“Multilevel Marketing” Companies Cheat and Exploit Ordinary People on a Vast Scale
Multilevel marketing is a scam. But thanks to protection by political elites and well-funded industry propaganda, it keeps growing. Cracking down on it would be as simple as enforcing the laws against fraud — if only the political will could be found.
Former US education secretary Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick DeVos (pictured right). Dick DeVos is the son of late billionaire Richard DeVos, who founded MLM giant Amway. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
So-called multilevel marketing (MLM) schemes have been around for decades, and for almost as long as they’ve existed, they’ve carried a pungent whiff of fraud. But as author and longtime MLM expert Robert FitzPatrick argues, the industry has only grown in size and influence since its inception — remaining a poorly understood and criminally underregulated enterprise that generates billions in revenue every year while scamming countless Americans.
As FitzPatrick notes, MLM has eluded not only the wrath of law enforcement, but also the scrutiny of investigative journalists and the critiques of progressive advocacy and activism — despite extracting billions of dollars from millions of people each year and well-established ties to the political right.
Jacobin’s Luke Savage sat down with FitzPatrick for a wide-ranging conversation about the history, scale, and structure of MLMs, and why there’s no such thing as a legitimate MLM.
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