Whilst law enforcement has done effectively nothing to identify the true nature of, let alone stop, the problem, there are hundreds of apparently independent blame-the-victim 'Amway' copy-cat 'MLM' cults operating in the world today. In reality, they have been the constituent parts of one phenomenon. For all them have been luring an endless-chain of ill-informed individuals into temporary de facto slavery by maintaining an absolute monopoly of information, in order to peddle bedazzling variations of essentially the same, self-perpetuating Big Lie. Conservative estimates are that, each decade, the overall number of ill-informed adherents being churned through this reality-controlling labyrinth of blame-the-victim cultic rackets, is counted in hundreds of millions. 'MLM' groups have become by far the most contagious, extensive, widely-copied and profitable evolution of the criminogenic cult phenomenon in the modern era. This shocking description, even though it is backed up by all independent evidence and is surely accurate, still remains unthinkable to most people.
David Brear (copyright 2025)
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Quiz: How Many MLMs Are There? | Pyramid Scheme Alert
Clue: You Don’t Have to Count
No one has verifiable and current data on the total number of multi-level marketing (MLM) companies in the USA or globally. Wikipedia cites sources for “over 1,000” MLMs in the USA alone. The website MLMTruth has attempted to document current and defunct MLMs in the USA, organizing them alphabetically. Counting just from A-D, 163 enterprises are listed. The USA is only 20% of the global MLM “market”!
As MLMs can’t be reliably counted, they cannot be accurately measured either. No government agency or economic body monitors the scale of MLM. “Annual sales” and number of “distributors” are whatever the MLMs say. The largest MLM in the world is commonly thought to be Amway, but Amway is actually dwarfed by the Chinese MLM, Tiens, that claims 14 million “distributors” in over 120 countries. Coincidentally, Tiens was launched in China the same year, 1995, that Amway starting operating in that country.
MLM “revenue” is only one measure of consumer damage. Costs for seminars, travel, hotels, coaching, “training,” entertainment, and “motivation” are additional costs. To these must be added lost opportunity costs – displaced productive work and education – and then there is the debt incurred. No one has ever calculated total financial losses. Social harm is immeasurable.
My colleague, the late Jon M. Taylor, and I estimated that between us we personally examined more than 500 MLMs, each one prompted by a consumer request or complaint, a journalist inquiry, a lawsuit or a prosecution over a number of years. I decoded MLM’s “income disclosures” to show that 50%-80% of total MLM payouts on all “sales” transactions (disguised as “commissions and bonuses”) are directly transferred to the top 1%. Jon Taylor waded into MLM “average income” data and factored associated costs and required purchases (which he knew of from personal experience in MLM) to reveal that 99% of all MLM recruits lose money. We also examined “qualification” rules and policies that define MLM as a closed, rigged and price-fixed “market.”
This painstaking and frustrating endeavor led to documenting the 4 operational characteristics we observed in each and every MLM we researched: (1) “endless” recruiting chain structure (2) pay-to-play requirements, up front and monthly (3) mandated recruiting to gain promised rewards, and (4) a “compensation” formula of extreme internal money transfer from “last ones in” to earlier ones “at the top.”
Of course, we saw that these are precisely the characteristics of a classic pyramid scheme. This answered the two questions we were both most often asked, “What about this MLM?” and, Are all MLMs pyramid schemes?” Once the MLM/pyramid characteristics are identified in the enterprise, (which takes about 5 minutes) the first question is answered by the second one.
These facts led us to the obvious and inescapable conclusion that MLMs are not “businesses.” Nowhere in the world is a pyramid scheme, which is inherently deceptive, harmful, and unsustainable, treated as a legitimate business enterprise. Nowhere in the world is a 99% “failure” rate called a “business opportunity.”
Finally, the Answer to “How Many MLMs?”
From these realizations, and from hearing the same pitiable accounts all over the world, year after year, I finally arrived at the true and current number of MLMs in the world. The number is one (1).
The pretense and the illusion of “multiple” MLMs is part of the scam. It is another element of disguise, like the overpriced products, phony “rank” titles, calling purchases by recruits “sales”, manipulated “income disclosures”, and the cruel promise of success to those who “believe” and “trust the system.”
The perception that there are multiple MLMs, each independent and distinct, and that they must, therefore, be examined one at a time, as Jon and I spent years doing, is, arguably, MLM’s most effective disguise for entrapping consumers and evading law enforcement.
By appearing as many “different” companies, MLM can better scam more people in more places and spread more rapidly. It can defraud the same people in the same way, over and over. I have met people who were in as many as 12 “different” MLMs, losing in each, of course, and are still searching. MLM victims are led to believe their MLM is unlike all others.
Working “on a case by case basis,” the FTC and other law enforcement can waste years to prove that one MLM, and only one, is a pyramid scheme. Their case is subverted and rendered pointless by their own policy that all the identical MLMs are presumed “legitimate.”
In reality, all MLMs are just elements of one and the same cultic racket, one monster, many heads, like the Hydra. Failed or closed MLMs regenerate, like Hydra’s heads. Top recruiters migrate their downlines to another MLM or start a new MLM. MLM “owners” pop up over and over, under new “company” names.
“Multiple” MLMs should all be seen as appendages – grotesque heads – of the original MLM monster, Nutrilite, hatched in 1945. Every MLM on earth is an extension of the Nutrilite beast. Amway was an early new head. Tiens in China is a later one; same creature, more heads speaking new languages. Each new “owner” that defected from one MLM to launch a “new” one understood that the only way to get to the top of MLM is to start there.
“New” MLMs are what Jon Taylor called “re-pyramiding”. All pyramids tell the latest recruits at the dead bottom of the chain that they are the top of their own “endless” chain. “Re-pyramiding” is based on the same lie. It is a trick of the insiders. It continues the recruiting as before, but restarts the rigged pay formula, leapfrogging the “founders” to where most of the money flows. All MLMs are genetically identical, the same monster scam.
As I documented in Ponzinomics, Nutrilite’s infamous adoption of its pyramid recruiting “plan” (later called “MLM”), was specifically concocted as a scam on the millions seeking work after World War II. It was never an adaptation of direct selling. The commodities to be bought and sold were the recruited salespeople. A viral fraud of this scale required nothing less than Big Lie propaganda to spread, and cultic mental enslavement to control victims and to cover up its trail of destruction.
Multiple MLMs, Multiple Delusions
When I first began exposing MLMs, there was already a strong base of “anti-Amway” activists, some of whom had endured years of mental enslavement and financial loss. Many could not imagine that all other MLMs were also brainwashing, gaslighting, deceiving and inflicting the same loss rates. Pyramid Scheme Alert was the first educational website focused on MLM overall, treating all MLM as pyramids.
Today, there are many more camps of anti-MLM activists organized around opposition to one MLM or another, like the first ones against Amway were. Some focus on individual MLMs as a gateway to explaining the overall fraud of MLM. But others ignore or reject any critique of other MLMs or “MLM” overall, just as some of the anti-Amway activists did decades ago.
Accepting “multiple” MLMs leads to evaluating the fake MLM “industry” data. One academic compares MLM’s fake “retail sales” data to the authentic retail sales figures of real businesses online and brick-and-mortar. The “comparison” is supposed to measure if the MLM “sales model” is competitive in the general economy. That is like measuring and comparing counterfeit currency against real dollars, since both facilitate financial transactions.
Tide is Turning, Slowly
According to MLM’s own data, between 2020 and 2024, total revenue in the USA, adjusted for inflation, declined 24.5%. (Note: the published dollar amounts are not valid since they are based on projected, imaginary “retail” sales. The yearly differences, however, are usable. The inflation calculation converts the 2020 and 2024 figures into 2025 dollars, for a valid comparison).
Another measure of change is the value of the larger MLMs traded on Wall Street. These formerly high flying stocks have dropped like rocks in the last 5 years. Herbalife is down 80%. Nuskin dropped 78%. Medifast declined 90%, and Usana 55%. Tupperware went bankrupt. Avon was broken up and sold off to MLMs in Asia and Latin America.
However, at the same time, the US and global economy is pushing millions more people into financial insecurity, making them more vulnerable to MLM’s Big Lie of “extra” or “extraordinary” income. And, though the reputation of MLM has turned more negative, the many-headed monster is still described – by major institutions and even by many in “anti-MLM” – as an “industry” of independent “sales” companies, each one “different.”
With the disguise of multiple sales companies still protecting MLM, many powerful truths about MLM that are now being publicized are weakened. Millions more people who otherwise would be properly forewarned are falling victim. The beneficial change that the truth will bring is slowed.
Robert L. FitzPatrick (copyright 2025)