When will regulators spit-out the sugar-coated 'MLM' lie?

Shyam

In recent times, we have received some pretty inane questions contained in comments posted on Corporate Frauds Watch. However, a private correspondent (a legal-adviser to a leading politician who has been involved in trade regulation in Europe) has now posed perhaps the most thoughtless question (to date):

'Are you seriously demanding the immediate closure of the entire direct selling industry?'

The following, is part of my reply: 

Self-evidently, what we have been requesting on Corporate Frauds Watch is merely that regulators finally start to do what they have been paid to do (i.e. protect their employers - the public) and make the effort to discover just how much 'direct selling'  (i.e. retailing of products, and/or services, to the public for a profit) has actually been conducted by persons who have been under contract to so-called 'direct selling companies' - the instigators of which have derived, and continue to derive, colossal, illegal benefits from selling what they have arbitrarily defined as 'MLM business opportunities.' 

Any government which has allowed retail sales tax to be paid by demonstrably-counterfeit 'direct selling companies' on internal contributions made by their own agents in return for effectively-unsaleable products and services, has actually been participating in the concealment of, and deriving benefit from, a closed-market swindle. Thus, any such government has had, and continues to have, a severe conflict of interest when it comes to investigating, and prosecuting, 'MLM business opportunity'fraud; but then, frauds are always far more effective when victims become incriminated themselves. 

Since 1979, 'MLM business opportunity' fraud has been effectively-authorized in the USA and elsewhere. During the intervening period, the overwhelming majority of victims, and casual observers, have assumed that organizations like 'Amway' must be lawful enterprises which have been recruiting significant numbers of agents who have made their livings by regularly retailing products and services to the public for a profit. In reality, in 1979, US regulators discovered that 'Amway' had been concealing an unlawful closed-market since the company's instigation in 1959, but a naïve, and/or corrupt, federal judge allowed this counterfeit 'direct selling company' not only to expand its hidden criminal activities in the USA, but also to export them overseas, simply because 'Amway's' attorneys pretended affinity with the US regulators and promised that the company had been radically reformed, and that, henceforth, 'Amway' would respect federal law by introducing a refund policy along with a 'rule' which would oblige 'Amway' agents regularly to retail significant amounts of products and services to the public for a profit.

Unbelievably, for more than 30 years, US regulators have never bothered to verify that these generous undertakings have been kept. In the adult world of quantifiable reality, 'Amway's' generous undertakings were empty promises - sugar-coated lies which form part of a pattern of ongoing, major racketeering activity; for, as a direct result of the chronic US regulatory failure (which the swallowing of this thought-stopping poison produced), the bosses of the 'Amway' mob, and their many copy-cats, have stolen, and continue to steal, many billions of dollars from tens of millions of ill-informed individuals around the globe. 

David Brear (copyright 2011)