This article shows just how easy it is for foreign based corporate crooks, running the most absurdly obvious scams, to infiltrate traditional culture with piles of illicit cash and make it appear (via paid association) that they cannot possibly be running a scam.
In February 2026, the European division of a US-based company called 'AG1' (formerly known as 'BrainQuicken / BodyQuick' until 2010 then as 'Athletic Greens' until 2021), signed a multi-year partnership with the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU). This deal mirrors the England Rugby agreement of 2025 and that of Rugby Australia also in 2025 - described as, 'covering the men's, women's, and grassroots teams, alongside matchday branding and fan-facing sampling experiences at home fixtures.'
Tellingly, for a reason that will become apparent later in this article, the bosses of 'AG1' have not made a similar deal with New Zealand Rugby.
https://drinkag1.com/en-uk/blog/post/ag1-multi-year-partnership-irish-rugby
https://www.englandrugby.com/follow/news-media/ag1-announces-multi-year-partnership-england-rugby
https://ministryofsport.com/rugby-australia-signs-three-year-partnership-with-ag1/
When explained in accurate English:
The devious tactic of buying association with major sport has given the bosses of 'AG1' direct access to vast numbers of rugby supporters from all over the world for recruitment. With a single 'AG1' annual 'subscription' designed to extract around $1000 (£750), this tactic needs only to recruit a small fraction of just one Twickenham, or Aviva Stadium, or Stadium Australia, matchday crowd to recover the initial cost.
No UK, Irish or Australian agency of law enforcement (civil or criminal) is trying to stop this, despite the fact that there are already lawsuits in the USA which explain in great detail one layer of the highly-structured mass-deception, and unlawful financial extraction mechanism, lurking behind the commercial cover story entitled 'AG1.'
https://www.classaction.org/media/ag1-class-action-complaint.pdf
These lawsuits have been filed by plaintiffs who accuse the company of operating a mechanical 'trap' employing specific digital design tricks (known as dark patterns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern ) to lure unwitting individuals into automatically renewing, difficult-to-cancel 'subscriptions' without their consent, resulting in perpetual recurring charges.
In other words, once 'AG1' starts taking money from your bank account every month, by design, it becomes almost impossible to stop this hidden, automatic financial extraction mechanism.
Laughably, the longer this type of scam remains ignored, and thus effectively authorized, by law enforcement agencies tasked with protecting the public from fraud: the more difficult it becomes for them to admit to their embarrassing failure to do their job.
https://www.swanseacity.com/news/swansea-city-agree-landmark-partnership-ag1
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c1je1edky89o
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c935957lnn4o
'AG1's' devious 'sponsorship' tactic has now started to infiltrate other professional sports in the UK, and Swansea City is a football club with existing celebrity connections.
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'AG1' is not the front for an 'Amway' copycat blame-the-victim 'Multi-Level Marketing commercial' cult, but there are many parallels, not least the cover of effectively-valueless, exorbitantly-priced products, along with pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus and a reality-inverting dictionary.
In the late 1950s, 'Amway' emerged out of two companies that were facing federal regulatory civil investigations / prosecutions concerning misrepresentation, and which peddled a product known as 'Nutrilite XX (Double X).' This was presented as 'a cure-all food supplement.' In reality, it was updated snake oil containing powdered dried vegetation in the form of two pills packaged to look like a pharmaceutical product. These pills cost pennies to produce, but were priced at $20 (the equivalent of around $275 today) for a month's supply. Behind the layer medical hocus-pocus was a second layer of economic hocus-pocus which was later to become known as 'Multi-Level Marketing.' This reality-inverting 'commercial' dictionary was maliciously designed to lure unwitting persons into becoming not just victims of a mass-deception and an unlawful, financial extraction mechanism, but also into becoming unwitting promoters of the same mass-deception and unlawful, financial extraction mechanism, preying on their own friends and relatives in the false-expectation of a future (non-existent) financial reward.
In the early 1950s, the bosses of 'Nutrilite' paid the popular Hollywood star, Alan Ladd, to promote the bait in their trap and, thus, make it appear that their successful 'nutrition brand' couldn't possibly be the front for an updated snake oil selling scam and unlawful, financial extraction mechanism.
 |
| Chris Ashenden |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb1g-Cbcjwo&t=1066s
The man behind 'AG1' is a fomer used car salesman / police officer from New Zealand called Chris Ashenden.
https://www.odt.co.nz/business/man-convicted-and-fined-for-dodgy-property-scheme-evfa4s8e
Chris is actually a convicted conman in his homeland, but who was declared bankrupt and then allowed to run off to the USA to avoid being held fully to account. It should come as no surprise that immediately prior to the instigation of the commercial cover story entitled, 'AG1,' Ashenden was involved with a prototype, 21st. century snake oil selling / financial extraction racket, entitled, 'BrainQuicken.' In fact, as noted above, 'AG1' is the company originally known as 'BrainQuicken,' which Ashenden acquired from his pal, and original owner, Tim Ferriss, at some time between 2006 and 2009, and initially rebranded as 'Athletic Greens' in 2010. Despite his own public explanations, Ferriss sold out at a time when he was facing a class-action civil lawsuit accusing him of misrepresentation. As a result, his racket, which had previously been producing a monthly revenue of between US$40 000 and US$70 000, was almost played out.
Ferriss had been operating online peddling containers of pills in capsule form, priced at US$30-50 for a month's supply (60 pills). These contained a blend of various, cheaply procured, common stimulants including caffeine and vitamin B12. They were packaged to look like a pharmaceutical product, and the mark-up was about 50-90x. As the absurd 'BrainQuicken' name suggests, Ferriss' pills were supposed to make you instantly more alert and intelligent. Not only that, he was also peddling this preposterous quackery as 'BodyQuick Nootropic1,' which was supposed to make you instantly stronger and faster.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkL4BROJpI3/?hl=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AG1_(company)
January 2025, Ashenden's company (since 2021, rebranded as 'AG1') had received a cash injection of more than US$100 million from Wall St. private equity investors, and was apparently valued at US$1.2 billion. Some of the A-list celebrities reported as having 'invested in AG1,' and whose international pulling-power attracted the backing of Wall St. capital, are Hugh Jackman, Cindy Crawford and Lewis Hamilton.
'AG1's' unique product (the bait in the trap, which Ashenden claimed to have initially formulated himself) is a finely-ground, green powder labelled, 'Whole Food Dietary Supplement,' to be mixed in water. Thus, the overwhelming bulk of what gets swallowed, is in fact water. By US law, the main ingredients of food supplements have to be listed on the packaging, but the exact proportion of the ingredients, and identity of every single one of them, is apparently not mandatory. Thus, the impressive claim of '75 ingredients' included in Ashenden's commercial cover story, is a classic example of mind-numbingly complex, nonspecific, pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus.
To enlarge the target recruitment group, there has lately appeared a 'chewable' green addition to the basic green powder at US$40-60 for one month's supply. Although this version of the updated snake oil can appear to be a bargain, it is actually being peddled at approximately the same price as the powder by weight. You are supposed to consume 8 of these green sweets each day or 240 per month. However, unlike the powder, they have fewer listed ingredients and already contain a significant % of bulk fillers including: water, pectin and tapioca, with sugar to mask the taste.
Essentially, this is nothing more than a high-tech adaptation of a classic pre-WWII British newspaper fraud. In such old-time scams, crooks rented post-office box addresses and advertised an 'authentic cigarette lighter and a portrait of the King' if you sent in a postal order of just a few shillings: only to mail the unwitting customer a single match inside an envelope. Crucially, the promised 'portrait' was a penny stamp stuck to the outside of the envelope used to mail the match. While technically fulfilling the literal definition of the words in the advert, the transaction was an absurd confidence trick generating many x mark-up on the initial cost of the stamp, envelope and match.
'AG1's' boss, Chris Ashenden, has been getting away with an essentially identical semantic confidence trick. He's been baiting his victims with the enticing offer of what appear to be 'Unlimited Referral Rewards,' yet the hidden reality is that (according to the small print) his victims are permitted to redeem only one single '$15 electronic reward voucher' per month, but the 'vouchers' automatically expire after 12 months. Just like the vintage scammers who hid behind the literal definition of a match (which can light a cigarette), 'AG1's' boss can point to the literal truth that you can generate endless $15 monthly reward vouchers. Yet this cloaks the absurd reality that they are a valueless illusion. For no matter how many you acquire, you can never redeem them, because at just one per month, they will automatically vanish before you can. Furthermore, they can only be claimed as a monthly price reduction on further purchases.
- If you fail to recruit anyone: The central bosses of the racket win because you continue to pay them the full, exorbitant $80 to $100 a month for the green powder.
- If you recruit under 12 people: The central bosses win because they acquire new pay-to-play monthly 'subscribers' from your unpaid efforts while you remain trapped paying at least $65 per month to keep your own 'subscription' active in order to use the $15 discounts.
- If you recruit over 12 people: The central bosses win massively because they acquire an army of new pay-to-play 'subscribers' from your unpaid efforts, while your illusory excess $15 rewards are automatically wiped out by the expiration dates and one per month limit.
The profits from this ridiculous racket are jaw-dropping. You only have to look at what raw, un-blended ingredients of the green powder sell for on the open wholesale commodity market per kilo.
The main bulk ingredients listed on the 'AG1' nonspecific label are cheap, mass-produced (and in some cases waste) agricultural commodities like lecithin, spirulina, apple powder, and alfalfa. On the commercial wholesale market, these raw materials trade for roughly $2 to $10 per kilo.
Via the semantic 'Referral Rewards' trick and associating the product with celebrities and major sports, Ashenden and his associates have packaged pulverized dried vegetation that costs pennies to procure and manufacture, and extracted a staggering $250-$300 a kilo from their captured 'subscribers.' In even more accurate terms, this is a highly-structured mass-deception presented using a reality-inverting dictionary, and maliciously designed not only to extract about $1000 per year from its unwitting victims, but also to transform them into unwitting, and unrewarded, promoters of the same deception.
Apparently, the authorities now treat this as 'a legitimate form of commercial activity.' In other words, the authorities have swallowed the reality-inverting dictionary.
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Footnote.
Blog readers are reminded that the common-sense test for evaluating anything published, or broadcast, in an attempt to expose any type of fraud, is whether it can be understood as a comprehensive, step-by-step formula laying-out how the fraud has been set up and perpetrated.
- Register a private limited liability commercial company and give it a made-up (preferably catchy) technical-sounding name.
- Take a mixture of cheaply procured (preferably inert), common raw materials.
- Process, package and market these materials at an exorbitant (preferably 100x) mark-up under your made-up technical-sounding proprietary brand name.
- Cloak this updated snake oil with mind-numbing, pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus, and pay confident and physically attractive 'influencers' (preferably some with authentic academic qualifications) to broadcast the enticing comic-book narrative that 'this is an exclusive, high-value, highly-researched wellness/nutritional product offering a range of great mental and physical benefits to those smart enough to buy it, and keep consuming it every single day.'
- Trap the resulting buyers' credit cards in a hidden auto-billing loop.
- Add a rigged 'Unlimited Referral Rewards' scheme, so that a significant % of unwitting buyers will also become an unwitting unpaid salesforce trapped in the auto-billing loop, preying on their own friends and relatives in the false expectation of a future (non-existent) financial reward.
- Use some of your ill-gotten gains to buy the cover of trusted (preferably A-list) celebrities and major sports to make it appear that your 'successful wellness / nutrition brand' cannot possibly be the front for an updated snake oil selling scam and unlawful, financial extraction mechanism.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1840792/000119312521285949/d177975d425.htm
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09998121/more
Whilst my article deconstructs the different layers of the 'AG1' racket, there is also the question of the corporate labyrinth which has been created to insulate the beneficiaries from liability. For the jaw-dropping profits (hundreds of millions of $ annually) derived from peddling the green powder do not pile up in Ashenden's and his associates' vulnerable bank accounts; instead, 'AG1' corporate records reveal they are systematically transferred through a mind-numbing international web, leading to other parent corporate structures like 'AG1 Holdings, Ltd.,' safely registered in the Cayman Islands out of reach of law enforcement.
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/nutrition-startup-athletic-greens-ag1-vc-funding-unicorn/
This offshore shield is backed by Wall Street, where multi-billion-dollar private equity and venture capital firms helped to 'AG1's' boss to build the illusion of legitimacy - pumping US$115 million into the company to raise its valuation into the billions of $. Obviously, these investors are only interested in taking profits and have no interest in protecting consumers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat_Cole
Ultimately, the 'AG1' racket has followed a further human shield strategy. By publicly dumping the convicted conman instigator, Chris Ashenden (but who still retains a significant share of the company), and hiring the more acceptable mercenary, Kat Cole, as an attractive and innocent-looking managerial front, the racket can appear to have been reformed. However, the combination of offshore tax havens, Wall St. backing and polished corporate management, forms a shield that allows what is merely an absurd updated snake oil selling scam to operate in plain sight, ensuring that even if civil regulators or victims' lawyers start to challenge it, the devious, financial extraction mechanism can continue to function.
David Brear (copyright 2026)
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FOREWORD By
Orwell’s Ghost
In 1945, I offered the world an allegorical ‘fairy story' entitled, 'Animal
Farm.' My intention was to show how totalitarianism is merely a deception - the
oppressors' fiction mistaken for fact by
the oppressed. Somewhat ironically, by presenting this fact as fiction, it became
easy to see how, at a time of vulnerability, almost any people's own dream
of freedom in a future, secure, Utopian existence, can be used to lure them
into a trap.
Sadly, when it comes to identifying the same enduring phenomenon,
most of today’s commentators have been unable to look past its latest disguise.
Yet, the truly frightening power of totalitarianism is not that it can enslave
you with physical chains, but that it can enslave you by capturing your mind.
In my own era, I watched the rise of state-run propaganda
machines designed to overwhelm and supress human capacity for critical thought.
In this way, millions of people were conditioned to believe that lies were the
‘truth’ and that the truth was a ‘lie.’
In my final book, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ to clarify how these
sinister mechanisms of intellectual castration worked, I again presented fact
as fiction and coined the term ‘Newspeak.’ The premise was brutal in its
simplicity: if a concept cannot be put into words, it cannot be thought, and
therefore heresy against the central rulers of totalitarian regimes became impossible.
I had imagined that such a nightmare world could only be maintained through the
iron fist of the State - surveillance cameras, secret policing and the threat
of imprisonment, torture and execution. However, I was mistaken.
In this insightful new book David Brear chronicles the
most-insidious modern mutation of Newspeak. For the central rulers of ‘Multi-Level
Marketing’ cults discovered that one doesn’t need barbed wire to build a slave
labour camp; all that is required is a reality-inverting dictionary.
By cloaking a mathematically impossible swindle in the
sacred vocabulary of ‘Business, Freedom and Family,’ today’s Big
Brothers have achieved near-perfect compliance. They have been allowed to
engineer and maintain a parallel reality wherein an individual, whilst drowning
in debt and working long hours without payment, is prevented from thinking the
words ‘victim, exploitation’ and ‘slave.’ Instead, today’s unquestioning captives
are conditioned to view themselves as ‘Independent Entrepreneurs’ and
their inevitable ruin as personal moral failure - a lack of a ‘positive
mindset.’ For what has been hidden here, is a perfect example of a totalitarian
deception - compelling its victims to accept all responsibility, but with no benefit:
while their abusers extract all the benefit, but with no responsibility.
Thus, ‘The Principles of Newspeak,’ as laid out in my appendix
to ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ can be easily updated and adapted.
The purpose of Newspeak is not only to provide a medium
of expression for the unquestioning worldview and mental habits
proper to the core-adherents of ‘Multi-Level Marketing’ cults, but
to make all other critical and evaluative modes of thought
impossible. It is intended that when Newspeak has been adopted once and
for all and traditional language forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a
thought diverging from the principles of ‘MLM’ — should be
literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its
vocabulary is so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression
to every meaning that a ‘MLM’ core-adherent can
properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the
possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This is done partly by the
invention of new words and phrases, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words
and phrases and by stripping such words and phrases as remain of unorthodox
meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.
Whilst my work was meant as an explicit warning, it can
also be read as detailed instruction manual, but then, so can 20th
century history. Yet the tragic farce of the current era is that the
very institutions ostensibly designed to protect the public from fraud and
slavery have swallowed this ‘Multi-Level Marketing’ Newspeak whole. Consequently,
those who should have acted as gatekeepers enabled the paid agents of totalitarian
predators to infiltrate the legislative process; thereby codifying a reality-inverting
dictionary into law while falsely branding any independent analytical
critique as ‘paranoid conspiracy theory.’ The refusal of these captured guards
to recognize their embarrassing failure, has become the ultimate shield for
what is nothing more than a blatant confidence trick.
This book is a vital tool of linguistic deconstruction.
By employing an accurate vocabulary and meticulously flagging all examples of ‘Multi-Level
Marketing’ Newspeak, its independent author demonstrates that common-sense
remains the ultimate weapon against any Big totalitarian Lie - and that the
defence of human liberty begins with the preservation of our means of critical thought.
The Big 'Multi-Level Marketing' Lie.
(Once an absurdly obvious American swindle: now a
contagious global delusion)
Introduction
Around the world during the past several decades, it has
been regularly observed that, as a result of unprotected exposure to one of an
ever-growing number of companies, all offering what their bosses have labelled ‘Multi-Level
Marketing income/business opportunities,’ almost anyone can suddenly start behaving
in a strange, but remarkably uniform, way. It’s as if they have fallen head
over heels in love or even taken some sort of drug. Although this initial
euphoric state is often short-lived, a significant minority (those with access
to sufficient funds, and/or credit) will undergo a prolonged, radical
personality transformation; recklessly committing all their resources (mental, physical,
social and financial) to the benefit of persons previously unknown to them, but
whom they continue to trust and follow no matter what suffering this
entails. It has also been regularly observed that individuals whose lives
have become dangerously diverted in this way, but who have eventually managed
to wake up and confront the painful reality that they’ve been deceived and
exploited, are not only destitute and dissociated from their previous social
contacts, but they can also exhibit chronic psychological deterioration
symptoms, generally indicative of the traumatized victims of abuse. These include
depression and overwhelming feelings (guilt, grief, shame, fear, anger,
embarrassment, etc.), inability to make decisions, suicidal thoughts,
panic/anxiety attacks, extreme identity confusion, inability to trust, etc.
However, the number of broken relationships, actual suicides and premature
deaths resulting from unprotected exposure to so-called ‘Multi-Level
Marketing’ companies, has never been accurately evaluated.
So, what exactly have all these copycat corporate
structures been hiding, and how is it possible that their bosses have been
allowed to get away with causing so much harm to so many individuals, families
and communities in so many different countries, when quite clearly ‘Multi-Level
Marketing’ is not what its banal label proclaims it to be? These obvious,
but nonetheless uncomfortable, questions finally appeared to be on the verge of
being answered officially when, in January 2006, a UK government regulatory
agency, the ‘Company Investigation Branch’ of the ‘Dept. of Trade and Industry,’
launched what was described as, ‘a major law enforcement action’ against
‘Amway UK Ltd.’ However, this privately owned British company, first registered
as long ago as 1973, was just one of multiple, expendable ‘affiliates’ of
an American-based, privately owned, multinational, parent corporation. The UK
regulators were, in fact, about to challenge (albeit indirectly) the legality,
and indeed the very nature, of a colossal, corporate edifice of mind-numbing structural
complexity. The architects, and central rulers, of which have comprised the
members of two families, DeVos and Van Andel. Indeed, the UK regulators had
been made aware that this pair of Dutch Protestant American dynasties have
counted their wealth in billions of $, enabling them to buy the protection of not
only an army of public relations specialists, attorneys and accountants, but
also that of the highest ranks of the US political establishment. Furthermore, before
any investigation began, the regulators had also been explicitly warned that
behind its commercial camouflage, the organization they would be
challenging was neither original nor unique, so therefore, it could not be fully
understood in isolation. The deceptive foundations of all this were first laid in
the USA back in the 1950s when it was known as, the ‘Ja-Ri Corporation.’
By the 1960s it had become the ‘American Way Association’ then the ‘Amway
Corporation,’ and since 1999 also known as, ‘Alticor,’ but it has
usually been referred to just as, ‘Amway.’
In April 2007, after fifteen months of investigations, John
Hutton, the Business Secretary (trade minister) in the Labour government of Gordon
Brown (Tony Blair’s successor), filed a ‘public interest bankruptcy petition’
in the UK High Court, seeking the compulsory closure of ‘Amway UK Ltd.’ In
brief, the company stood accused of contravening the ‘UK Fair Trading Act 1973’
and the ‘UK Lotteries and Amusements Act 1976,’ by running what was described
as, ‘an inherently objectionable dream-selling scheme… targeting vulnerable,
gullible and deluded persons.’ However, despite appearances, this was far
from being the appropriate official response to what had been discovered. For
this standard civil ‘insolvency’ procedure dodged the embarrassing truth that,
for more than thirty years, a highly organized, foreign controlled and
profoundly abusive criminal racket had been allowed to operate in plain sight
in Britain masquerading as a ‘legitimate commercial enterprise,’ whilst every
domestic law enforcement agency (civil and criminal) had ignored it.
At the pre-trial stage, two more, privately owned British
companies, ‘Britt World Wide UK Ltd.’ and ‘Network TwentyOne UK
Ltd.,’ ostensibly run by persons styled as, ‘Amway Diamond
Distributors,’ were included on the bankruptcy petition accused of being an
integral part of the same civil offences. Again, these were expendable ‘affiliates’
of wealthy, American-based, family owned, multinational parent corporations. Yet
soon afterwards, these two companies were quietly removed from the petition
when, as a result of some behind-the-scenes negotiations with the regulators, ‘Britt
World Wide UK’ ceased ‘trading,’ and the legal representatives of ‘Network
TwentyOne UK’ apparently agreed that their corporate client would have
to follow suit, should the petition against ‘Amway UK’ be granted. Another
company, ‘International Business Systems UK Ltd.’ (again, ostensibly run
by persons styled as, ‘Amway Diamond Distributors,’ and an expendable ‘affiliate’
of another wealthy, American-based, family owned, multinational parent
corporation), had also been a prime target for investigation, but since this
one had immediately ceased ‘trading,’ it never even made it onto the petition.
Eight months later, the UK government’s isolated civil
prosecution of ‘Amway UK’ came to court in a hearing which the
regulators insisted ‘would not be open to the public.’ These
proceedings took place over eight days at the end of November and beginning of
December 2007. The government was represented by barristers, Mark Cunningham QC
(Queen’s Counsel) and Andrew Westwood, instructed by the Treasury Solicitor. ‘Amway
UK’ was represented by David Chivers QC and Philip Gillyon instructed by
Eversheds LLP. Sadly, although some of the shocking superficial facts of the
government’s case were reported by certain media outlets, including ‘The
Times,’ no journalist bothered to dig deeper into what was far from being an ordinary
story. For it never came out in court that America’s celebrated leading authority
on racketeering, professor of law George Robert Blakey (who was still alive in
2007), had previously drafted a report in which he identified ‘Amway’s business’
as, being ‘run in a manner that is parallel to that of major organized
crime groups, in particular the Mafia.’ Whilst the UK regulators
(who had been supplied with a copy of Prof. Blakey’s expert opinion) privately
compared ‘Amway’ to the ‘second Ku Klux Klan’ in the 1920s and
acknowledged the prosecution to be the result of ‘the largest ever investigation
of a British company.’ Indeed, several truckloads of documentary evidence had
been seized at ‘Amway UK’s’ head office in the Buckinghamshire city of
Milton Keynes by a team of specialist ‘Company Investigation Branch’ agents led
by Peter Bott. However, after looking beyond a wall of mind-numbing
mathematical, and linguistic, hocus-pocus, Bott and his colleagues had initially
been faced with an enigma.
During the thirty+ years of ‘Amway UK’s’ existence,
the company’s independent auditors had never once signed off on an annual net trading
profit. In fact, in just the period 2000-2006, ‘Amway UK’ had officially
chalked up accumulated net trading losses of approximately fifteen million £. Although
this disastrous British company had always been haemorrhaging financially, for some
obscure reason, its billionaire American bosses had been keeping it alive with regular
cash transfusions declared in its accounts as, deriving from other ‘Amway’ affiliates
in Europe and Asia. In fact, a lot more external funding was now urgently required
just to cover ‘Amway UK’s’ mounting legal costs. Obviously, the UK
regulators were powerless to establish the full truth of where all this magical
money originated, because they did not have access to the independently
audited, financial records of foreign registered companies. Yet for decades, ‘Amway
UK’s’ corporate officers had been allowed to use this opaque, endless
supply of cash to build, and maintain, the enticing illusion that they were
running ‘Britain’s most successful direct selling company, providing ordinary
people with a perfectly legal, government approved, Multi-Level Marketing income/business
opportunity.’ However, completely contrary to its nonspecific, jargon-laced
commercial cover-story, prior to 2006, there had never been the
slightest official attempt to determine what was the real function of this apparently
pointless corporate structure. For whilst ‘Amway UK’s’ own exciting comic-book
narrative had previously boasted of fifty+ million £ of ‘annual sales via an
expanding ‘salesforce’ rapidly approaching one hundred thousand persons in the UK
and Ireland, the regulators had now discovered that, in the adult world of
quantifiable reality, at any given moment during 2005 and 2006, ‘Amway UK’
had counted less than forty thousand so-called ‘distributorships’ registered
on its books, whilst the company had lately been declaring ‘annual (net-loss)
sales’ of around ten million £.
Meanwhile, behind all these misleading, and ultimately meaningless,
labels and snapshot figures, an astonishing ever-shifting reality had remained concealed.
For ‘Amway’s’ unremarkable merchandize was found to have always been
priced (even before any retail profit margin was added) at a level which made it
effectively unsaleable on the open market. Whilst the average churn rate for
participants in ‘Amway’s’ scheme, had always exceeded 50% per year. Consequently,
it was possible to extrapolate from the available data that (since many of these
temporary so-called ‘distributorships’ were formed by couples) around
one million recruits had, in fact, gradually passed through ‘Amway UK’s’
lowest ranks 1973-2006. Indeed, without their fully-informed consent, all these
people had been persuaded to sign take-it-or-leave-it contracts which had also falsely
labelled them as ‘Independent Business Owners (IBOs);’ thereby obliging
them not only to accept responsibility for their considerable start up and
operating costs, but also, on pain of unilateral termination of their
contracts, to obey an additional thick book of ‘rules’ and abide by ‘Amway’s’
own, trumped up, pay-to-access, internal system of dispute resolution. Yet,
for obvious reasons, after the deduction of all their inevitable costs, not one
of this endlessly expanding flock of would-be entrepreneurs had managed
to generate so much as a penny of overall net-income lawfully by regularly
retailing fixed-priced, ‘Amway’-supplied merchandise for a profit to
persons who were not fellow so-called ‘Independent Business Owners.’ Thus,
since there had never been a significant and sustainable source of revenue
other than that deriving internally from the payments of ‘Amway UK’s’
own contractually bound so-called ‘salesforce,’ the hidden overall
net-loss churn rate for unwitting investors in this dissimulated rigged-market
swindle, had been effectively 100%. However, the fact that ‘Amway’s’ incomprehensible
so-called ‘business model’ was, by design, financially suicidal, but few
people had come forward to complain about it, indicated that something
extremely sinister must have been occurring here.
Although it was never reported, the decision to prosecute
‘Amway UK’ had, in fact, been made, when, after listening to external guidance,
the regulators had themselves finally woken up and deduced that the hidden
function of this mysterious, chronically insolvent British company, had been to
act as bait in a heavily disguised human trap. Yet previously, whilst the UK
national media had failed to identify it and, and by doing nothing to stop it, the
authorities had effectively authorized it, year upon year, this insidious,
foreign-controlled mechanism had been permitted to pump out a steady stream of
reality-inverting (‘anyone can start his/her own independent business, earn
extra income and even achieve financial freedom’) propaganda and, thus, keep
luring and exploiting an endless chain of fresh UK and Irish recruits. However,
although the overwhelming majority of ‘Amway’s’ unwitting human
quarry had remained for less than a couple of years and wasted the equivalent
of no more than a few thousand $, a significant minority (around 5%) had been
able to remain in the trap for extended periods, recklessly wasting the
equivalent of tens of thousands of $ and isolating themselves from anyone
trying to reason with them. For even though they had no chance of establishing
a viable business, just like chronic gambling addicts, chronic losers in ‘Amway’s’
rigged, pay-to-play game of commercial make-believe were totally convinced
that they would ‘soon become winners,’ because they had ‘discovered a sure-fire
way to make all your dreams come true.’
Despite the somewhat obvious reality that ‘Amway’s’
so-called ‘income/business opportunity,’ had always been a pernicious
fake (designed not only to relieve its victims of their time and money, but
also to trick the most vulnerable of them into becoming chronically deluded de
facto slave recruiters), in the spring of 2008, it was reported in ‘The
Times’ that 'Amway UK' had been ‘cleared at the High Court of dream
selling, of operating an unlawful lottery and of being an unlawful trading
scheme.' This, however, did not even come close to being a full and accurate
summary of what was contained in the lengthy, ambiguous and impossibly naïve, jargon-laced
ruling handed down by one High Court Judge, Mr. Alastair Justice Norris, and
which was subsequently upheld by two out of three Appeal Court Judges. For
although Judge Norris initially seemed to be acting in the interest of the
public, by applying common-sense and accepting that the government’s case against
‘Amway UK’ had been brought on valid grounds, he then got lost in the
mind-numbing labyrinth of legally ‘independent’ companies and mathematical,
and linguistic, hocus-pocus, and somehow managed to conclude that, 'on
balance,’ the public interest bankruptcy petition could be declined, and no
other penalty imposed.
Regrettably, in his ruling the judge also completely failed
to spot the far-reaching implications contained in some truly jaw-dropping evidence
provided by Richard Berry, the senior corporate officer of another legally ‘independent,’
privately-owned company, the so-called ‘UK Direct Selling Association,’
of which ‘Amway UK’ had, in fact, been the leading member and source of funding.
For Berry confessed to the court, albeit in the form of a foolish boast, that
'Amway operated its Multi-Level Marketing scheme in eighty other countries
around the world,’ and that, ‘for two decades, the overwhelming majority
of direct selling companies operating in the UK had also been running Multi-Level
Marketing schemes.’ Furthermore, at this moment time, the ‘Amway
Corporation’s’ toxic propaganda boasted of ‘three million Independent
Business Owners (worldwide).’ Whilst the so-called ‘UKDSA’s’
own toxic propaganda claimed four hundred thousand+ ‘direct sellers’
under contract to ‘Amway UK’ and its other (mainly ‘MLM’) member
companies. However, to maintain the enticing illusion of legitimacy,
viability and sustainability, the key data required to extrapolate the
built-in, hidden, overall, effectively 100%, net-loss/churn rate for ‘MLM’
participation, did not feature in either of these essentially identical, nonspecific,
snapshot narratives.
Yet although it was staring him in the face, the truth
that ‘Amway’ is by no means unique, and that (just as Prof. Blakey had
once begun to explain) ‘Amway’s’ entire multinational operation has
always been a textbook example of a Mafia-style criminal racket - a
mass-deception disguised as a ‘legitimate commercial activity’ and organized
behind a colossal, and deliberately confusing, protective front of legally ‘independent,’
but in fact interdependent, centrally controlled, corporate structures, maliciously
designed to prevent, and/or divert, investigation and insulate its billionaire crime-family
bosses from liability, was conveniently outside the limited civil remit of Judge
Norris. Nonetheless, his dubious decision to reject the UK government’s public
interest bankruptcy petition, rested on his first swallowing the defence’s preposterous
argument that, although ‘Amway UK’s’ unlawful ‘business model’ had ‘remained
more or less unaltered for over thirty years,’ in order to comply with UK trading
scheme and lotteries legislation, ‘Amway UK’s’ current company officers had now
(only when finally faced with civil investigation and prosecution) given
solemn ‘undertakings’ to the High Court that the previous 'business model' had
been ‘voluntarily paused in January 2006’ and then ‘significantly revised in
October 2007,’ and that certain of the company's ‘network leaders’
contracts’ had been terminated, because they’d ‘broken Amway’s own rules.’
Thus, Judge Norris’ ruling (in which he compared ‘Amway’s’
so-called ‘network leaders’ to ‘gang masters,’ and even observed
that due to price-fixing and a resulting emphasis on recruitment and self-consumption
rather than selling, ‘Multi-Level Marketing schemes risk being exploited
as pyramid schemes’) was ultimately based, not on the abundance of quantifiable
evidence proving beyond all reasonable doubt that, by design, it had always been
impossible to generate an overall net-income lawfully in ‘Amway UK’s’ version
of a pyramid scheme, but on the false-assumption that because ‘Multi-Level
Marketing schemes’ have existed for so many years and are so widespread, they
must, therefore, be a legitimate form of commercial enterprise, when properly self-regulated.
This fundamental gaffe then enabled Judge Norris to
swallow the resulting, increasingly preposterous falsehood that it was just a
few British ‘Amway Diamond Distributors’ whose own ‘legally independent
companies, like Britt World Wide UK and Network TwentyOne UK,’ had been largely
responsible for making ‘unobtainable earnings claims’ and running the ‘inherently
objectionable dream selling scheme,’ and that these were ‘unauthorized
activities’ that ‘Amway UK’s’ company officers had claimed to be opposed to,
albeit unaware of, but had now (with the guidance of the regulators) identified
and taken steps to prohibit. However, even the wide-eyed Judge Norris felt
obliged to place on record his own lingering doubts that ‘Amway UK’s’ modified
version of its commercial cover-story was entirely true. Nonetheless, his
complete lack of curiosity as to how much money had been stolen by fraud during
all these decades of ‘unauthorized activities,’ and who in the USA had
ultimately controlled the British portion of ‘Amway’s’ colossal labyrinth
of legally ‘independent,’ but in fact interdependent, front companies
and received the lion’s share of the mountain of cash thieved and laundered by this
highly organized Mafia-style mechanism, has never been explained. For
Judge Norris’s remit also apparently rendered him unable to call for Jerry and
Mandy Scriven and Pat and Greta Gregory (the ‘leaders’ of the British subsection
of the gigantic, worldwide so-called ‘Amway Network’ known as ‘International
Business Systems’), to be investigated and held to account for the catalogue
of abusive crimes which, in his own ruling, he indirectly acknowledged that they
and a handful of other British ‘Amway gang masters’ had been committing.
Yet for years, these smiling charlatan-couples had starred in ‘Amway UK’s’
toxic propaganda and had been admired and revered by the bedazzled ‘Amway’
faithful, as prosperous ‘Diamond Distributors’ and ‘Top Earners’ who had ‘discovered
the secrets of how to achieve unlimited wealth and success in MLM.’ Furthermore,
the Scrivens and the Gregorys had also been portrayed as selfless
‘positive thinking’ role models prepared to share their life-transforming secret
knowledge with others (for a price), in the form of ‘a proven two-to-five-year
plan to achieve total financial freedom.’ However, in 2006, they
had suddenly been air-brushed out the company’s comic-book narrative, after
being sacked from their so-called ‘Independent Businesses’ and made convenient
scapegoats. Indeed, as far as I’m aware, not one excommunicated ‘Amway UK’
scapegoat was ever interviewed by UK law enforcement agents, or tax compliance
officials, demanding to know where the bulk of the money they had stolen had
gone, and how much they had kept themselves.
Subsequently, secure in the knowledge that they risked
nothing from the authorities, the Scrivens and the Gregorys spent years on the
Net screaming their innocence and declaring that, far from being ‘unauthorized,’
the activities for which they had been kicked out of ‘Amway,’ had always
been pursued with the full approval, and enthusiastic participation, of 'Amway
UK's' corporate officers. Yet, mysteriously, neither the Scrivens nor the Gregorys
were called as witnesses to perjury during the High Court proceedings, whilst the
dispute resolution clause attached to their so-called ‘distributor’
contracts prevented them from going to law. However, again for reasons that
were never explained, the regulators apparently did not bother to tell Judge
Norris that they already knew damn-well where most of the stolen cash had gone
and even approximately how much it totalled - hundreds of millions of £. They
also knew that there was plenty of documentary evidence, as well as other far
more reliable witnesses, proving that ‘Amway UKs’ company officers had simply
pretended affinity with the regulators and recited established passages from
their billionaire bosses’ fraudulent play book.
In fact, some of the most damning documents recovered by
the regulators, were employment contracts, dating back to the mid-1990s,
proving that, when an article appeared in a London listings magazine linking ‘Amway’
with totalistic cultism, the corporate officers of ‘Amway UK’ had begun
paying generous ‘consultancy’ fees to the directors of two so-called ‘independent
UK cult advice charities.’ The regulators knew that, prior to their
investigation, this pair of self-styled ‘cult experts,’ Ian Haworth and
Graham Baldwin, had been approached by a significant number of confused ‘Amway’
survivors seeking guidance. The regulators were also aware that, rather than
directing these vulnerable people to the authorities and journalists, or to their
political representatives, Haworth and Baldwin had taken them back to ‘Amway
UK,’ where they had been persuaded to accept limited ‘refunds’ in
return for signing gagging agreements; thus, obstructing justice by preventing witnesses
to fraud from coming to light in the UK. Yet, mysteriously, none this documentary
evidence was produced and, as far as I’m aware, neither Haworth nor Baldwin were
interviewed by UK law enforcement agents, wanting to know how many victims had
been effectively buried in this way, or where they could now be dug up.
The reason why I know all this, is because I am someone who,
in 1997, was character assassinated in two toxic propaganda letters circulated by
‘Amway UK’s’ legal representatives. These documents, which the
regulators had access to, sought to destroy my credibility by falsely
portraying me as a misguided and ill-informed fantasist motivated by money,
and threatened me with a nonspecific lawsuit, for speaking out about the very
same abusive criminal activities which, ten years later, ‘Amway UK’s’ senior
company officers were allowed to deny all previous knowledge of and pretend to
be opposed to themselves. Indeed, the regulators also knew that this was by
no means the only attempt to bury me and obstruct justice. For I am also the
person whose persistent complaint (and guidance) finally triggered the civil prosecution
of ‘Amway UK’ in the first place. However, I had called for a rigorous
criminal inquiry into the wider ‘MLM commercial’ cult phenomenon in the
UK, hopefully leading to the protection of the public and the re-establishment
of the rule of law, but the most-senior regulator involved, the UK’s ‘Deputy
Inspector of Companies,’ Cliff Callaghan, had personally assured me that this
would take years and cost millions of £, and could, therefore, only happen
after the compulsory closure of ‘Amway UK Ltd.’ using relatively inexpensive, standard
civil bankruptcy procedures. Tellingly, he made sure never to put any of this
in writing.
In this way, not only was the luring and exploitation of literally
hundreds of thousands of unwitting UK and Irish citizens over a period spanning
several decades, resulting in the theft by deception and laundering of hundreds
of millions of £, by the billionaire bosses of the ‘Amway’ cultic
racket quietly brushed under the judicial carpet, but also, following this isolated
and ill-conceived, cut-price, civil prosecution, the wealthy bosses of various,
mainly American controlled, ‘Amway’ copycat, ‘MLM’ cultic rackets
were, by default, given the green light to keep their own corporate Trojan
Horses registered in Britain and continue hiding their real criminal function. For
today, no UK or Irish law enforcement agency (civil or criminal) is trying to
stop them, but then it would be more than just embarrassing for the authorities
to admit to their gross negligence, and share of responsibility, in enabling
this shameful situation to develop and persist since 1973. Indeed, over the
years, some of the unwitting individuals to have proved the most susceptible to
recruitment into deluded de facto ‘MLM’ slavery have been disgruntled
police officers. Furthermore, various gullible politicians have apparently believed
that the UK has been deriving a considerable financial benefit from what
is clearly foreign controlled, ongoing, major racketeering activity. For,
starting with ‘Amway UK,’ various, copycat, UK registered, ‘MLM’ front
companies have been paying ‘Value Added (sales) Tax’ on the unlawful flow
of money coming internally their own contractors, making these losing
investment payments (motivated by a false expectation of a future reward) appear
to be retail transactions (based entirely on value and demand). This
partly explains why, in 1997, the UK’s new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was
persuaded to make a preposterous, but highly misleading, video of ‘support’ for
‘Amway UK’ and the other (mostly ‘MLM’) member companies
of the so-called ‘UKDSA,’ in which (avoiding the term ‘MLM’ and
any individual company name) Blair confidently stated that: ‘We’ve got
something like thirteen percent of the entire home market, which is done by
direct selling, and almost half a million people involved in direct selling,
forty thousand of those doing it full time… we as a government recognize the
tremendous contribution that people who are taking up these opportunities can
make to the overall prosperity of the economy.’ Yet, apparently
under the illusion that he was telling the truth, Blair was merely reciting
a cocktail of lies and ambiguous, nonspecific, scripted nonsense, designed not
only to promote a form of pernicious mass-deception, which has caused (and
continues to cause) extensive damage to the UK economy and literally millions
of citizens, but also to make it appear that ‘MLM’ schemes cannot possibly
be frauds. Thus, Prime Minister Blair was playing the role of useful idiot.
So, how can a pile of money be made from a financially
suicidal ‘business model’ that has been deliberately rigged to fail? In
1967, an American satirical movie offered a memorable answer to this conundrum.
I am of course referring to ‘The Producers,’ written and directed by Mel
Brooks. Whilst this movie went over the heads of certain humourless critics who
described it as ‘controversial,’ in 1968 it won its author an Academy Award for
best original screenplay. Indeed by 1996, ‘The Producers’ had long-since achieved
a ‘cult’ status and was deemed to be of such ‘cultural, historic and aesthetic
significance,’ that it was selected by the Library of Congress to be preserved
in the United States National Film Registry. For Mel Brooks’ had presented the
world with a classic comedy double act - Max Bialystock, an outrageous caricature
of a once successful, but now failing, New York Jewish theatrical producer (evidently
suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder) played by Zero Mostel, and
Leo Bloom, a deeply insecure Jewish accountant (evidently suffering from Social
Anxiety Disorder) played by Gene Wilder. In the movie, this pair of physically
and psychologically opposite characters come together and perpetrate an absurd swindle;
identified by the accountant and peddled by the producer. By first building a
bedazzling fantasy of boundless future prosperity, happiness and
freedom in his mind, Bialystock overwhelms an initially reluctant Bloom,
and persuades him to become his partner in crime. He then sets to work seducing
a flock of wealthy, but lonely and vulnerable, old ladies. One by one, Bialystock
persuades them to buy a staggering total of ‘25 000% of the projected profits’
from, what he assures them will be, ‘a sure-fire hit stage musical’ which
he and Bloom are producing on Broadway. However, he doesn’t tell them that the
show has been written by a deranged devotee of Adolf Hitler, Franz Liebkind, or
that it will venerate the ‘führer’ and the ‘Nazis.’ For the show,
‘Springtime for Hitler,’ has been carefully selected by its producers with
the hidden criminal motive of offending a sophisticated New York theatre audience
to such an extent, that it will be doomed to close after only one disastrous
performance. Just to make certain that it will immediately bomb, Bialystock and
Bloom recruit an aggressively kitsch transvestite, Roger DeBris, to direct the show,
and they find a drug-fuelled pacifist-hippie, Lorenzo Saint DuBois (LSD), to play Hitler. On opening
night, Bialystock even makes an enemy of the New York Times theatre critic, by
offering him a bribe.
The devious plan being that, seeing as ‘Springtime for
Hitler’ has cost Bialystock and Bloom only a mere fraction of their available
financing to stage, when inevitably it sinks without a trace, the Internal Revenue
Service will have no reason to investigate Bloom’s fraudulent declaration that ‘no
profit was made.’ Moreover, the old ladies who collectively have vastly
over-financed the show, will believe that they simply made a bad investment.
As ill-informed and isolated individuals, they too will have no reason to
suspect fraud. Thus, Bialystock and Bloom will be able quietly to keep
the large pile of excess finance. However, when despite all their sabotage efforts,
‘Springtime for Hitler’ turns out to be a smash hit predicted to ‘run
and run,’ the producers, along with the show’s author, wind up behind bars. Ultimately,
they are seen duplicating the same fraud on their fellow inmates and the prison
warden, with Bialystock and Liebkind directing rehearsals and Bloom
over-selling ‘shares’ in their latest ‘sure-fire hit production,
Prisoners of Love.’
Now most people would automatically assume that, in the
real world, it wouldn’t be quite so easy to perpetrate essentially the same absurd,
blame-the-victim swindle, albeit hidden behind an incomprehensible ‘sure
fire business model,’ but again one centrally controlled by crooks who have
deliberately designed it to fail. A swindle not just based on the same, relatively
simple, one-off modus operandi as described above but now expanded, and
duplicated, on an industrial scale and baited to keep ensnaring a much wider
range of unwitting victims. Indeed, to the average person, the idea that numerous
gangs of copycat charlatans have been allowed to keep peddling the same rigged game
of commercial make-believe as reality, steadily luring, exploiting,
isolating and silencing many millions of losing investors around the world over
several decades, and thereby get away with stealing a veritable mountain of
money, would seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility. However, it should be
remembered that ‘the best way of hiding something, is to place it in plain
sight and make as big as you possibly can.’
Thus,
I managed to live more than three decades without ever hearing the made-up technical-sounding
phrase, 'Multi-Level Marketing,’ or its catchy abbreviation, ‘MLM.’
Today, I wish this contagious nonsense had never entered my life, but unfortunately,
I had no choice in the matter. Whilst reading the history of my own nightmare encounter
with the original 'MLM commercial' cult known as 'Amway' (corruption
of 'The American Way'), bear in mind that, when these disturbing events first started
to unfold, I had no idea of the extraordinary level of danger my family was in,
or of the true nature, extent and power of the phenomenon I was confronted
with. As yet, there was no plain language, comprehensive explanation of 'MLM
commercial' cultism readily available. That’s why I began the thankless
task of formulating one as long ago the late 1990s. However, at that time, I
was still struggling to find the right words to identify it accurately. Even when
I did find the right words, I discovered that the ugly, but ultimately absurd,
truth about the 'MLM commercial' cult phenomenon was still totally unthinkable
to most people. The truth being, that what has become commonly referred to as, 'the
MLM business model,’ has been nothing more than a textbook example of the
notorious, reality-inverting, totalitarian propaganda tactic known as the 'Big
Lie.' That is to say, ‘the spreading of a falsehood which is so colossal and
outrageous that the average person cannot even begin to conceive that anyone
would have the audacity to invent it.’ Indeed, when I first began to challenge
the Big 'MLM' Lie, I was faced with the daunting situation where it had
been repeated, largely unchallenged, so often and for so many years, that a
remarkable number of apparently sophisticated and rational people have accepted
it as the truth. Thus, rendering them incapable of admitting to their
embarrassing gaffe - Alastair Norris and Tony
Blair, being prime examples. For unfortunately, it is human nature for us to
try to justify our previous behaviour, no matter how gullible and foolish we
might have been.
The situation is still daunting, but lately it has begun
to change in that, mainly due to the Internet, an increasing number of
courageous 'MLM commercial' cult survivors have found accurate information,
as well as mutual support, enabling them to come forward and describe their
essentially identical, nightmare experiences. Also, whereas in the past many of
the most-fanatical 'MLM' converts were men, who naturally found it hard
to admit to the world that they'd been duped, lately the majority of unwitting persons
being lured into, and exploited by, these pernicious groups, have been women.
Furthermore, in 2020, my American associate, Robert FitzPatrick, published
'Ponzinomics.' In this book, Robert not only goes a long way towards
identifying the true criminogenic totalitarian nature of the 'MLM commercial'
cult phenomenon, but he also traces the origins and evolution of the Big 'MLM'
Lie and explains how, almost by chance, a pair of its earliest preachers managed
to obtain the highest-level of protection in the USA. As a result, politically
appointed senior Federal Trade Commission officials effectively raised the
white flag of surrender to predatory criminals, albeit dressed up as respectable
Christian businessmen, when, starting in the 1970s and despite rising
levels of concern across the USA, they set aside an established, common-sense
legal precedent which had automatically identified and banned all mathematically
impossible, commercially unviable, endless-chain (infinite level) recruitment
frauds, previously labelled as, 'pyramid selling schemes.' For, even though it
had been under investigation for years and was facing civil prosecution, these senior
FTC officials eventually latched onto a convenient, and convoluted, pretext not
to go ahead and shut-down the corporate-front for the original 'MLM commercial'
cult, upon which all subsequent versions have been, and continue to be, modelled.
This dubious decision was evidently made because the bosses of the 'Amway
Corporation,' Messrs. Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos, with a Bible in one
hand and the Stars and Stripes in the other, had not only developed the devious
tactic of pretending affinity with the regulators, but they’d also purchased
association with their local congressman (fifth Michigan district) with
significant quantities of stolen money. The beneficiary of these ill-gotten
gains was none other than Gerald Rudolph Ford Jnr. - a politician not exactly
noted for his intellectual capacity, but nonetheless someone of great influence.
For those readers who are perhaps too young to remember
him, Gerald Ford was leader of the Republican party in the House of
Representatives 1965-1973, becoming US vice-president under Richard Nixon when,
in 1973, Spiro Agnew (who was under investigation for corruption), pled guilty to
a minor felony charge and was obliged to resign. Ford went on to become US
president 1974-1976 after Nixon himself was obliged to resign rather than face
certain impeachment over the Watergate scandal. Thus, Ford remains the only
person to have held both the office of US vice-president and US president,
without being elected to either. He is also the president who granted a pardon
to Nixon for the crimes he'd committed whilst in office.
However, the co-opting of Gerald Ford to be the first high
ranking US politician to act the role of ‘Amway’s’ useful idiot, was
only one step in DeVos and Van Andel’s well-financed infiltration, and
subversion, of the US legislative process and justice system. Indeed, there can
be absolutely no doubt that, culminating in 1979, the chiefs of an important
civil regulatory agency of the US federal government played politics, and in so
doing, completely failed in their appointed task of protecting the American
public. As a direct consequence, the FTC brought about the birth of the essentially
meaningless phrase, 'Multi-Level Marketing is legal.' In this way, a ridiculous,
but nonetheless insidious, endless-chain (infinite level) recruitment fraud was
effectively authorized in the USA by an unaccountable little clique of self-serving
bureaucrats. Furthermore, this major American regulatory lapse permitted the
profitable racket of 'MLM commercial' cultism not only to be extensively
reproduced in the USA, but also to be exported around the world, now hidden
behind the pretence that ‘the MLM business model (as developed by the
founders of the Amway Corporation)’ had been ‘examined, regulated and approved
by the US government… So, anyone calling it a fraud must be a deranged, hate-filled
anti-capitalist or crazy conspiracy theorist.'
Not surprisingly, subsequent generations of politically
appointed senior FTC officials have all refused to admit publicly to their
predecessors' catastrophic failure and their own gross (and in some cases
criminal) negligence; for which, one day, a sitting American government might
find itself liable. In this way, the Big ‘MLM’ Lie was permitted to
transform and expand into a well-oiled machine for stealing and laundering
money on a global scale. Each year bringing billions of dollars into the USA,
and all right under the noses of complacent officials who have continued to
allow much of this plunder to be falsely declared, with the paid compliance of
some of the world's largest accountancy firms, as 'retail sales revenue.'
However, plenty of senior FTC types, as well as other high-ranking US
politicians, including a certain Donald John Trump, have all had their greedy snouts
planted in this almost bottomless trough of foreign and domestic loot, set
before them by the wealthy bosses of a multiplication of 'Amway' copy-cat
'MLM' cultic rackets whose essentially identical, camouflaged criminal
activities they have conveniently refused to identify. Indeed, the number of
senior FTC officials who have sold their souls and signed lucrative employment
contracts with 'MLM' front-companies, or law and accountancy firms, co-opted
to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, whilst playing along with the
Big 'MLM' Lie, is truly astonishing.
All this begs the not unreasonable question: other than
enabling a growing number of unoriginal gangs of devious cultic con artists to get
away with thieving from the entire planet for the best part of half a century,
what exactly has been the point of having such a spineless, easily-corrupted
and, therefore useless government agency as the FTC?, when in 'Ponzinomics,' simply
by telling the truth, one independent American does far-more to protect his
fellow citizens from the Big 'MLM' Lie, than the entire one thousand
five hundred+ FTC staff (including more than five hundred attorneys and seventy
economists, with an annual budget of hundreds of millions of dollars) have ever
done. In fact, Robert explains in great detail why, completely contrary to the
ambiguous official message broadcast by the FTC for decades, it has not just
been ‘a few bad apples,’ but all 'Amway' copy-cat so-called 'MLM
income/business opportunities' that have been centrally controlled ‘rigged-market
swindles,’ hiding their inevitable, effectively 100%, overall net-loss/churn
rates of endless-chains of transient losing investors. For the crack-pot
pseudo-economic theory which has been falsely-labelled the 'MLM business
model,' was maliciously designed to be flawed-financially, to the point
where it would be impossible for any so-called 'MLM' company to derive
the majority of its revenue lawfully from persons who are not the temporary unwitting
contractors of it, motivated by the false expectation of a future reward.
In even more accurate terms, 'MLM commercial' cults have all comprised groups,
and sub-groups, of susceptible individuals who have been subjected to identifiable,
co-ordinated devious techniques of coercive, social, psychological and physical
persuasion designed to shut down their critical and evaluative faculties, and thereby
convert them, without their fully informed consent, to the self-perpetuating
and self-gratifying, but ultimately self-destructive, delusional belief that: endless
recruitment + endless purchases by the recruits = endless prosperity for the
recruits. For this reason, Robert FitzPatrick coined the word,
'Ponzinomics,' in an attempt to place an appropriate label on the financially suicidal
activity that, to their eternal shame, generations of senior FTC officials,
their advisers and political masters, have permitted to be passed off and
normalized around the world as, ‘a viable and legal part of the direct
selling industry.'
Thus, 'Ponzinomics' can be briefly defined as the
dark art of peddling unwitting persons infinite shares of their own
finite money, because what the FTC has consistently refused to acknowledge
publicly, is the undeniable fact that any claim, or implication, that one
penny of extra net-income, let alone life-changing sums of money, can be
generated lawfully by participating in an 'MLM income opportunity,' is dangerous
comic-book nonsense designed to entice, deceive and enslave. Indeed, it should
be glaringly obvious that the Big ‘MLM’ Lie is far-too-good to be true,
whilst it's no secret that what used to be the traditional direct selling industry
(‘door-to-door peddling’), has long-since died out. Its demise being due to
many evolving social and economic factors; not least the arrival of
supermarkets, hard-discount stores and online shopping. Furthermore, contrary
to all commercial logic, unremarkable (and in some cases useless, and/or potentially
dangerous) 'MLM' merchandize has been offered at fixed, often exorbitant,
prices, rendering it effectively unsaleable on the open market to persons with fully
functioning critical and evaluative faculties; whilst no so-called 'MLM' company
has ever set common-sense limits on the number of contractors being recruited,
or on the areas of population where these so-called 'distributors/direct
sellers' are supposed to find customers. Just imagine what would
happen if the bosses of McDonalds fixed the price of their company’s hamburgers
at twice that of their competitors and set no limits on the number of
franchises they sold, or any restrictions on the locations where all these demonstrably
unviable catering establishments were supposed to operate shoulder to shoulder?
Once the utter absurdity of the so-called 'MLM
business model' is fully understood, anyone with a modicum of common-sense,
and/or the most-rudimentary hands-on experience of commerce, ought to be
immediately able to deduce that no ‘Amway’ copycat front company can
ever have been, or will ever be, found by the FTC (or any other civil, or
criminal, law enforcement agency for that matter) voluntarily disclosing the
true, ever-shifting, results of its economically incestuous activities and
operating lawfully. Indeed, this ongoing situation is beyond farcical, because
when asked the most obvious of questions, it goes without saying that American
regulators and their academic advisers, have never been able to come up with one
solitary example of a so-called 'MLM' company that would be able pass independent
rigorous inspection. Yet despite the lengthy list of common-sense reasons proving
that there can be no such thing as ‘a commercially viable and lawful MLM
income/business opportunity,' FTC officials, guided by a cabal of smug dunces
with diplomas, came up with a truly pointless and stupid ‘test.’ This
boils down to them throwing common-sense out of the window whilst laboriously trying,
on rare occasions and on a case-by-case basis, to prove that a so-called 'MLM'
company, suspected of running a mathematically impossible, commercially
unviable, dissimulated pyramid scheme (‘rigged market swindle’), has not been
deriving the overwhelming majority of its income lawfully from authentic retail
sales (based entirely on value and demand) to members of the general public
(persons who were not unwitting, temporary adherents of the Big ‘MLM’ Lie
motivated by the false expectation of a future reward).
Today (2026) with a notorious ‘MLM’ promoter still
sat in the White House and in control of the FTC and Dept. of Justice, the continuing,
chronic failure of American regulators to do their job and protect the public,
has produced the tragicomic situation where, since 1979, less than forty ‘Amway’
copycats have been investigated and shut down by the FTC as dissimulated
pyramid schemes, whilst hundreds more have continued to appear, but without the
slightest attempt to stop them. Laughably, FTC officials have listed other ‘pyramid
scheme red flags' for the public to look out for, and the agency has even posted
warnings that 'MLM companies have caused, and are still causing, extensive
damage to consumers, because some MLM income opportunities are pyramid schemes
in disguise.' At the same time, American regulators, without the slightest
concern for the extensive damage they themselves have caused and are still
causing, have continued bleating the Big Lie, by insisting that 'MLM
is a legal branch of the direct selling industry.' Yet no one at the FTC
has ever seen a shred of quantifiable evidence proving that this ridiculous adult
fairy story can be true. In fact, when asked in the most specific of terms,
if they have ever seen such evidence, like income-tax payment receipts, it has
been impossible to get any meaningful, let alone the only truthful, response to
this simple ‘yes/no’ question. Another highly revealing question that FTC types
have obviously shied away from answering, is: what would be your own reaction
if a vulnerable individual you care about suddenly underwent a radical
personality transformation, and declared that he/she had signed up for a
so-called 'MLM income/business opportunity?
Consequently, in respect of their Orwellian refusal to
tell the truth publicly and identify this textbook example of a Big totalitarian
Lie, Robert FitzPatrick and I have openly ridiculed these inflexible FTC
officials, and their equally inflexible advisers, by comparing them to a body
of humourless scientists who have been paid to investigate the manifestly preposterous
claim that 'pigs might fly.' However, after decades of examining an
assortment of wingless swine, all labelled as ‘flying pigs,’ they still
insist on continuing their futile, but financially profitable, quest whilst
systematically rejecting any suggestion that there can be no such mythical creature.
Furthermore, ‘Amway’s’ archetypal ‘two-to-five-year
plan to achieve total financial freedom’ reveals the unoriginality of the
Big ‘MLM’ Lie, as well as the irony that this form of mass-deception was
developed in ‘the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave’ during the Cold
War. For in the 1960s and 70s, whilst Messrs. De Vos and Van Andel waved their false
flag of ‘capitalism, individualism, and free enterprise’ and
posed as God-fearing American patriots, the evil mechanism which
they were busily establishing in the USA, and exporting to the rest of the world,
was a twisted version of ‘Soviet’-style collectivization. For these
crooks and their criminal associates did not invent the ‘five-year plan.’
They simply borrowed the concept, and adapted, it straight from the toxic state-propaganda
that, in the 1920s and 30s, had promoted the ‘Soviet’ command economy. Thus,
by rebranding collectivisation as a risk-free means for anyone to achieve
the American dream, these racketeers were able to commit fraud on an
industrial scale. Tellingly, DeVos and Van Andel never claimed exclusive ownership
of this system, because to do so, would be an admission of guilt.
In the original ‘Soviet five-year plan,’
individual peasants were stripped of their land and forced onto collective farms.
They still worked the land, but despite the reality-inverting narrative being constantly
fed into their minds, they no longer owned any part of it, or what it produced.
The state’s central rulers dictated what animals were raised, what crops were planted
and what methods and tools were used. They could also seize the yield, leaving
the peasants to starve. In ‘Amway’s’ archetypal ‘capitalist’
version of this same abusive system, the recruit is led to believe that he/she
is building an ‘independent business.’ Yet, they possess nothing,
because they too are being collectivized and constantly lied to. For they do
not control the price or quality of the merchandize they are supposed to sell,
they cannot source alternative supply chains, they cannot alter the reality-inverting
contracts they have been tricked into signing. So they do not own what they are
building. Instead, ‘MLM’ recruits become part of a unwitting body of
transient, de the facto slave recruiters who provide 100% of the labour, and
pay 100% of their operating costs, but the corporate politburo at the
top retains ownership of the system. The moment a chronically deluded de facto
‘MLM’ slave recruiter begins to wake up and ask questions, the central
rulers can enforce their reality-inverting contracts and unilaterally terminate
them; thereby taking over the de facto slave’s network of recruits without
compensation.
Whilst essentially identical versions of the archetypal ‘two-to-five-year
plan’ have been peddled to ‘MLM’ recruits around
the world as the ‘path to total financial freedom,’ in reality, they
have served the same sinister function as ‘Stalinist five-year production
quotas.’ They have been enticing timelines maliciously designed to delay
dissent and normalize systemic exploitation. In the real world, if a company ordered
its employees (with fully functioning critical faculties) to ‘work for zero pay
and keep buying stacks of overpriced products every month whilst recruiting
other unpaid employees to do the same,’ the workforce would immediately walk
out. By disguising this outrageous demand as the ‘investment phase of a
proven plan to achieve total financial freedom,’ the central
rulers of ‘MLM’ cults have successfully conditioned their de facto
slaves to normalize their own ruin, and the ruining of their friends and
relatives. Over the decades, the bosses of dozens of ‘Amway’ copycats
have deployed the same toxic propaganda to keep tricking an endless chain of
unwitting individuals around the world into viewing their mounting losses as a
necessary investment required to reach the (non-existent) ‘MLM’ promised
land.
In this way, the de facto ‘MLM’ crime syndicate has
been allowed to rule over a borderless, totalitarian system of collective
exploitation that would make even Stalin green with envy. Operating in
plain sight, ‘MLM’ bosses have constructed copycats of ‘Amway’s’
archetypal, de facto, slave-labour camp all around the world. Inside these
close-logic mental prisons, the transient de facto ‘MLM’ slaves not only
work without payment, but they pay their de facto owners for the dubious privilege
of doing so. Furthermore, the most deluded de facto ‘MLM’ slaves have
also functioned as an effective branch of the syndicate’s propaganda machine, systematically
acting as ‘thought police.’
At this point, I should declare that, although I am an
'MLM commercial' cult survivor, I was never an adherent of one of these pernicious
groups. I was, however, an indirect victim. For regrettably, I found myself
shackled financially to a person, my only brother, who at a time of
vulnerability, had fallen under the spell of the Big 'MLM' Lie. Again, when
these disturbing events started to unfold, I did not fully understand that my brother
was perfect prey to be lured and defrauded, then used as chronically bedazzled bait
to lure and defraud others; all for the benefit of a little gang of sanctimonious
American billionaire-charlatans posing as 'Compassionate Capitalists,' and
whom he had never met. Yet my brother was an ideal subject to be deceived, for
the simple reason that he was totally convinced that he was far too smart to
be deceived. Sadly, once enslaved inside the ‘MLM’ trap, the most
powerful weapon in the hands of the criminals exploiting him, was my brother’s
own mind. However, initially I failed to grasp just how dangerously deluded 'MLM
commercial' cult adherents can be. That said, like many people whom they
approach, I immediately realised that they are living in a parallel reality, completely
obsessed with trying to recruit you into what is clearly a pyramid scheme, but
which they insist is 'part of the legal MLM direct selling industry and
definitely not a pyramid scheme.' What took me much longer to fathom, is
that core-'MLM commercial' cult adherents are also living by a parallel,
and perverted, code of morality. Their destructive, financially suicidal behaviour
is controlled by the self-righteous delusion that, by recruiting you, and
even by lying to you, they are ultimately helping both themselves and you to
achieve future redemption in a secure Utopian existence - a form of Capitalist
Paradise on Earth - where no one has a job, but everyone is his/her ‘own
boss’ - a happy, healthy, prosperous and free 'MLM business owner.'
Thus, it should always be remembered that chronic 'MLM'
adherents' belief can be quite genuine, but what they believe in, and have
bought into body and soul, is a colossal and bedazzling totalitarian fake. The
irony of all this being, that the Big 'MLM' Lie has continued to thrive,
because its most-fanatical adherents have been tricked into wasting their own
time and money spreading it and hiding the truth about it, combined with legislators’,
law enforcement agents’, prosecutors’ and judges’ catastrophic failure to
identify it accurately. Although they have no idea what they are really
involved in, active 'MLM' adherents are, in fact,
proselytising-evangelists for a camouflaged, non-rational, dualistic ritual
belief system (call it a 'perverted religion' if you like) which has been
maliciously designed not only to spread like a contagion - enticing, deceiving,
robbing, exploiting and abusing susceptible individuals and their friends and
families - but also to load its victims with shame and guilt for their
inevitable failure to succeed, and thus, prevent them from facing reality and
complaining.
Consequently, whilst they remain under the control of the
Big 'MLM' Lie, its most-dangerous adherents should be seen for
what they really are - the deluded deployable agents of a de facto syndicate
comprising the bosses of some the most widespread, socially, psychologically
and financially destructive organized cultic crime groups to have emerged in
recent history.
David Brear (copyright 2026)
