doing. He seems to be completely unaware that the so-called 'Amway business opportunity' has already been examined in India by senior judges who declared it to be a dangerous fake, but 'Amway India Enterprises' and its many copy-cats (including 'TVI Express') are still steadily gnawing their way like an undetected cancer into India. Currently (if the organization's own figures are to be trusted) around quarter of a million Indian citizens are being churned through the 'Amway' fraud annually.

As Kasey Chang is demonstrably a world authority on the 'TVI Express' fraud, it was, therefore, a reasonable assumption to make that he would be able to look at the quantifiable evidence and apply the same level of intellectual rigour to the deconstruction of all similar, reality-inverting 'business opportunity' frauds. Having said that, he does now seem to accept that 'Amway' might have been hiding a form of closed-market swindle and certainly a related advance fee fraud (or tool scam), but for reasons best known to himself, he still says that he believes that:

- whether 'Amway' adherents have actually sold products is 'not relevant to this particular discussion.' 

- 'Amway is not beyond redemption.'

- 'Amway' adherents can 'operate ethically.'  

I'm now wondering if these statements might be motivated by the fear of litigation?

In reality, since the laughable US regulatory-failure of the 1970s, the 'Amway' bosses and their many copy-cats have been allowed to gorge themselves on tens of millions of ill-informed and vulnerable individuals in N. America and Europe, and they have now moved on to fresh feeding grounds in Asia. The problem still persists in Europe and N. America, albeit on a reduced scale, but the current world economic crisis has produced another glut of potential victims almost everywhere. The overwhelming majority of 'Amway' recruits quit the organization after a short time, but a minority core-group of fanatics (around 5%) undergo a nightmarish personality transformation. It is these people who perpetuate the organization. They have recklessly dissipated all their mental, physical and financial resources to the benefit of 'Amway's' bosses, whom they have continued to trust and follow no matter what suffering this entailed. Sadly, in the most extreme cases, core- 'Amway' victims have committed suicide, but the true level of 'Amway'-related deaths is almost impossible to quantify.

It was not my intention to insult Kasey Chang by stating (and fully-qualifying) my view that he is not as well-informed about 'business opportunity' fraud as we first thought or that he has repeated 'Amway's' reality-inverting propaganda on this Blog (without qualification or heavy irony). On the contrary, it was merely my intention to inform the free-thinking readers of Corporate Frauds Watch.

Given that Kasey Chang has such a deep understanding of how the 'TVI Express' racket functions, I am baffled and frankly concerned by his almost total lack of interest in the wider-phenomenon; particularly, the origins of blame-the-victim 'business opportunity' fraud and how its first instigators escaped criminal prosecution in the USA by initially pretending affinity with naive, and/or corrupt, trade regulators and by introducing retailing rules which they had absolutely no intention of enforcing, then by infiltrating the FTC by corrupting the Republican party with buckets of stolen money. I am also baffled by Kasey Chang's contention that one 'business opportunity' scam can be more of a scam than another one. Indeed, I would say that, from the point of view of the individual, destitute and dissociated victims, blame-the-victim 'business opportunity' frauds are all equally dangerous psychologically and financially, but the longer these reality-inverting gangs survive and the more stolen wealth their bosses acquire:  the more difficult they become to challenge.

Given 50+ years of damning evidence proving 'Amway' to be the reality-inverting label over the entrance to a criminogenic, cultic organization controlled by a handful of severe and inflexible narcissistic charlatans who have hidden behind a Mafia-style labyrinth of (apparently independent) corporate structures, pursuing lawful and/or unlawful activities, in order to dodge investigation and isolate themselves from liability, I think that it is pretty safe to pronounce this Faustian swindle to be completely beyond redemption.

'Amway' and its many criminogenic copy-cats should really have: 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here,' fixed over their entrances, and this is what we have been endeavouring to do on Corporate Frauds Watch. 

David Brear (copyright 2011)