'Amway' and its copy-cats have survived due to chronic regulatory failure

Shyam

I see that that yet another unquestioning Indian believer in the 'Amway' myth has posted a comment on your Blog. This deluded person repeats the scripted bullshit that 'Amway's business opportunity' must be lawful, because it has survived for 52 years .

In reality, 50 years ago, 'Amway' was a minor, all-American scam, but today (due to chronic regulatory failure) 'Amway' and hundreds of copy-cat 'MLM business opportunity' frauds churn  millions of victims annually around the globe.

The 'Amway' scam was itself a copy-cat of the original 'MLM business opportunity' fraud, 'Nutrilite.' 'Amway' was created when 'Nutrilite' finally faced closure in the late 1950s. The 'Amway' myth then began to gnaw its way, largely-unrecognised, into the'Bible Belt' States of the USA during the 1960s.  Eventually, complaints about 'Amway' surfaced all over America and the company's claimed lawful enterprise was investigated on a national scale by officials at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington DC. As a result of bad publicity, recruitment temporarily dwindled in the USA, but the pernicious 'Amway' lie had already spread abroad. 'Amway' front-companies were created first in Canada and then in Europe, where complaints were yet to surface and where, consequently, no one was investigating. Recently, the'Amway' lie has spread to Asia, because it was largely played-out in the USA and Europe. 

During the 1970s,  FTC officials discovered that behind 'Amway's' reality-inverting front of 'lawful direct selling,' lurked a dissimulated pyramid scheme in which virtually no American 'Amway' agent was retailing products directly to the public for a profit. FTC prosecutors charged that 'Amway' was an unlawful trading scheme based on endless-chain recruitment, because the company fixed the prices of its products so that they were effectively-unsaleable on the open market, whilst 'Amway' agents were induced to buy 'Amway' products and to recruit others to do the same, but it took a decade for the FTC to bring the 'Amway' company to trial.

In 1979, despite having operated unlawfully for 20 years, 'Amway' paid a fine and escaped closure, and criminal prosecution, in the USA, when the company's attorneys promised a federal judge that, henceforth, federal laws prohibiting price-fixing and the operation any trading scheme based on endless-chain rcruitment, would be respected.Since that time, the FTC has never bothered to verify that these promises have been kept. As a direct result, 'Amway' and hundreds of copy-cat 'MLM business opportunity'frauds have been allowed to steal billions of dollars from tens of millions of constantly-churning, ill-informed victims around the globe.

For obvious reasons, the 'Amway' organization and its many copy-cats have steadfastly pretended that their 'industry' is both lawful and ethical, and that 'MLM' has the approval of the US government and of governments around the world.

In the adult world of quantifiable reality, nothing could be further from the truth. 

Davifd Brear (copyright 2011)