Thiyagaraj Krishna thiya.net – My favourite place to rant and rave.

Multi-level humbug

I am really getting mighty irritated with these multi-level marketing guys, the type where you are supposed to make millions without working your ass off. I had this friend from high-school, and we were good friends and then I lost all contact from him for a few years. Then, all of a sudden, I met him in Bangalore and found that he stayed very close to where I was staying(though I moved away from there a month ago). It so happened that there were a few other friends living nearby, all former school/college mates and we used to team up for dinner every night. I got to know that this guy was involved in some kind of multi-level business as they call it, which involves getting new people into your network and you get a payout from the parent concern for every guy who joins your network. I have asked these guys how will they earn money "as people are added to the tree", but they insist that after just a few months, money will flow in like anything(guess their training involved deception).

I always had a feeling that this kind of business was BS and never thought of earning money just by getting people into the net. This business model will work(for the parent company at best) and a little for the guys who go around pleading for friends and family to join this network. But after a while, or even early on, you figure out that not many people are buying it and you end up with no one to sell your 'stuff' to. This ends up spoiling friendships and relationships amongst the seller and the buyer since most of the time, they should be well-known to each other and you just cant sell to any stranger on the road.

I really felt bad when this guy called me up and tried to get me into his 'network'. He kept saying on his own that he did not want me to join and only wanted me to attend one of these meetings that they conduct everyday and that I could make thousands in days. He also said that of his 30K investment, he had 'recovered' 15K or so. And that he was making money fast..

I felt haggled when he kept explaining it when I was not interested upto the point when I politely hung up the call and that was the last I heard of him. Our friendship had turned sour just because he tried to push something onto me which I did not like and this is the major reason why I hate this multilevel crap.

Now my girl calls me to tell that her colleague had started doing something on similar lines and just casually started explaining this to her. She was wise enough to know what it had in store and jokingly asked him to share his millions if ever she was in need. Here comes another one.

I just have one question for such people, if ever you had a decent day job, would you ever try getting more people onto your 'network' after you have recovered the amount you had initially invested? 

Work hard and come up in life, money can be earned anytime, but friendships soured over such things as petty as money will take a beating for a long time and may never come to its previous state.