Old but Good

 An old but good web site - from which the above "How to Spot a Pyramid Scheme" is taken - is here, about stopping the Amway scam. 

"Married to an Ambot" Blog

Credit -- See below

A shout-out to an interesting blog, "Married to an Ambot", which is maintained by the wife of an ex-IBO in Amway. It's "IBO" for "Independent Business Owner". "Independent" is supposed to mean that you are your own boss, not tied down to a lousy J-O-B ("Just Over Broke"), but in reality it means you don't get paid, you don't get social security, you don't get medical insurance and, in general, don't get anything for working for Amway as a salesman for free.

Oh, did I say "for free"? Not quite;  for a typical commission of about $10 a month for upwards of 100 hours of work a month. At $0.10 an hour, sweatshop workers in China. or federal prisoners, get paid better. And they don't get this "commission" mostly for buying hundreds of dollars a month of lousy products they don't need from the Amway corporation -- or as Amway calls it, "being your own best customer". 

She tells it like it is: the brainwashing, the lousy products sold at absurdly high prices, the need to "edify your upline" -- i.e., to put him on a pedestal and do anything he says, despite the fact that he is the guy from down the block who is only "above" you in Amway because he joined a week earlier and talked you into joining. By the way, "to edify" actually means "to educate" or "to inform", but never mind. 

Behind everything else there is the sheer tackiness of it all. New "Diamonds", wearing suit or frilly dresses (required), walk on a red carpet to the cheers of similarly-dressed Amway members. Numerous cliched speeches saying nothing more than to "keep doing Amway until you make it". Tacky motivational tapes with grinning "uplines" standing next to their brand-new car (90% owned by the bank) and mansion (ditto) and speaking of their great success. 

As they (ungrammatically) say in Amway, "ain't it great"? No, it ain't great. 

An Excellent Anti-Fraud Web Side

Image credit: Tax Guard Blog

A very good anti-fraud web site is the Fraud Files Blog -- which investigates all sort of frauds and scams. Its most recent (May 2014) emphasis is on divorce fraud (spouses hiding assets from each other using all kinds of illegal means), but there are much more information there. In particular, searching for 'MLM' in that blog leads to a huge list of articles, and looking for specific MLMs -- such as "Amway" -- leads to many others, many of them not likely to have been seen by readers here before. See if your own favorite MLM scammer is there (they likely are).