You Knew You Were Getting Into a Scam
Apparently EVERYONE knows what a scam Mary Kay is, and they still sign up for it.
“So to whatever Mary Kay executive or minion is reading this right now, I’ll ask you straight out: how do you live with yourself?”
C’mon now, lay off the melodrama. You and everyone else who signed up for this obvious scam knew you were getting into. They probably live with themselves just like the politicians you vote for, the businesses who use child labor whose goods you buy, and so on: they all know what they do, but as long as people like you continue to buy into their schtick, they don’t care. Why should they? They’re getting paid, and a society is what it incentivizes: we incentivized greed and ignorance.
We live in the information age where the truth is freely avaliable within five seconds. We have tons of horror stories out there about MLMs in general, and yet you couldn’t be arsed to look for any of them?
I call BS.
Pink Truth is full of nothing but a bunch of dimwits who gladly bought into a scam out of hubris and greed, then whine about how they were the victims after all.
The only victims of any MLM are the spouses and children of those who buy into them.
Of course, I’ll be told I’m “victim blaming” or something. LOL. You lot sound like a drunk driver who kills a family of five on the road, then acts like he did nothing wrong because it was all a mistake, as if no one knew you’re not supposed to drive while drunk.
What a sick sad world we live in.
Visit the
What the heck did I just read? Did this idiot seriously just compare signing up for a “business opportunity” to drunk driving and killing a family? There’s no denying that families of MLMers are victims to this whole process, but to say that EVERYONE who joins MK willingly and knowingly puts their families through that? Come on.
“Did this idiot seriously just compare signing up for a “business opportunity” to drunk driving and killing a family?”—
No, it was an analogy of “claiming” ignorance. They were saying how preposterous it would be to claim you didn’t know the dangers of drunk driving, i.e., a mistake, after causing a deadly drunken accident.
I agree that everyone doesn’t know about the MLM cult scam, but it’s definitely a case of “should have known”. Unfortunately, cult tactics are remarkably effective at getting humans to ignore and/or dismiss facts.
I’m so confused. The author clearly isn’t a fan of MLMs, but also isn’t a fan of PT because members are using their experiences in MK to spread the word about the scam that is MK (and other MLMs)?
And before joining an MLM, people could go online and find out the truth because ‘the truth is freely available within five seconds’, but PT shouldn’t help by educating people about the truth?
And no one has ever made a poor ‘business’ choice and regretted it after the fact? And tried to clean up their mess?
So to summarize. MLMs are bad and people who are considering them should do online research first to find the ‘tons of horror stories’ that are available to them, but PT shouldn’t contribute to the research with our many collective years of experience and horror stories?
Okay then.
One of the reasons I keep coming back to this site is that there is no whining. I wonder what the critics consider whining? I also keep coming back for the education and keeping my radar tuned to anything at all that might be a scam. I spend a lot of time with people a generation ahead of me and listening to them for any hint that they might fall for something, probably not an MLM scam, but scams are pretty similar to one another. I also enjoy the very intelligent women and men who provide the articles and commentary.
Still wondering where the whining is……
While there are people who knowingly sign up to scams hoping to make a quick buck, they do not sign up to scams like Mary Kay, Amway, LuLaRoe, etc. They sign up to scams like OneCoin, Success Factory, and Forsage. The latter are so-called HYIPs, or High-Yield Investmemt Plans. More colloquially: Ponzi schemes; more accurately: hybrid Ponzi/pyramid schemes.
The Ponzi/pyramid hybrids get a lot of coverage over at behindmlm.com, and the comment sections are chock-full of amoral twats who brag (lying, most likely) about how much money they’re making and how they don’t care if it’s a scam. “Only invest what you can afford to lose,” they advise, as if monetarily supporting a criminal enterprise were somehow justifiable.
But those scams are considerably different. The only “product” is membership in the scam itself, and rather than buying inventory, members just flog the “investmemt opportunity” and sell more memberships.
But the “scam schmam, so long as I make money” mercenaries aren’t signing up with Mary Kay. There’s too much work and too little upside. They’re looking for the latest HYIPs they can get into early and skim as much as they can off the schmucks who sign up too late to catch the gravy train. A decades-old MLM with hundreds of thousands of members already? Pass.
This writer hasn’t a flippin’ clue. Not even one.
Ex-CUSE me, THIS dimwit never took part in an MLM or looked for a get rich quick scheme }:(
I get that you’re bitter about being scammed and that you’re lashing out, but that chip on your shoulder keeps knocking people over when you walk down the street.
The first couple of times I read this, I thought perhaps it was a clumsy attempt at satire. But it’s hard to be sure.
When I joined, there was no Pink Truth, barely even an internet. There was no information about the MLM scam. So, there’s that.
Also, as someone mentioned above, cults are extremely good at getting people to ignore facts. Victim blaming (and just anticipating that we are going to bring this up doesn’t let you off the hook, OP) helps people (such as yourself) feel safer and more in control. If the victims are smarter, they won’t get burned. If you are smarter, you can also avoid this trap. However, that puts the entire burden on the victims and that’s not cool. MLM’s should NOT be lying and manipulating people . Period. We are working on educating people to not become victims, but that does not mean we don’t take any accountability.
I joined MK in 1998. There was NOTHING on the internet about MK or MLM that would tell us what a scam it is. 🙁